In 1999 French paper Le Monde asked its readers for the best books of the twentieth century, based on the criteria “Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?”/”Which books have stayed in your memory?”
In looking at the list I was struck by how different it was to similar type lists in the English-speaking press that crop up at various times. The other lists I’ve seen all seem to just re-work the same titles in different orders. Of course there are some here that feature on the other lists (I guess there’s just no escaping LOTR or Midnight’s Children) but I was impressed with the broader scope of Le Monde’s list, and how it really did cover the last century, when these lists often seem biased towards the publishing sensations most recent to the compilation date. It was the most wide ranging in terms of genre, taking in novels, plays, children’s books and essays.
Sadly. its not the most wide-ranging in terms of gender… It’s also pretty Euro-centric.
I was also struck by how few I’d read. Normally I can feel quite smug about lists like this, but here I am at the starting point of a paltry 22. So I decided to set myself the challenge of reading my way through Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century. I won’t succeed, there are some here I know I’ll struggle to finish, but I’ll have fun trying and it will encourage me to try some different reading choices.
The books are listed below in order, with date of publication in brackets and original language they were published in (I’ll be reading them all in English translation). Bold indicates books I’ve read, I’ll link the titles to my discussion of them as I go along (in keeping with the ethos of this blog I’ll only be writing about the books I enjoy, the ones I recommend). Numbers 9, 36, and 44 I’ve already blogged about, so although they are linked, the post doesn’t reference Le Monde’s list.
Which ones have you read? Which would you recommend?
Total read: 40
1. The Stranger/The Outsider – Albert Camus (1942) French
2. In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past -Marcel Proust (1913–1927) French
3. The Trial – Franz Kafka (1925) German
4. The Little Prince- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) French
5. Man’s Fate – André Malraux (1933) French
6. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932) French
7. The Grapes of Wrath -John Steinbeck (1939) English
8. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway (1940) English
9. Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier (1913) French
10. Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian (1947) French
11. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir (1949) French
12. Waiting for Godot -Samuel Beckett (1952) French
13. Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre (1943) French
14. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (1980) Italian
15. The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973) Russian
16. Paroles – Jacques Prévert (1946) French
17. Alcools – Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) French
18. The Blue Lotus – Hergé (1936) French
19. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank (1947) Dutch
20. Tristes Tropiques – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) French
21. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (1932) English
22. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (1949) English
23. Asterix the Gaul – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1959) French
24. The Bald Soprano – Eugène Ionesco (1952) French
25. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud (1905) German
26. The Abyss/ Zeno of Bruges – Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) French
27. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (1955) English
28. Ulysses – James Joyce (1922) English
29. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati (1940) Italian
30. The Counterfeiters – André Gide (1925) French
31. The Horseman on the Roof – Jean Giono (1951) French
32. Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen (1968) French
33. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez (1967) Spanish
34. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner (1929) English
35. Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac (1927) French
36. Zazie in the Metro – Raymond Queneau (1959) French
37. Confusion of Feelings – Stefan Zweig (1927) German
38. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (1936) English
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence (1928) English
40. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (1924) German
41. Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan (1954) French
42. Le Silence de la mer -Vercors (1942) French
43. Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec (1978) French
44. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle (1901–1902) English
45. Under the Sun of Satan – Georges Bernanos (1926) French
46. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) English
47. The Joke – Milan Kundera (1967) Czech
48. A Ghost at Noon/Contempt – Alberto Moravia (1954) Italian
49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie (1926) English
50. Nadja – André Breton (1928) French
51. Aurelien – Louis Aragon (1944) French
52. The Satin Slipper – Paul Claudel (1929) French
53. Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello (1921) Italian
54. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht (1941) German
55. Friday – Michel Tournier (1967) French
56. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells (1898) English
