Farewell. It doesn't look like I'll get the book list compiled prior to the break. Instead....

[Pretzel_Warrior]

I offer you a great list of lists. In my original post here, I include a link to Norwegian Book Club's list of 100 top works of literature. After reviewing ones from The New York times, Le Monde, BBC, and others, I felt this one was a little more fair to authors regardless of country or ethnicity.

The Norwegian Book Club chose not to rank each book in its relative place in the top 100 other than to say Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes received 50% more votes than other books and is at #1. The rest appear in alphabetical order.

http://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/28


1.Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry...


1984 by George Orwell

The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literature


Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during,...


The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature.


The Aeneid by Virgil

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor....


Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage...


Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner...


Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on...


Blindness by Jose Saramago

Blindness is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city


The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

The Book Of Disquietude or The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego in Portuguese), published posthumously, is one of the greatest works by Fernando Pessoa.


Selected works also included on the list are:

Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ramayana by Valmiki
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

[Pretzel_Warrior]

1. Modern Library Top 100 board picks (both fiction and nonfiction)

Modern Library's list was published by the New York Times in 1998.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/20/books/ulysses-at-top-as-panel-picks-100-best-novels.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/

1. ''Ulysses,'' James Joyce

2. ''The Great Gatsby,'' F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,'' James Joyce

4. ''Lolita,'' Vladimir Nabokov

5. ''Brave New World,'' Aldous Huxley

6. ''The Sound and the Fury,'' William Faulkner

7. ''Catch-22,'' Joseph Heller

8. ''Darkness at Noon,'' Arthur Koestler

9. ''Sons and Lovers,'' D. H. Lawrence

10.''The Grapes of Wrath,'' John Steinbeck

11. ''Under the Volcano,'' Malcolm Lowry

12. ''The Way of All Flesh,'' Samuel Butler

13. ''1984,'' George Orwell

14. ''I, Claudius,'' Robert Graves

15. ''To the Lighthouse,'' Virginia Woolf

16. ''An American Tragedy,'' Theodore Dreiser

17. ''The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,'' Carson McCullers

18. ''Slaughterhouse Five,'' Kurt Vonnegut

19. ''Invisible Man,'' Ralph Ellison

20. ''Native Son,'' Richard Wright

21. ''Henderson the Rain King,'' Saul Bellow

22. ''Appointment in Samarra,'' John O'Hara

23. ''U.S.A.'' (trilogy), John Dos Passos

24. ''Winesburg, Ohio,'' Sherwood Anderson

25. ''A Passage to India,'' E. M. Forster

26. ''The Wings of the Dove,'' Henry James

27. ''The Ambassadors,'' Henry James

28. ''Tender Is the Night,'' F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. ''The Studs Lonigan Trilogy,'' James T. Farrell

