With books, mankind transcends history. Humanity’s voice is heard thousands of years later and not a single nuance, idea, or exclamation is lost. It is as if the writer’s mind was transported across time and stood in front of us waiting to be examined. The following writers shook the world with the power of their voice, and the readers are one step closer to understanding this large tapestry that makes up humanity’s history. Each story is painstakingly woven and it is up to us to unravel each and every one for our pleasure.
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1982) Gabriel García Márquez
2. Ulysses (1922) James Joyce
3. Waiting For Godot (1952) Samuel Beckett
4. Pedro Páramo (1955) Juan Rulfo
5. The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2008) Paolo Giordano
6. The Solitaire Mystery ( 1990) Jostein Gaarder
7. The Rebel (1951) Albert Camus
8. Madame Bovary (1856) Gustave Flaubert
9. Nausea (1938) Jean-Paul Sartre
10. Ham on Rye (1982) Charles Bukowski
11. Faustus (1808) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
12. Demian (1919) Hermann Hesse
13. The Tin Drum (1979) Günter Grass
14. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Lewis Carrol
15. The Invention of Morel (1940) Adolfo Bioy Casares
16. The Master and Margarita (1966) Mijaíl Bulgakov
17. Hopscotch (1963) Julio Cortázar
18. Marianela (1878) Benito Pérez Galdos
19. The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Sigmund Freud
20. Farewell to Arms (1899) Ernest Hemingway
21. The Sound and the Fury (1929) William Faulkner
22. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (1887 ) Friedrich Nietzsche
23. A Clockwork Orange (1971 ) Anthony Burguess
24. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Ray Bradbury
25. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) J. D. Salinger
26. Dead Souls (1842) Nikolai Gogol
27. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Arthur C. Clarke
28. The Seagull (1896) Antón Chéjov
29. At the Mountains of Madness (1936) H. P. Lovecraft
30. Animal Farm ( 1945) George Orwell
31. The Idiot (1869) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
32. The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights (1833) Aleksandr Pushkin
33. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) Vladimir Nabokov
34. Answered Prayers (1987) Truman Capote
35. In Search of Lost Time (1913) Marcel Proust
36. Argonautica, Apollonius of Rhodes
37. The Song of the Nibelungs (XIII Century) Anonymous
38. Prosas profanas (1896) Rubén Darío
39. The Night Pieces (1817) E. T. A Hoffmann
40. The Decameron (1353) Giovanni Boccaccio
41. Mist (1914) Miguel de Unamuno
42. Persuasion (1816) Jane Austen
43. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) Immanuel Kant
44. Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782) Jean Jacques Rousseau
45. Candide (1759) Voltaire
46. Broken April ( 1978) Ismail Kadare
47. Last Argument of Kings (2006) Joe Abercrombie
48. Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) Jules Verne
49. My Family and Other Animals (1956) Gerald Durrell
50. The Odyssey (VII a.C. ) Homer
51. Poetic Edda (XIII Century) Anonymous
52. Dracula (1897) Bram Stoker
53. The Three Musketeers (1844) Alexandre Dumas
54. Robinson Crusoe (1719) Daniel Defoe
55. The Sound of Waves (1956) Yukio Mishima
56. Leo Africanus (1986) Amin Maalouf
57. The Hive (1950) Camilo José Cela
58. Jane Eyre (1847) Charlotte Brontë
59. The Golem (1914) Gustav Meyrink
60. War and Peace (1869) Leo Tolstoy
61. The Star Rover (1915) Jack London
62. La hora de Quevedo (2008) Baltasar Magro
63. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Milan Kundera
64. The Castle (1926) Franz Kafka
65. The Magic Mountain (1924) Thomas Mann
66. “The Aleph” (1949) Jorge Luis Borges
67. The Time of the Hero (1962) Mario Vargas Llosa
68. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) Pablo Neruda
69. La tregua (1960) Mario Benedetti
70. El túnel (1948) Ernesto Sabato
71. “Piedra de sol” (1957) Octavio Paz
72. Las batallas en el desierto (1939) José Emilio Pacheco
73. Memorias de cocina y bodega (1953) Alfonso Reyes
74. Blood Wedding (1933) Federico García Lorca
75. La Galatea (1585) Miguel de Cervantes
76, Nadja (1928) André Breton
77. Illuminations (1886) Arthur Rimbaud
78. Fleurs Du Mal (1857) Charles Baudelaire
79. The Eleven Thousand Rods (1907) Guillaume Apollinaire
80. Blindness (1995) José Saramago
81. Germinal (1885) Émile Zola
82. The Book of Disquiet (1984) Fernando Pessoa
83. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Virgina Woolf
84. Ariel (1965) Sylvia Plath
85. The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir
86. Frankestein (1818) Mary Shelley
87. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Douglas Adams
88. Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Kurt Vonnegut
89. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Harper Lee
90. East of Eden (1952) John Steinbeck
93. The Little Prince (1943) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
94. Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) Viktor Frankl
95. Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James
96. Passage to India (1924) E. M. Forster
97. Spartacus (1959) Howard Fast
98. Lord of the Flies (1954) William Golding
99. The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald
100. On The Road (1957) Jack Kerouac
101. Cosmos (1980) Carl Sagan
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Over 3 million years ago, our dearest Lucy, one of the first upright bipedal specimens, began to roam this earth. We know of their existence and evolution thanks to the remains embedded on this earth, and these small fragments tell the poignant tale of our origins and how we came to be. As mankind gathered around the fires and found music and the power of the spoken word, men began to weave its own history and reality.
Then came the written word, which was forever immortalized on heavy slabs of clay and on papyrus. Humanity has always thirsted for knowledge and for its voice and ideas to survive the relentless passing of time. History’s great accomplishment is not the discovery of the written word, but the act of countless adventurous souls that inscribed their names for posterity. The first literary masterpiece that boasts the name of its creator is “The exaltation of Inana” by Enheduanna from the XXIII a.C. These ideas that floated in the air like cotton candy were finally woven into a story, and now mankind could admire and study its gods and idols on paper. The order of this list is inconsequential, no writer stands above another since each one has a different story to tell.