57. If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz – Primo Levi (1947) Italian
58. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien (1954–1955) English
59. The Tendrils of the Vine – Colette (1908) French
60. Capital of Pain – Paul Éluard (1926)French
61. Martin Eden – Jack London (1909) English
62. Ballad of the Salt Sea – Hugo Pratt (1967) Italian
63. Writing Degree Zero – Roland Barthes (1953) French
64. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll (1974) German
65. The Opposing Shore -Julien Gracq (1951) French
66. The Order of Things – Michel Foucault (1966) French
67. On the Road – Jack Kerouac (1957) English
68. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils – Selma Lagerlöf (1906–1907) Swedish
69. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (1929) English
70. The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury (1950) English
71. The Ravishing of Lol Stein – Marguerite Duras (1964) French
72. The Interrogation – J. M. G. Le Clézio (1963) French
73. Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute (1939)French
74. Journal, 1887–1910 – Jules Renard (1925) French
75. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad (1900) English
76. Écrits – Jacques Lacan (1966) French
77. The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud (1938) French
78. Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos (1925) English
79. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges (1944) Spanish
80. Moravagine – Blaise Cendrars (1926)French
81. The General of the Dead Army – Ismail Kadare (1963) Albanian
82. Sophie’s Choice – William Styron (1979) English
83. Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca (1928) Spanish
84. The Strange Case of Peter the Lett – Georges Simenon (1931) French
85. Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet (1944)French
86. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil (1930–1942) German
87. Furor and Mystery – René Char (1948)French
88. The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger (1951) English
89. No Orchids For Miss Blandish -James Hadley Chase (1939) English
90. Blake and Mortimer – Edgar P. Jacobs (1950) French
91. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke (1910) German
92. Second Thoughts – Michel Butor (1957) French
93. The Burden of Our Time/ The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt (1951) German
94. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) Russian
95. The Rosy Crucifixion – Henry Miller (1949–1960) English
96. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (1939) English
97. Amers – Saint-John Perse (1957) French
98. Gaston Gomer Goof – André Franquin (1957) French
99. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry (1947) English
madame bibi lophile recommends 
cool, I did not even know that Le Monde had also that type of things! I read 31 of them. there are so many genres in here, including poetry, philosophy, theater, and authors from so many different countries, difficult to recommend you one. you have read my favorite of all, Le grand Meaulnes. what genre do you like? thanks for listing my blog in your ‘brilliant blogs”!! and as you seem to enjoy French stuff, be sure to visit http://francebooktours.com, where I organize virtual book tours for authors. all books in English, but related to France! and you can sign up for free to get a book for free to review on your blog
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I’m fairly opened-minded when it comes to genres, that’s why Le Monde’s list appealed. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of your other blog, I’ve followed, it looks great!
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ok then, you can start easy with your #4, such a classic, of course better in French if you can
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Thank you for the recommendation, I appreciate it!
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I’ve only read 27. I hope we don’t have to read them in the original language? Oh, and I have read some Asterix cartoons, does that count! 🙂 SD
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Asterix definitely counts – no.23! I’m reading them all in English translation, it would take me the rest of my life to finish otherwise 🙂
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Feel good about the 22 (and those you’ve read since). My tally is six. I have a few of them gathering dust on my shelf, though, but after watching the film this weekend I don’t know if I’m going to bother reading Gatsby.
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I haven’t seen the film, but I think many fans of the book didn’t like the interpretation, so don’t let it put you off! (Or you could await my piercing insights to aid your decision 😉 )
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I’ve only read 4 of them!
But I have many in my wish list and some are even on my shelves waiting to be picked up!
On a side note,that list is very interesting as it comprises many little known French novels! I’ve been looking for French books lately,but found that I only knew the works from Balzac,Hugo,Flaubert,and Dumas….
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That’s very interesting – it seems “classic” French novels are better known than 20th century ones. If you read any you’d recommend do let me know!
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Sadly! I haven’t read any! (Well,I did read Colette’s Le Ble en Herbe which I liked and Antigone,although it’s a play,which I absolutely adored,because of the language and the storyline.)
