What's say we look at the last 125-ish years of literature, and make a list of the best novels. Off of that, we could create a book-a-week list, with 52 entrants, so that after a year you were caught up on the best literature of broadly contemporary time. From 1900-2026, divvied by 52 would give you about 40 books representing the 20th century (about 10 for every 25 years), and another 10 for the 21st. One entry per author, graphic novels included. Here, presented chronologically, is that list:
Buddenbrooks
- Thomas Mann, Germany, 1901
The
Ambassadors - Henry James, USA, 1903
The Way of
All Flesh - Samuel Butler, UK, 1903
Swann's
Way - Marcel Proust, France, 1913
The
Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka, Czechia, 1915
A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce, Ireland, 1916
A Passage
to India - EM Forster, UK, 1924
Desert of
Love - Francois Mauriac, France, 1925
Mrs.
Dalloway - Virginia Woolf, UK, 1925
The Sun
Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway, USA, 1926
Death
Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather, USA, 1927
Brave New
World - Aldous Huxley, UK, 1932
Journey to
the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, 1932
Darkness
at Noon - Arthur Koestler, Hungary/UK, 1940
Animal
Farm - George Orwell, UK, 1945
Brideshead
Revisited - Evelyn Waugh, UK, 1945
All the
King's Men - Robert Penn Warren, USA, 1946
El Senor
Presidente - Miguel Asturias, Guatemala, 1946
The Plague
- Albert Camus, France, 1947
Memoirs of
Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar, France, 1951
Lolita -
Vladimir Nabokov, USA, 1955
Pedro
Paramo - Juan Rulfo, Mexico, 1955
Grande
Sertão: Veredas - João Guimarães Rosa, Brazil, 1956
Children
of Gebelawi - Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, 1959
The Tin
Drum - Gunter Grass, Germany, 1959
Season of
Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih, Sudan, 1966
One
Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, 1967
Slaughterhouse-Five
- Kurt Vonnegut, USA, 1969
Play It as
It Lays - Joan Didion, USA, 1970
Invisible
Cities - Italo Calvino, Italy, 1972
Housekeeping
- Marilynne Robinson, USA, 1980
Midnight's
Children - Salman Rushdie, India, 1981
The House
of the Spirits - Isabel Allende, Chile, 1982
Blood
Meridian - Cormac McCarthy, USA, 1985
Beloved -
Toni Morrison, USA, 1987
Akira -
Katsuhiro Otomo, Japan, 1990
Kaddish
for a Child Not Born - Imre Kertesz, Hungary, 1990
Maus - Art
Spiegelman, USA, 1991
Sleepwalking
Land - Mia Couto, Mozambique, 1992
Blindness
- Jose Saramago, Portugal, 1995
The God of
Small Things - Arundhati Roy, India, 1997
Murambi:
The Book of Bones - Boubacar Boris Diop, Senegal, 2000
Atonement
- Ian McEwan, UK, 2001
Never Let
Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro, UK, 2005
The
Arrival - Shaun Tan, Australia, 2006
The Hunger
Angel - Herta Muller, Romania, 2009
Wolf Hall
- Hilary Mantel, UK, 2009
Here -
Richard McGuire, USA, 2014
Human Acts
- Han Kang, South Korea, 2014
Grief Is
the Thing With Feathers - Max Porter, UK, 2015
The
Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead, USA, 2016
Lincoln in
the Bardo - George Saunders, USA, 2017
