100 Greatest Books of All Time?

So, after nearly 25 years, I finished reading the 100 Greatest Books of All Time - the Bokklubben World Library. It's a grand, and good, list. From Gilgamesh to the late 1990s, and all over the world - it's a broad, and carefully constructed "world library". You could do worse, if looking for a way to spend your time. 

That said, some took some real tracking down. The Masnavi, by Rumi, is not extant in an English edition. I read as much as I could (from the Oxford publications). "Devil to Pay in the Backlands" is a poor translation of "Grande Sertao: Veredas" and was only printed in English once, in the 50s. It was not easy to get a hold of. So proceed with caution.

Here's my ranking, then, which is fairly personal, of the works included:

 

Essential

 

Don Quixote

Hamlet

Oedipus Rex

The Odyssey

Middlemarch

Collected Fiction – Borges

Children of Gebelawi

Memoirs of Hadrian

Mrs. Dalloway

The Brothers Karamazov

The Divine Comedy

Beloved

Blindness

The Tin Drum

Midnight’s Children

Buddenbrooks

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Madame Bovary

Jacques the Fatalist

Pippi Longstocking

 

Great Reads

 

Gilgamesh

Death of Ivan Ilych

Iliad

Ramayana

Moby Dick

Pedro Paramo

Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Pride and Prejudice

Leaves of Grass

To the Lighthouse

Hunger

Season of Migration to the North

Ulysses

Anna Karenina

1984

Mahabharata

The Stranger

Journey to the End of the Night

Thousand and One Nights

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Lolita

The Old Man and the Sea

Love in the Time of Cholera

Selected Stories – Chekhov

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Book of Disquiet

Complete Poems – Celan

The Red and the Black

A Sentimental Education

Fairy Tales and Stories – Anderson

History – Morante

Complete Tales – Poe

Old Goirot

Dead Souls

 

Good Books

 

King Lear

Canterbury Tales

Aeneid

War and Peace

Gulliver’s Travels

Orchard – Saadi

Independent People

Njal’s Saga

Complete Stories – Kafka

Faust

Othello

Remembrance of Things Past

Medea

The Possessed

The Idiot

The Man Without Qualities

Essays – Montaigne

The Sound of the Mountain

Metamorphoses

Invisible Man

The Golden Notebook

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Recognition of Shakuntala

Trilogy – Beckett

Great Expectations

Nostromo

Things Fall Apart

Gypsy Ballads

Decameron

Poems – Leopardi

 

Over-rated

 

Diary of a Madman – Lu Xun

The Magic Mountain

The Book of Job

A Doll’s House

The Trial

Crime and Punishment

Tristram Shandy

Confessions of Zeno

Wuthering Heights

The Sound and the Fury

 

Why???

 

Sons and Lovers

The Tale of Genji

The Castle

Masnavi

Absalom, Absalom

Zorba the Greek

 

So. 20 Amazing, 34 Great, and 30 Good – 84 that I’d recommend with virtually no reservation. That’s a really solid list. The bottom 16 are not very good, but only the final two are irredeemable (I truly can’t fathom how they got on there).