Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century

The effect of cinema is amusing.

  1. The Stranger (The Outsider), Albert Camus (1942)
  2. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
  3. The Trial, Franz Kafka (1925)
  4. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
  5. Man’s Fate, Andre Malraux (1933)
  6. Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1932)
  7. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)
  8. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (1940)
  9. Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier (1913)
  10. Froth on the Daydream, Boris Vian (1947)
  11. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
  12. Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett (1952)
  13. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)
  14. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1980)
  15. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
  16. Paroles, Jacques Prevert (1946)
  17. Alcools, Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)
  18. The Blue Lotus, Herge (1936)
  19. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank (1947)
  20. Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss (1955)
  21. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
  22. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)
  23. Asterix the Gaul, Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1959)
  24. The Bald Soprano, Eugene Ionesco (1952)
  25. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud (1905)
  26. The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (1968)
  27. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
  28. Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)
  29. The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati (1940)
  30. The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide (1925)
  31. The Horseman on the Roof, Jean Giono (1951)
  32. Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen (1968)
  33. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
  34. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929)
  35. Therese Desqueyroux, Francois Mauriac (1927)
  36. Zazie in the Metro, Raymond Queneau (1959)
  37. Confusion of Feelings, Stefan Zweig (1927)
  38. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (1936)
  39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence (1928)
  40. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924)
  41. Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan (1954)
  42. Le Silence de la mer, Vercors (1942)
  43. Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec (1978)
  44. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle (1901-1902)
  45. Under the Sun of Satan, Georges Bernanos (1926)
  46. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
  47. The Joke, Milan Kundera (1967)
  48. A Ghost at Noon (Contempt), Alberto Moravia (1954)
  49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie (1926)
  50. Nadja, Andre Breton (1928)
  51. Aurelien, Louis Aragon (1944)
  52. The Satin Slipper, Paul Claudel (1929)
  53. Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello (1921)
  54. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht (1959)
  55. Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, Michel Tournier (1967)
  56. The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells (1898)
  57. If This Is a Man, Primo Levi (1947)
  58. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (1954-1955)
  59. Les Vrilles de la vigne, Colette (1908)
  60. Capitale de la douleur, Paul Eluard (1926)
  61. Martin Eden, Jack London (1909)
  62. Ballad of the Salt Sea, Hugo Pratt (1967)
  63. Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes (1953)
  64. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Boell (1974)
  65. The Opposing Shore, Julien Gracq (1951)
  66. The Order of Things, Michel Foucault (1966)
  67. On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)
  68. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerloef (1906-1907)
  69. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929)
  70. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (1950)
  71. The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras (1964)
  72. The Interrogation, J. M. G. Le Clezio (1963)
  73. Tropisms, Nathalie Sarraute (1939)
  74. Journal, 1887-1910, Jules Renard (1925)
  75. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad (1900)
  76. Ecrits, Jacques Lacan (1966)
  77. The Theatre and its Double, Antonin Artaud (1938)
  78. Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos (1925)
  79. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges (1944)
  80. Moravagine, Blaise Cendrars (1926)
  81. The General of the Dead Army, Ismail Kadare (1963)
  82. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron (1979)
  83. Gypsy Ballads, Federico Garcia Lorca (1928)
  84. The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, Georges Simenon (1931)
  85. Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet (1944)
  86. The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1932)
  87. Fureur et mystere, Rene Char (1948)
  88. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (1951)
  89. No Orchids For Miss Blandish, James Hadley Chase (1939)
  90. Blake and Mortimer, Edgar P. Jacobs (1950)
  91. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke (1910)
  92. Second Thoughts, Michel Butor (1957)
  93. The Burden of Our Time, Hannah Arendt (1951)
  94. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
  95. The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller (1949-1960)
  96. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (1939)
  97. Amers, Saint-John Perse (1957)
  98. Gaston (Gomer Goof), Andre Franquin (1957)
  99. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (1947)
  100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)