Best Books Ever Listings (Bookshelf)

Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo (2002)

In 2002, the editors of The Norwegian Book Clubs asked 100 authors to nominate ten books that, in their opinion, are the ten best and most central works in world literature. This list was reprinted in The Guardian in 2002. Here's the list.

© signifies original publication still copyrighted in the U.S.

1. Don Quixote (English)  (Spanish)  by Miguel de Cervantes
2. © Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe
3. Fairy tales and stories  by Hans Christian Andersen
4. Pride and prejudice  by Jane Austen
5. Old Goriot  by Honoré de Balzac
6. © Trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
7. Decameron (English)  (Dutch)  by Giovanni Boccaccio
8. Collected fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
9. Wuthering Heights  by Emily Brontë
10. © The Stranger by Albert Camus
11. © Poems by Paul Celan
12. © Journey to the end of the night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
13. Canterbury Tales  by Geoffrey Chaucer
14. Nostromo  by Joseph Conrad
15. The Divine Comedy  by Dante Alighieri
16. Great expectations  by Charles Dickens
17. Jacques the fatalist and his master by Denis Diderot
18. © Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
19. Crime and punishment  by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. The Idiot  by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
21. The Possessed  by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
22. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
23. Middlemarch  by George Eliot
24. © Invisible man by Ralph Ellison
25. Medea  by Euripides
26. © Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
27. © The Sound and the fury by William Faulkner
28. Madame Bovary (English)  (French)  by Gustave Flaubert
29. A Sentimental education by Gustave Flaubert
30. © Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca
31. © One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
32. © Love in the time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. The Epic of Gilgamesh 
34. Faust (German)  (English)  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
35. Dead souls  by Nikolai Gogol
36. © The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
37. © The Devil to pay in the backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
38. Hunger  by Knut Hamsun
39. © The Old man and the sea by Ernest Hemingway
40. The Iliad by Homer
41. The Odyssey by Homer
42. A Doll's house  Henrik Ibsen
43. The Book of Job 
44. Ulysses  by James Joyce
45. The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
46. The Trial  Franz Kafka
47. The Castle by Franz Kafka
48. The Recognition of Sakuntala  by Kalidasa
49. © The Sound of the mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
50. © Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
51. Sons and lovers  by D H Lawrence
52. © Independent people by Halldor K Laxness
53. Complete poems  by Giacomo Leopardi
54. © The Golden notebook by Doris Lessing
55. © Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
56. Diary of a madman and other stories  (Chinese) by Lu Xun
57. Mahabharata  Anon
58. © Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
59. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
60. © The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
61. Moby Dick  by Herman Melville
62. Essays  by Michel de Montaigne
63. © History by Elsa Morante
64. © Beloved by Toni Morrison
65. The Tale of Genji  by Murasaki Shikibu
66. © The Man without qualities by Robert Musil
67. © Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
68. Njal's saga 
69. © 1984 by George Orwell
70. Metamorphoses  by Ovid
71. © The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
72. The Complete tales by Edgar Allan Poe
73. Remembrance of things past by Marcel Proust
74. Gargantua and Pantagruel  Francois Rabelais
75. © Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
76. The Mathnawi by Jalalu'l-Din Rumi
77. © Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie
78. The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard) by Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz
79. © A Season of migration to the north by Tayeb Salih
80. © Blindness by Jose Saramago
81. Hamlet  by William Shakespeare
82. King Lear  by William Shakespeare
83. Othello  by William Shakespeare
84. Oedipus the King  by Sophocles
85. The Red and the black  (French) by Stendhal
86. The Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
87. © Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
88. Gulliver's travels  by Jonathan Swift
89. War and Peace  by Leo Tolstoy
90. Anna Karenina  by Leo Tolstoy
91. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories by Leo Tolstoy
92. Selected Stories Anton Chekhov
93. Thousand and One Nights vol. 1 , vol. 2 , ...
94. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  by Mark Twain
95. Ramayana  by Valmiki
96. The Aeneid (Latin)  (English)  by Virgil
97. Leaves of grass  by Walt Whitman
98. © Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
99. © To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
100. © Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Melvyn Bragg's Books that Changed the World

These twelve books are discussed in Melvyn Bragg's Twelve Books that Changed the World and an article in The Times.

1. Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton
2. Married Love by Marie Stopes
3. Magna Carta 
4. Book of Rules of Association Football
5. On the Origin of Species  by Charles Darwin
6. On the Abolition of the Slave Trade by William Wilberforce
7. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  by Mary Wollstonecraft
8. Experimental Researches in Electricity  by Michael Faraday
9. The patent specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine by Richard Arkwright
10. The King James Bible translated by William Tyndale and others
11. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations  by Adam Smith
12. The First Folio by William Shakespeare