Thursday 12 March 2015

Le Monde - The 100 Books of the Century


The 100 Books of the Century according to Le Monde
Another country, another list. Even though I am European, I probably should have read more of these but there are only 25. Some of the others have been on my wishlist for ages so I might add more after a while.

No. "Title" Author (Year) Language

1. "The Stranger/The Outsider" Albert Camus ** (1942) French
2. "In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past" Marcel Proust (1913–1927) French
3. "The Trial" Franz Kafka (1925) German
4. "The Little Prince" Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) French
5. "Man's Fate" André Malraux (1933) French
6. "Journey to the End of the Night" Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932) French
7. "The Grapes of Wrath" John Steinbeck ** (1939) English
8. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" Ernest Hemingway ** (1940) English
9. "Le Grand Meaulnes" Alain Fournier (1913) French
10. "Froth on the Daydream" Boris Vian (1947) French
11. "The Second Sex" Simone de Beauvoir (1949) French
12. "Waiting for Godot" Samuel Beckett ** (1952) French
13. "Being and Nothingness" Jean-Paul Sartre ** (1943) French
14. "The Name of the Rose" Umberto Eco (1980) Italian
15. "The Gulag Archipelago" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ** (1973) Russian
16. "Paroles" Jacques Prévert (1946) French
17. "Alcools" Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) French
18. "The Blue Lotus" Hergé (1936) French
19. "The Diary of a Young Girl" Anne Frank (1947) Dutch
20. "Tristes Tropiques" Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) French
21. "Brave New World" Aldous Huxley (1932) English
22. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" George Orwell (1949) English
23. "Asterix the Gaul" René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1959) French
24. "The Bald Soprano" Eugène Ionesco (1952) French
25. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" Sigmund Freud (1905) German
26. "The Abyss/Zeno of Bruges" Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) French
27. "Lolita" Vladimir Nabokov (1955) English
28. "Ulysses" James Joyce (1922) English
29. "The Tartar Steppe" Dino Buzzati (1940) Italian
30. "The Counterfeiters" André Gide ** (1925) French
31. "The Horseman on the Roof" Jean Giono (1951) French
32. "Belle du Seigneur" Albert Cohen (1968) French
33. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" Gabriel García Márquez ** (1967) Spanish
34. "The Sound and the Fury" William Faulkner ** (1929) English
35. "Thérèse Desqueyroux" François Mauriac ** (1927) French
36. "Zazie in the Metro" Raymond Queneau (1959) French
37. "Confusion of Feelings" Stefan Zweig (1927) German
38. "Gone with the Wind" Margaret Mitchell (1936) English
39. "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" D. H. Lawrence (1928) English
40. "The Magic Mountain" Thomas Mann (1924) German
41. "Bonjour Tristesse" Françoise Sagan (1954) French
42. "Le Silence de la mer" Vercors (1942) French
43. "Life: A User’s Manual" Georges Perec (1978) French
44. "The Hound of the Baskervilles" Arthur Conan Doyle (1901–1902) English
45. "Under the Sun of Satan" Georges Bernanos (1926) French
46. "The Great Gatsby" F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) English
47. "The Joke" Milan Kundera (1967) Czech
48. "A Ghost at Noon/Contempt" Alberto Moravia (1954) Italian
49. "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" Agatha Christie (1926) English
50. "Nadja" André Breton (1928) French
51. "Aurelien" Louis Aragon (1944) French
52. "The Satin Slipper" Paul Claudel (1929) French
53. "Six Characters in Search of an Author" Luigi Pirandello ** (1921) Italian
54. "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" Bertolt Brecht (1941) German
55. "Friday" Michel Tournier (1967) French
56. "The War of the Worlds" H. G. Wells (1898) English
57. "If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz" Primo Levi (1947) Italian
58. "The Lord of the Rings" J. R. R. Tolkien (1954–1955) English
59. "Les Vrilles de la vigne" [Never translated: The Tendrils of the Vine] Colette (1908) French
60. "Capital of Pain" Paul Éluard (1926) French
61. "Martin Eden" Jack London (1909) English
62. "Ballad of the Salt Sea" Hugo Pratt (1967) Italian
63. "Writing Degree Zero" Roland Barthes (1953) French
64. "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" Heinrich Böll ** (1974) German
65. "The Opposing Shore" Julien Gracq (1951) French
66. "The Order of Things" Michel Foucault (1966) French
67. "On the Road" Jack Kerouac (1957) English
68. "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" Selma Lagerlöf ** (1906/07) Swedish
69. "A Room of One’s Own" Virginia Woolf (1929) English
70. "The Martian Chronicles" Ray Bradbury (1950) English
71. "The Ravishing of Lol Stein" Marguerite Duras (1964) French
72. "The Interrogation" J. M. G. Le Clézio ** (1963) French
73. "Tropisms" Nathalie Sarraute (1939) French
74. "Journal, 1887–1910" Jules Renard (1925) French
75. "Lord Jim" Joseph Conrad (1900) English
76. "Écrits" Jacques Lacan (1966) French
77. "The Theatre and its Double" Antonin Artaud (1938) French
78. "Manhattan Transfer" John Dos Passos (1925) English
79. "Ficciones" Jorge Luis Borges (1944) Spanish
80. "Moravagine" Blaise Cendrars (1926) French
81. "The General of the Dead Army" Ismail Kadare (1963) Albanian
82. "Sophie’s Choice" William Styron (1979) English
83. "Gypsy Ballads" Federico García Lorca (1928) Spanish
84. "The Strange Case of Peter the Lett" Georges Simenon (1931) French
85. "Our Lady of the Flowers" Jean Genet (1944) French
86. "The Man Without Qualities" Robert Musil (1930–1942) German
87. "Furor and Mystery" René Char (1948) French
88. "The Catcher in the Rye" J. D. Salinger (1951) English
89. "No Orchids For Miss Blandish" James Hadley Chase (1939) English
90. "Blake and Mortimer" Edgar P. Jacobs (1950) French
91. "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" Rainer Maria Rilke (1910) German
92. "Second Thoughts" Michel Butor (1957) French
93. "The Burden of Our Time/The Origins of Totalitarianism" Hannah Arendt (1951) German
94. "The Master and Margarita" Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) Russian
95. "The Rosy Crucifixion" Henry Miller (1949–1960) English
96. "The Big Sleep" Raymond Chandler (1939) English
97. "Amers" Saint-John Perse ** (1957) French
98. "Gaston Gomer Goof" André Franquin (1957) French
99. "Under the Volcano" Malcolm Lowry (1947) English
100. "Midnight’s Children" Salman Rushdie (1981) English

** This author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature

49 French, 27 English, 9 German, 6 Italian, 3 Spanish, 2 Russian, 1 each Albanian, Czech, Dutch, Swedish; 15 Nobel Prize Laureates for Literature

2 comments:

  1. I've read 16 of them. I just tried to read The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner and gave up on it. Could not follow the story at all. I read mainly American and British authors, though you and Danielle (at A Work in Progress) have led me to more European authors.

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    Replies
    1. That is so nice of you to say, Janet. I have found so many fantastic authors from all over the world just by listening to my international friends. There are many great books in every country and it's a privilege to be able to discover even just a small part of them. Glad I could pass that on to others, as well.

      Have a good weekend,
      Marianne

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