What’s the Best Book of the Past 125 Years? We Asked Readers to Decide.

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

About this list

A list from the New York Times. Here's the description from the website:

In October, as we marked the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, we invited readers to nominate the best book published during that time. This was a nod to our history: In its first few decades, the Book Review often asked readers to anoint the best books, the best short stories, the best poems. We wanted this project, like those early ones, to reflect readers’ tastes and preferences.

Responses began pouring in from all 50 states and 67 countries. In November, we presented a list of the 25 most-nominated books (one per author) for a vote. There were more than 200,000 ballots.

This list was originally published in 2021 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
16	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	1960	American	English
17	The Lord Of The Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	1959	English	English
6	Nineteen Eighty Four	George Orwell	1949	British	English
5	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	1967	Colombian	Spanish
49	Beloved	Toni Morrison	1987	American	English
1326	Parable Of The Sower	Octavia E. Butler	1993	American	English
908	The Warmth Of Other Suns	Isabel Wilkerson	2010	American	English
53	Dracula	Bram Stoker	1897	British	English
673	The Joy of Cooking	Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker	1931	American	English
229	Watership Down	Richard Adams	1972	British	English
1301	The Road Less Traveled	M. Scott Peck	1978	American	English