Eurydice,Anouilh’s other play,sounds very promising too! 🙂
And I have Le Mythe de Sisyphe at home.I’ll read it after Waiting for Godot! I’m expecting much from this essay!
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I’ll look out for Le Ble en Herbe – I haven’t read much Colette. I really like Antigone too 🙂
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What a great list, I have only read 11 listed, but have read some of the authors other books. I’m not surprised that it comprises so much variety, more than 40% of the fiction read in France is translated from other languages, they have for a long time has a much greater awareness of foreign fiction than we have have ever had access to in the English language.
I enjoy reading contemporary French authors and Gallic Books are now trying to bring more of it to the English reading world, which you probably already know about.
I read Le Grand Meaulnes in January this year and thought it was a wonderful read. I’m currently reading Simone De Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Love translated fiction and non-ficton. So much to discover.
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That’s really interesting – I had no idea translated fiction was read in such high proportion in France, although I knew they read much more translated fiction than the UK. 40% is astounding!
Most of the French fiction I read is classics – I should use Gallic Books’ initiative to read more contemporary authors. I really enjoy translated fiction too. As you say, so much to discover: a whole world 🙂
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This looks like a fascinating list. So many on there that I haven’t even heard of, let alone read. How are you finding the list so far?
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I’m really enjoying it, but I need to get back on track – life’s been so busy I’ve let it slide a bit… It is a really interesting list and definitely encourages me to read things I wouldn’t otherwise.
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Quite a fascinating list that I’ve only just discovered now – how are you getting on with it? I grew up outside the UK and had access to several languages, so I’ve been fortunate enough to have read about 50 of the books on this list. But do you know what I’ve just realised? I must have read them al or most of them by the time I turned 20 – and I do believe my reading has grown less diverse since! Is that sad, or what?
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That’s not sad – I had much more time to read when I was younger. And it’s never to late to start diversifying your reading again 🙂 My reading has really slowed down at the moment (I’m writing – or failing to write! – a dissertation) but I was looking at the list just the other day and thinking I really want to get back into it. 50 books is really impressive! Any recommendations for me?
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Ha, when I had a dissertation to write, I felt like reading, cleaning the house, doing pretty much anything BUT the dissertation, so good luck with writing it! My recommendations (if you haven’t read them already) are: The Little Prince (makes me cry every time, one of my favourite books ever), The Second Sex (still so relevant), The Joke and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Good luck with everything and thanks for visiting my blog too.
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Thanks for the recommendations – I will definitely check them out!
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I love book lists like these – I’m always on the look out for recommendations! It’s interesting to see a French list, there are some titles I’ve not come across, so I shall definitely be bookmarking this page! (Oh, I got 23. Must read more!)
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It’s a really interesting list, isn’t it? If you have any recommendations from the books you’ve read, do let me know!
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Sadly, I’ve only read nine out of all 100 here.
Quick question: are the books ranked in any way on this list?
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Good question! I’ve always assumed they were ranked by number of votes, but I’m not totally sure.
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Which ones would you recommend most? I’m afraid of getting too into a book then being disappointed.
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What sort of thing do you like to read? I don’t want to mislead you & be the cause of disappointment!
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I feel like I’ve burned through all of romance, so I’m done with those, unless there’s something REALLY exceptional.
I’m thinking drama, thriller, crime, sci-fi.
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OK – 1984 & Brave New World are both dystopian novels, so they’re both sci-fi ish. The Name of the Rose & The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are both crime novels, although very different. The Christie is a fairly light, quick read, The Name of the Rose is more philosophical. Drama – Six Characters in Search of an Author & Waiting for Godot are both great plays, but again very philosophical , so you have to be in the mood. Do any of those sound any good?
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1984 is one of my all-time favorites. I’ve just started The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’ll take your word and try the rest.
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Hope you enjoy them!
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You and me both.
I’ll try to get back to you when I’m done.
