IWU Select 100 Must-Read Books
This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
About this list
IWU (Faculty, Staff, and Students), 99 Books
The IWU Select 100 Must-Read Books list was unveiled on September 17 1991 at Illinois Wesleyan University (Bloomington, Illinois). The project was run by the campus Bookstore Advisory Committee, whose chair—then–vice-president for Business & Finance Ken Browning—was charged with “initiating the search for the 100 top books.”
Rather than imposing a canonical ranking, the committee invited open nominations from faculty, staff and students, sifted those suggestions, and published the final 100 alphabetically under the label “Broad-Based Reading List.”
Because every title cleared the same nomination threshold, the brochure is unranked; each entry is presented on equal footing. Exact participation figures were never recorded, but an IWU advisory committee in the early 1990s typically had about a dozen voting members, and the press material speaks of a campus-wide call that brought in dozens of nominations—so roughly 40–60 people likely had a direct hand in shaping the selection. The stated aim was breadth and enduring relevance: classics and modern works across literature, history, philosophy, science and social commentary that “any curious reader on campus could tackle.”
This list was originally published in 1991 and was added to this site about 1 year ago.