By Era
Twentieth-Century Greats
Essential reading first published between 1900 and 1999.
24 books · ranked
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1
The Waste Land
The fractured, allusive poem that became the emblem of modernism; difficult, dazzling, endlessly studied.
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2
The Hobbit
A comfortable hobbit is swept into an adventure with dwarves and a dragon; the cosy doorway into Middle-earth.
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3
Rebecca
A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.
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4
1984
Total surveillance, rewritten history and a man who dares to think for himself; the defining dystopia.
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5
Charlotte's Web
A pig, a clever spider and a barnyard friendship that beats death; the gentle classic about loyalty.
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6
Silent Spring
The book that exposed the cost of pesticides and helped launch the environmental movement; calm and devastating.
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7
Dune
Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.
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8
In Cold Blood
A Kansas farm-family murder reconstructed in novelistic detail; the book that created the true-crime genre.
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9
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of one family in a town where the magical is everyday; the defining novel of magical realism.
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10
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Sharp, cool essays on 1960s America; the book that set the standard for the personal essay.
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11
Ways of Seeing
How we look at images, and who benefits; a short, radical book that changed art criticism.
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12
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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13
Watchmen
Flawed, ageing superheroes in an alternate Cold War; the graphic novel that proved comics could be literature.
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14
A Brief History of Time
Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of the cosmos for the general reader; the bestseller that made physics fashionable.
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15
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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16
Sophie's World
A teenager receives mysterious lessons that walk through the whole history of Western philosophy; a story and a course in one.
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17
The Power of Now
A guide to living in the present moment; the bestselling cornerstone of modern mindfulness.
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18
A Walk in the Woods
Two unfit friends attempt the Appalachian Trail; very funny, with real love for wild places.
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19
Interpreter of Maladies
Stories of Indian and Indian-American lives between cultures; a Pulitzer-winning debut of great delicacy.
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20
Brave New World
A future engineered for comfort and conformity; the other great dystopia, warning against pleasure rather than fear.
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21
Murder on the Orient Express
Hercule Poirot boards the Orient Express snowbound in Yugoslavia and wakes to find a fellow passenger has been murdered. Everyone on the train is a suspect. Christie's most famous novel turns the conventions of the whodunit inside out with a solution that raises genuine moral questions about justice and collective vengeance.
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22
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
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23
The Little Prince
A pilot meets a small prince from another planet; a deceptively simple fable for all ages.
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24
Man's Search for Meaning
A psychiatrist's survival of the camps and the meaning he drew from it; brief, profound and enduring.