The Norwegian Book Club, Verdensbiblioteket [2002]
103 entries: 96 monographical, 7 otherwise
Unrankedarranged alphabetically by author
The Norwegian Book Club initiated one of the best "great books" projects in 2002. One-hundred writers were polled; the results are only arranged chronologically, with the caveat that Don Quixote is the best. A Wikipedia article about the project provides the names of the 100 scholars and writers on the same page as the list.
- Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
1958English
Fables
Nineteenth CenturyDanish
- Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
originally anonymously published 1813English
- Honoré de Balzac
Le Père Goriot
Father Goriot
originally published serially Dec. 1834-Feb. 1835 in Revue de ParisFrench
Samuel Beckett
- Molloy
1951French
- Malone Muert
1951French
- L'Innommable
The Unnameable
1953French
- Giovanni Boccaccio
Il Decameron, Cognominato Prencipe Galeotto
ca. 1351-53Italian
- Jorge Luis Borges
Ficciones
originally entitled El Jardín de Senderos que se Bifurcan, published 1941; expanded 1944 and 1956Spanish
- Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights
originally published 1847 under the pseudonym, Ellis Bell; revised 1850English
- Albert Camus
L'Étranger
The Stranger
1942French
Poems
Twentieth CenturyGerman
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit
Journey to the End of Night
1932French
- Miguel de Cervantes
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha
Don Quixote
originally published in two volumes, 1605 and 1615Spanish
- Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
1478English
Stories
late Nineteenth-early Twentieth centuriesRussian
- Joseph Conrad
Nostromo
originally published serially 1904 in T P's WeeklyEnglish
- Dante
La Divina Commedia
The Divine Comedy
originally entitled La Commedia; written ca. 1308-21Italian
- Charles Dickens
Great Expectations
originally published serially Dec. 1860-Aug. 1861 in All the Year RoundEnglish
- Denis Diderot
Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
published in part, 1785; in its entirety, 1796French
- Alfred Döblin
Berlin Alexanderplatz
1929German
Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Prestuplénie i Nakazániye
Crime and Punishment
originally published serially Jan.-Dec. 1866 in Rússkij VéstnikRussian
- Idiot
originally published serially 1868-9 in Rússkij VéstnikRussian
- Besy
Demons; The Devils; The Possessed
1872Russian
- Brat'â Karamazovy
The Brothers Karamazov
originally published serially 1880 in Rússkij VéstnikRussian
- George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
originally published serially Dec. 1871-Dec. 1872English
- Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
1952English
- Euripides
Mēdeia
Medea
431 B CGreek
William Faulkner
- Absalom, Absalom!
1936English
- The Sound and the Fury
1929English
Gustave Flaubert
- Madame Bovary
originally published serially Oct. 1856-Dec. 1856 in La Revue de ParisFrench
- L'Éducation Sentimentale
1869French
*Classics* *France* *Rexroth* *Ward* *Bloom* *Recommended* *Norway* *Newman*
- Federico García Lorca
Romancero Gitano
Gypsy Ballads
originally entitled Primero Romancero Gitano, published 1928Spanish
Gabriel García Márquez
- Cien Anõs de Soledad
One Hundred Years of Solitude
1967Spanish
- El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera
Love in the Time of Cholera
1985Spanish
--
- Sha Naqba Imuru
The Epic of Gilgamesh; He Who Saw the Deep
Eighteenth-Tenth centuries B CSumerian; Akkadian
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
originally published in two volumes: first, Faust. Der Tragödie Erster Teil, published in part, 1790; in its entirey, 1808; revised 1829; second, Faust. Der Tragödie Zweiter Teil, 1832German
- Nikolai Gogol
Mërtvyâ Duši
Dead Souls
1842Russian
- Günter Grass
Die Blechtrommel
The Tin Drum
1959German
*Ward* *Bloom* *Recommended* *Trinity* *Norway* *Zane*
- João Guimarães Rosa
Grande Sertão: Veredas
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
1956Portuguese
*Ward* *Norway*
- Knut Hamsun
Sult
Hunger
published in part, 1888, in Ny Jord; in its entirety, 1890Norwegian
- Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
1952English
Homer
- Iliad
ca. Ninth-Eighth centuries B CGreek
- Odýsseia
The Odyssey
ca. Ninth-Eighth centuries B CGreek
- Henrik Ibsen
Et Dukkehjem
A Doll's House
1879Norwegian
--
part of the BibleHebrew; Aramaic; Greek
- James Joyce
Ulysses
published in part serially Mar. 1918-Dec. 1920 in the Little Review; in its entirety, 1922English
Franz Kafka
- Die Verwandlung
The Metamorphosis
originally published 1915 in Die Weißen BlätterGerman
- Der Prozess
The Trial
1925German
- Das Schloss
The Castle
1926German
- Kalidasa
Abhijnanasakuntalam
The Recognition of Sakuntala
ca. Fifth CenturySanskrit
- Kawabata Yasunari
Yama no Oto
The Sound of the Mountain
1954Japanese
- Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek
1946Greek
- D H Lawrence
Sons and Lovers
1913English
- Halldór Laxness
Sjálfstætt Fólk
Independent People
