the 100 best books of all time
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THE 100 BEST BOOKS OF ALL TIMEMost book lovers cherish the dream of reading the best books of all time in their lifetime. Making a list of best books whether in fiction or nonfiction is a controversial and difficult task as the tastes and opinions of people vary from one another.
“The World Library is a list of the 100 best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club. This list endeavors to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods.
Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books.The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that “they are all on an equal footing,” with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction “best literary work ever written.” The following list organizes the works alphabetically by author” (Source: wikipedia)
The List1) To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, which centres on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporal and psychological elements.To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book’s many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception.
Buy From Amazon 2) Memoirs of HadrianMemoirs of Hadrian (French: Mémoires d’Hadrien) is a novel by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Roman Emperor Hadrian. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoiresd’Hadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. Although the historical Hadrian wrote an autobiography, it has been lost.The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian’s cousin and eventual successor “Mark” (Marcus Aurelius). The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous, all in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert‘s “melancholy of the antique world.”
Buy From Amazon 3) Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf’s best-known novels.Created from two short stories, “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” and the unfinished “The Prime Minister,” the novel’s story is of Clarissa’s preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters’ minds to construct an image of
Clarissa’s life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005, Mrs Dalloway was includedon Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923
Buy From Amazon 4) Leaves of GrassLeaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. Among the poems in the collection are “Song of Myself“, “I Sing the Body Electric“, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking“, and in later editions, Whitman’s elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“.
Buy From Amazon 5) The MahabharataThe Mahabharata or Mahābhārata (Sanskrit: महाभारतम्,Mahābhāratam) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other beingtheRamayana.
Besides its epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates oftheKaurava and the Pandava princes, the Mahabharata contains much philosophical and devotional
material, such as a discussion of the four “goals of life” or purusharthas (12.161). Among the principal works and stories that are a part of the Mahabharata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and the Rishyasringa, often considered as works in their own right.
Buy From Amazon 6) The AeneidThe Aeneid (/ ə ̍ n i ː ɪ d / ; Latin: Aeneis [aj ̍ ne ː is] —the title is Greek in form: genitive case Aeneidos) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells thelegendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter.[1] The first six of the poem’s twelve books tell the story of Aeneas’ wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem’s second half tells of the Trojans’ ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.
Buy From Amazon 7) The RamayanaThe Ramayana (Sanskrit: रामायणम्, Rāmāyaṇam, pronounced [r ɑːˈ m ɑː j əɳə m] ) is one of the great epics of India. It is ascribed to the Hindu sage Valmiki and forms an important part of the Hindu literature (sm ṛ ti ), considered to be itihāasa. The Ramayana is one of
the two great epics of India, the other being the Mahabharata. It depicts the duties of relationships, portraying ideal characters like the ideal father, ideal servant, the ideal brother, the ideal wife and the ideal king. The name Ramayana is a tatpurusha compound of Rāma and ayana(“going, advancing”), translating to “Rama‘s Journey“. The Ramayana consists of 24,000 verses in seven books (kāṇḍas) and 500 cantos (sargas), and tells the story of Rama (anavatar of the Hindu Supreme-God Vishnu), whose wife Sita is abducted by the king of Ravan. Thematically, the Ramayana explores human values and the concept of dharma.
Buy From Amazon 8) The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughoutinvernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person byHuckleberry “Huck” Finn , a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.
Buy From Amazon 9) The Death of Ivan IlyichThe Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича, Smert’ Ivana Ilyicha), first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.
The novel tells the story of the death, at age 45, of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia. Living what seems to be a good life, his dreadful relationship with his wife notwithstanding, Ivan Ilyich Golovin injures his side while hanging up curtains in a new apartment intended to reflect his family’s superior status in society. Within weeks, he has developed a strange taste in his mouth and a pain that will not go away. Several expensive doctors are consulted, but beyond muttering about blind gut and floating kidneys, they can neither explain nor treat his condition, and it soon becomes clear that Ivan Ilyich is dying.
Buy From Amazon 10) Anna KareninaAnna Karenina (Russian: «Анна Каренина»; Russian pronunciation: [ ̍ an ːə k ɐˈ r ̡ en ʲɪ n ə ] ) is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with editor Mikhail
Katkovover political issues that arose in the final installment (Tolstoy’s unpopular views of volunteers going to Serbia); therefore, the novel’s first complete appearance was in book form.Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, when he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a novel.
