Le Monde's 100 most memorable books of the twentieth century

It's always good to see the world as others see it as Rabbie Burns might have said. French newspaper Le Monde. They developed a list of 200 titles from booksellers and journalists (no author was allowed to appear twice) and then asked 17,000 French respondents "Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?" (which books have stayed in your memory?). 

  1. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  3. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  5. Man's Fate by Andre Malraux
  6. Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
  7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  8. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  9. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
  10. Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian
  11. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
  12. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
  13. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
  14. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  15. The Gulag Archipelago by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
  16. Paroles by Jacques Prevert
  17. Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire
  18. The Blue Lotus by Herge
  19. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
  20. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss
  21. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  22. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
  23. Asterix the Gaul by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
  24. The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco
  25. Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud
  26. The Abyss/ Zeno of Bruges by Marguerite Yourcenar
  27. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  28. Ulysses by James Joyce
  29. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
  30. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
  31. The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono
  32. Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen
  33. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  34. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  35. Therese Desqueyroux by Francois Mauriac
  36. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
  37. Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig
  38. Gone with the Wind by Margerte Mitchell
  39. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence
  40. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
  41. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
  42. Le Silence de la Mer by Vercors
  43. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
  44. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
  45. Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos
  46. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
  47. The Joke by Milan Kundera
  48. Contempt/ A Ghost at Noon by Albert Moravia
  49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
  50. Nadia by Andre Bretgon
  51. Aurelien by Louis Aragon
  52. The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel
  53. Six Character in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
  54. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
  55. Friday by Michel Tournier
  56. The War of the Worlds by H G Wells
  57. If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
  58. The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien
  59. The Tendrils of the Vine by Colette
  60. Capital of Pain by Paul Eduard
  61. Martin Eden by Jack London
  62. The Ballad of the Salty Sea by Hugo Pratt
  63. Writing Dehree Zero by Roland Bathes
  64. The Lost Honour of Katherine Blum by Heinrich Boll
  65. The Opposing Shore by Julien Grach
  66. The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
  67. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  68. The Wonderful Adventure of Nils by Selma Lagerlof
  69. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
  70. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  71. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
  72. The Interrogation by J M G Le Clezio
  73. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
  74. Journal 1887 - 1910 by Jules Renard
  75. Lord Jim by Jospeh Conrad
  76. Ecrits by Jacques Lacan
  77. The Theatre and its Double by Antonin Artaud
  78. Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
  79. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
  80. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
  81. The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare
  82. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
  83. Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca
  84. The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon
  85. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
  86. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
  87. Furor and Mystery by Rene Char
  88. The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger
  89. No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase
  90. Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P Jacobs
  91. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
  92. Second Thoughts by Michel Butor
  93. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
  94. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  95. The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller
  96. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
  97. Amers by Saint-John Perse
  98. Gaston by Andre Franquin 
  99. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
  100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie




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