originally published in two volumes, 1934 and 1935Icelandic
Poems
early Nineteenth CenturyItalian
- Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook
1962English
- Astrid Lindgren
Pippi Långstrump
Pippi Longstocking
1945Swedish
'Kuángrén Rìjì'
'A Madman's Diary'
1918Chinese
- Vyasa
Mahabharata
includes Bhagavad Gita; ca. Ninth Century B C-Fourth CenturySanskrit
- Naguib Mahfouz
Awlad Haritna
Children of Gebelawi
originally published serially 1959 in Al-AhramArabic
Thomas Mann
- Buddenbrooks
1901German
- Der Zauberberg
The Magic Mountain
1924German
- Herman Melville
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
1851English
- Michel de Montaigne
Les Essais
Essays
originally published in three volumes: 1580, 1588, and 1595French
- Elsa Morante
La Storia
1974Italian
- Toni Morrison
Beloved
1987English
- Murasaki Shikibu
Genji Monogatari
The Tale of Genji
ca. early Eleventh CenturyJapanese
- Robert Musil
Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften
The Man Without Qualities
originally published in three volumes: 1930, 1933, and 1943German
*Ward* *Bloom* *Fadiman* *Trinity* *Norway*
- Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita
1955English
--
- Njáls Saga
ca. Thirteenth CenturyNorse
*Rexroth* *Read* *Ward* *Norway* *Dirda*
- George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four
1949English
- Ovid
Metamorphoseon
Metamorphoses
8Latin
- Fernando Pessoa
Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, Ajudante de Guarda-Livros na Cidade de Lisboa
The Book of Disquiet
1928Portuguese
Complete stories
No particular edition specified; nearly all collections include The Narrative of Gordon PymEnglish
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Of Nantucket
published in part, 1836-37, in the Southern Literary Messenger, under the author's given name; in its entirety, 1838, under the pseudonym, Arthur Gordon PymEnglish
- Marcel Proust
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
In Search of Lost Time; In Remembrance of Things Past
originally published in seven volumes, two of which originally published as two books each, 1913-27French
- François Rabelais
La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel
originally published in five volumes: Les Horribles et Épouvantables Faits et Prouesses du Très Renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, Fils du Grand Géant Gargantua, 1532; La Vie Très Horrifique du Grand Gargantua, Père de Pantagruel, 1534; Le Tiers Livre des Faicts et Dicts Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel, 1546; Le Quart Livre des Faicts et Dicts Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel, 1552; Le Cinquiesme et Dernier Livre des Faicts et Dicts Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel, 1564French
- Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo
1955Spanish
- Rumi
Masnavi-l Ma'navi
Mathnavi
written ca. 1258-73Persian
- Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children
1981English
- Saadi Shirazi
Bostan
written 1257Persian
- Tayeb Salih
Mawsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal
Season of Migration to the North
1966Arabic
- José Saramago
Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira
Blindness
1995Portuguese
William Shakespeare
- Hamlet
1602English
- King Lear
1606English
- Othello
ca. 1604English
- Sophocles
Oidipous Tyrannos
Oedipus Rex; Oedipus the King
ca. 429 B CGreek
- Stendhal
Le Rouge et le Noir, Chronique du XIXe Siècle
The Red and the Black
1830French
- Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
originally published in nine volumes, 1759-67English
- Italo Svevo
La Coscienza di Zeno
Zeno's Conscience
1923Italian
- Jonathan Swift
Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships
Gulliver's Travels
1726; revised 1735English
Leo Tolstoy
- Voyna i Mir"
War and Peace
originally entitled 1805, published in part, 1865 and 1867; retitled and published in its entirety, 1869Russian
- Anna Karenina
published in part serially 1873-7 in Rússkij Véstnik; in its entirety, 1877Russian
- Smert' Ivana Il'icha
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
1886Russian
--
- Kitab alf Laylah Wa-Laylah
The Thousand and One Nights; The Arabian Nights
Ninth-Fifteenth centuriesArabic
- Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1884English
*Classics* *Hundred* *Rexroth* *Zulli* *Read* *Ward* *Van Doren* *Magill* *Adler* *Good* *Learning* *Bloom* *Recommended* *Fadiman* *Trinity* *Campbell* *Norway* *Great* *Zane* *GlobeMail* *Newman* *Graphic* *Educated*
- Valmiki
Ramayana
ca. Fifth-Second centuries B CSanskrit
- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
Aeneid
First Century B CLatin
- Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
1855; expanded and revised through ninth edition, 1892English
Virginia Woolf
- Mrs. Dalloway
published in part, Jul. 1923, as 'Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street', in the Dial; in its entirety, 1925English
- To the Lighthouse
1927 English
- Marguerite Yourcenar
Les Mémoires d'Hadrien
The Memoirs of Hadrian
1951French