Buy From Amazon 11) War and Peace
Buy From Amazon 12) Gulliver’s Travels
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13) Confessions of Zeno
Buy From Amazon14) Tristram Shandy. Laurence Sterne
Buy From Amazon15) The Red And The Black
Buy From Amazon16) Oedipus the King
Buy From Amazon17) Othello
Buy From Amazon18) King Lear
Buy From Amazon19) Hamlet
Buy From Amazon20) Blindness
Buy From Amazon21) Season of Migration to the North
Buy From Amazon22) The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard), Books I and II
Buy From Amazon23) Midnight’s Children
Buy From Amazon24) The Masnavi
Buy From Amazon25) Pedro Paramo
Buy From Amazon26) Gargantua and Pantagruel
27) In Search of Lost Time
Buy From Amazon28) Tales
Buy From Amazon29) The Book of Disquiet
Buy From Amazon30) The Metamorphoses
Buy From Amazon31) Nineteen Eighty-Four
Buy From Amazon32) Lolita
Buy From Amazon33) The Man Without Qualities
Buy From Amazon34) The Tale of Genji
Buy From Amazon35) Beloved
Buy From Amazon36) History
Buy From Amazon37) The Essays
Buy From Amazon38) Moby-Dick
Buy From Amazon39) The Magic Mountain
Buy From Amazon40) Buddenbrooks
Buy From Amazon41) Children of Gebelawi
Buy From Amazon42) Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Buy From Amazon43) Pippi Longstocking
Buy From Amazon44) The Golden Notebook
Buy From Amazon45) Leopardi: Poems
Buy From Amazon46) Independent People
Buy From Amazon47) Sons and Lovers
Buy From Amazon48) Zorba the Greek
Buy From Amazon49) The Sound of the Mountain
Buy From Amazon50) Abhijana Sakuntalam
Buy From Amazon51) The Castle
Buy From Amazon52) The Trial
Buy From Amazon53) The Complete Stories
Buy From Amazon54) Ulysses
Buy From Amazon55) A Doll
Buy From Amazon56) The Odyssey
Buy From Amazon57) The Iliad
Buy From Amazon58) The Old Man and the Sea
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59) Hunger
Buy From Amazon60) The Tin Drum
Buy From Amazon61) Dead Souls
Buy From Amazon62) Faust
Buy From Amazon63) Love in the Time of Cholera
Buy From Amazon64) One Hundred Years of Solitude
Buy From Amazon65) Gypsy Ballads
Buy From Amazon66) A Sentimental Education
Buy From Amazon67) MADAME BOVARY
Buy From Amazon68) The Sound and the Fury
Buy From Amazon69) Absalom, Absalom!
Buy From Amazon70) Medea
Buy From Amazon71) Invisible Man
Invisible ManBuy From Amazon72) Middlemarch
Buy From Amazon73) The Brothers Karamazov
Buy From Amazon74) The Possessed
Buy From Amazon75) The Idiot
Buy From Amazon76) Crime and Punishment
Buy From Amazon77) Berlin Alexanderplatz
Buy From Amazon78) Jacques The Fatalist
Buy From Amazon79) Great Expectations
Buy From Amazon80) Nostromo
Buy From Amazon81) Anton Chekhov-Stories
Buy From Amazon82) The Canterbury Tales
Buy From Amazon83) Don Quixote
Buy From Amazon84) Journey to the End of the Night
Buy From Amazon85) Paul Celan: 70 Poems
Buy From Amazon86) Camus: The Stranger
Buy From Amazon87) Wuthering Heights
Buy From Amazon88) Ficciones
Buy From Amazon89) The Decameron
Buy From Amazon90) Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable: A Trilogy
Buy From Amazon91) Le Pere Goriot
Buy From Amazon92) Pride and Prejudice
Buy From Amazon93) Njal’s Saga
Buy From Amazon94) One Thousand and One Nights
Buy From Amazon95) The Book of Job
Buy From Amazon96) The Epic of Gilgamesh
Buy From Amazon97) The Divine Comedy
Buy From Amazon98) Fairy Tales
Buy From Amazon99) Things Fall Apart
Buy From Amazon100) The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (“”The Devil in the Street, In the Middle of the Whirlwind”)