30. ''The Good Soldier,'' Ford Madox Ford

31. ''Animal Farm,'' George Orwell

32. ''The Golden Bowl,'' Henry James

33. ''Sister Carrie,'' Theodore Dreiser

34. ''A Handful of Dust,'' Evelyn Waugh

35. ''As I Lay Dying,'' William Faulkner

36. ''All the King's Men,'' Robert Penn Warren

37. ''The Bridge of San Luis Rey,'' Thornton Wilder

38. ''Howards End,'' E. M. Forster

39. ''Go Tell It on the Mountain,'' James Baldwin

40. ''The Heart of the Matter,'' Graham Greene

41. ''Lord of the Flies,'' William Golding

42. ''Deliverance,'' James Dickey

43. ''A Dance to the Music of Time'' (series), Anthony Powell

44. ''Point Counter Point,'' Aldous Huxley

45. ''The Sun Also Rises,'' Ernest Hemingway

46. ''The Secret Agent,'' Joseph Conrad

47. ''Nostromo,'' Joseph Conrad

48. ''The Rainbow,'' D. H. Lawrence

49. ''Women in Love,'' D. H. Lawrence

50. ''Tropic of Cancer,'' Henry Miller

51. ''The Naked and the Dead,'' Norman Mailer

52. ''Portnoy's Complaint,'' Philip Roth

53. ''Pale Fire,'' Vladimir Nabokov

54. ''Light in August,'' William Faulkner

55. ''On the Road,'' Jack Kerouac

56. ''The Maltese Falcon,'' Dashiell Hammett

57. ''Parade's End,'' Ford Madox Ford

58. ''The Age of Innocence,'' Edith Wharton

59. ''Zuleika Dobson,'' Max Beerbohm

60. ''The Moviegoer,'' Walker Percy

61. ''Death Comes for the Archbishop,'' Willa Cather

62. ''From Here to Eternity,'' James Jones

63. ''The Wapshot Chronicles,'' John Cheever

64. ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' J. D. Salinger

65. ''A Clockwork Orange,'' Anthony Burgess

66. ''Of Human Bondage,'' W. Somerset Maugham

67. ''Heart of Darkness,'' Joseph Conrad

68. ''Main Street,'' Sinclair Lewis

69. ''The House of Mirth,'' Edith Wharton

70. ''The Alexandria Quartet,'' Lawrence Durrell

71. ''A High Wind in Jamaica,'' Richard Hughes

72. ''A House for Mr. Biswas,'' V. S. Naipaul

73. ''The Day of the Locust,'' Nathanael West

74. ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Ernest Hemingway

75. ''Scoop,'' Evelyn Waugh

76. ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,'' Muriel Spark

77. ''Finnegans Wake,'' James Joyce

78. ''Kim,'' Rudyard Kipling

79. ''A Room With a View,'' E. M. Forster

80. ''Brideshead Revisited,'' Evelyn Waugh

81. ''The Adventures of Augie March,'' Saul Bellow

82. ''Angle of Repose,'' Wallace Stegner

83. ''A Bend in the River,'' V. S. Naipaul

84. ''The Death of the Heart,'' Elizabeth Bowen

85. ''Lord Jim,'' Joseph Conrad

86. ''Ragtime,'' E. L. Doctorow

87. ''The Old Wives' Tale,'' Arnold Bennett

88. ''The Call of the Wild,'' Jack London

89. ''Loving,'' Henry Green

90. ''Midnight's Children,'' Salman Rushdie

91. ''Tobacco Road,'' Erskine Caldwell

92. ''Ironweed,'' William Kennedy

93. ''The Magus,'' John Fowles

94. ''Wide Sargasso Sea,'' Jean Rhys

95. ''Under the Net,'' Iris Murdoch

96. ''Sophie's Choice,'' William Styron

97. ''The Sheltering Sky,'' Paul Bowles

98. ''The Postman Always Rings Twice,'' James M. Cain

99. ''The Ginger Man,'' J. P. Donleavy

100. ''The Magnificent Ambersons,'' Booth Tarkington.

[zappaman]

2. I need to read Catch 22 again.

One of my favorite books and haven't read it in 20 years.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

5. I've read quite a few...but too many great ones I still haven't finished.

I keep trying to knock out another 3 or 4 of the "big ones" a year.

[awoke_in_2003]

6. Very great book...

it's follow up, Closing Time, wouldn't make good toilet paper. It is hard to believe they were authored by the same person.

[zappaman]

8. I remember trying to read that one.

Yeah, it's bad.

[awoke_in_2003]

10. I made it through...

on sheer stubbornness.

[Gravitycollapse]

12. I'm rereading it right now. Definitely entertaining.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

3. 50 Greatest Books as published by The Globe and Mail

These also are not ranked but appear alphabetically

http://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/41

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Louis Carroll

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Antigone by Sophocles

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot by T.S. Eliot

Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by W. B. Yeats

Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Michel de Montaigne

The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka

Confessions by St. Augustine

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Das Kapital by Karl Marx

Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Histories of Herodotus by Herodotus

The Iliad by Homer

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

The King James Bible by William Tyndale

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Mahabharata by India

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Odyssey by Homer

Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Principia Mathematica by Issac Newton

The Qur'an by Various Authors

The Republic by Plato

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

Ulysses by James Joyce

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

[1000words]

4. I give you a fair amount of grief ...

but I sure do respect your love for books.

Recc'd

[Pretzel_Warrior]

9. thanks

[ucrdem]

7. Good stuff Pretzel

[Gravitycollapse]

11. I can't believe nothing by Thomas Pynchon made it on that list.

V.
Gravity's Rainbow
The Crying of Lot 49

Seriously?

[Pretzel_Warrior]

13. well, he's up against thousands of years of writers from around the globe

so I am sure there are numerous tremendous writers who didn't make the cut.

[Gravitycollapse]

14. Several books made it on there that were published after Gravity's Rainbow...

Including Midnight's Children and Beloved.

I mean, Pynchon is often compared in greatness to Joyce. That's pretty high praise yet nothing Pynchon wrote made it on the list.