Best Books of the Century
Non-Fiction / Fiction
Read Reviews and Reader Comments for Selected Books Below

Best of 1990 to 1999: Nonfiction

Hunting Mister Heartbreak : A Discovery of America by Jonathan Raban

U and I : A True Story by Nicholson Baker

The Silent Woman : Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr

The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia J. Williams

Jane Austen : A Life by Claire Tomalin

Confederates in the Attic : Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Best of 1990 to 1999: Fiction

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot

Mating by Norman Rush

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

Selected Stories by Alice Munro

Best of 1980 to 1989: Nonfiction

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Ake : The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte

Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon

Less Than One : Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Chaos : Making a New Science by James Gleick

Maus : A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman


Best of 1980 to 1989: Fiction

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

At Freddie's by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

White Noise by Don Delillo

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

Ordinary Love and Good Will : Two Novellas by Jane Smiley


Best of 1970 to 1979: Nonfiction

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

Hope Against Hope : A Memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam

Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin

Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Best of 1970 to 1979: Fiction


The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

The Ghost Writer by Phillip Roth

The Deptford Trilogy : Fifth Business/the Manticore/World of Wonders by Robertson Davies


Best of 1960 to 1969: Nonfiction

Survival in Auschwitz : The Nazi Assault on Humanity by Primo Levi

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

The Fire Next Time by James A. Baldwin

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford

Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

The City in History by Lewis Mumford

Best of 1960 to 1969: Fiction


To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

Catch-22 by Joseph L. Heller

The Golden Notebook by Doris May Lessing

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade : A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

 

Best of 1950 to 1959: Nonfiction


Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

The Art of Eating by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher

How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff, Irving Geis

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

Endurance : Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann

A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin


Best of 1950 to 1959: Fiction


Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James A. Baldwin

Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Best of 1940 to 1949: Nonfiction

A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men : Three Tenant Families by James Agee, Walker Evans

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon : A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West

Being and Nothingness : A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology by Jean-Paul Sartre

Christ Stopped at Eboli : The Story of a Year by Carlo Levi

Anne Frank the Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

An Autobiography : The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mahatma Ghandi

A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold

The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir

Best of 1940 to 1949: Fiction

Native Son by Richard Wright

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

If He Hollers Let Him Go : A Novel by Chester Himes

The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber

Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable : Malone Dies ; The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

 

Best of 1930 to 1939: Nonfiction

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Testament of Youth : An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 by Vera Brittain

A Field Guide to the Birds : A Completely New Guide to All the Birds of Eastern and Central North America by Roger Tory Peterson

The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield, Peter Stansky

Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass by Isak Dinesen

The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang

The Black Jacobins : Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James

My Early Life : 1874-1904 by Winston Churchill

Seven Pillars of Wisdom : A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence

Living My Life by Emma Goldman

 

Best of 1930 to 1939: Fiction

The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War by Jaroslav Hasek

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

 

Best of 1920 to 1929: Nonfiction

I and Thou by Martin Buber

Fowler's Modern English Usage by Henry Watson Fowler

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Autobiographies Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol 3 by William Butler Yeats

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Good-Bye to All That : An Autobiography by Robert Graves

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Best of 1920 to 1929: Fiction

The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Ulysses by James Joyce

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Passing by Nella Larsen

Lolly Willowes : Or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner

 

Best of 1910 to 1919: Nonfiction

Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addams

Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

Principia Mathematica to 56 by Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Arthur Russell

The Psychology of the Unconscious : A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido by Carl Jung

On Growth and Form by Darcy Wentworth Thompson

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Golden Bough by James George Frazer

 

Best of 1910 to 1919: Fiction

Howards End by Edward Morgan Forster

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Good Soldier : A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford

The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells

The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

My Antonia by Willa Cather

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

 

 

 

 

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