Books of the Century

This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The Age (Newspaper), 26 Books

The Age, a major newspaper Melbourne, Victoria asked around 30 authors/critics/experts what their favorite book of the century was. Note, some authors did not understand the question and picked books written in the 1700s

This list was originally published in 1999 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
319 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money John Maynard Keynes 1936 British English
240 The Godfather Mario Puzo 1969 American English
355 At Swim Two-Birds Flann O'Brien 1939 Irish English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
3927 One Hundred Poems Kenneth Slessor 1944 Australian English
1840 Kafka's Other Trial Elias Canetti 1969 Bulgarian German
1383 Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond 1997 American English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
479 Four Quartets T. S. Eliot 1943 British English
777 The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss 1957 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
81 The Castle Franz Kafka 1926 Czech German
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
714 Encyclopedia Britannica Encyclopedia Britannica 1768 British English
213 Life and Fate Vasily Grossman 1980 Russian Russian
99 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
436 Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein 1953 Austrian German
173 A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf 1929 British English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
2873 Scouting For Boys Robert Baden-Powell 1908 British English
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
25 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German German
707 Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson 1830 British English
77 The Plague Albert Camus 1947 French French