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I’m feeling quite smug after discovering I’ve read 17 from the list, I must admit that Joyce’s Ulysses was read only because I thought one should read it. I didn’t enjoy it. My favourite book from the list is probably the Orwell selection: 1984. Though I must say I prefer most others by him. I rate him the finest writer of the 20th century. I would highly commend ‘Burmese Days’ and his very useful, even today, essay ‘Politics and The English Language’.
I shall read another from the list soon, your review prompted me to do so: Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ I’ve been meaning to read it for twenty years and I shall… as soon as I finish raeding my all time favourite book, again. I’ll let you know what it is when I’ve finished Woolf.
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Yes, ‘Politics and the English Language’ is certainly still relevant. I’ve not read Burmese Days but I definitely want to fill the gaps in my Orwell reading – thanks for the recommendation. I look forward to hearing about your favourite book 🙂
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Interesting – it certainly seems much more diverse and intellectual than English ones – not to mention, as you point out, international. And I like, very much, the fact it isn’t only novels. Anyway, it seems I’ve done 28, Like MarinaSophia I read much more challenging stuff in my teens and twenties than now……….for example, I have faded copies of Apollinaire’s Alcools and Calligrammes on my bookshelf – IN FRENCH – which i would never have been able to properly read!!!! I have no idea why, perhaps I thought I could teach myself better than O level French, with this – I also have a copy of the Penguin Modern European Poets, – Apollinaire, (translated) so its possible I had a grand intention of reading some poems in English and French.
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I’m impressed – I can only read in English. I want to get back to learning French though, so maybe I’ll try The Little Prince in French to help me on my way 🙂
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This is a great reading challenge! Perhaps I should do this instead of my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, lol!
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Well, it should be 10 times easier than 1001 books 😉 but the rate I’m going at I bet you finish before me!
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I’m amazed at the fact that I have read six books from this list!! Six! I know not something to fuss about but I love reading and this is the first time I am looking at some list and feeling unexpectedly excited and happy!! Maybe I have gone mad!!
I hope i will read more books in future… Love your blog Madamebibliophile…. keep writing, I sure have a lot to read here …
TC Tata
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I’m so glad the list made you happy, that’s great! Happy future reading 🙂
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I have to say I was disappointed in this list. Just books published in English, French, German, and Russian, with the occasional Other — like Milan Kundera — thrown in. There are amazing Latin American authors, like Cortazar or Borges or Pablo Neruda, which are not here. And then there’s the rest of the world, besides the Americas and Europe, which isn’t represented at all.
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I find these lists are always so parochial – I chose this one because it was the most wide-ranging I’d seen, but you’re absolutely right, apart from Marquez and Borges, Latin American writers are not represented. I’ll try and redress the balance throughout the rest of my blog!
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Can’t wait to read about it 🙂
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(Revisiting this list a few years later) Gabriel García Márquez is Colombian, and Borges is from Argentina.
Some of the writers marked as ‘English’ are writing in English but are not English, for example James Joyce and Beckett are Irish, Hemingway and Fawkner are American, and Salman Rushdie was born and educated in India. Kafka was Czech not German. And they’re just the ones I know… I bet some of the ones writing in French are Francophones writing from outside France.
I say this not to correct what you have here on the blog, because I think it’s a much better list than most, but to agree that Latin American writers are indeed represented.
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Thanks Lisa, yes the language listed next to the author is the original published language, not the nationality of the writer. These lists are always limited but I chose it because it was more wide-ranging than most. I have totally let this challenge fall by the wayside however! I’ll try and get back to it, and once it’s done I’ll be looking for a less Euro-centric list for a new reading challenge.
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I’ve read 29 of them, mostly the US, UK and French ones though also a couple of German, Italian and Latinos.
I agree that it’s a bit parochial, nothing from China or Africa, for example, and *sigh* as usual nothing from Australia, but still, it’s a much more interesting list than most of them:)
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Yes, these lists are as much a source of frustration as interest a lot of the time! I’m enjoying reading through this one, and when I’m done (one day!) I’m planning on trying to find another one which will balance this one out a bit.
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I see what you mean. Some good meaty titles in which to sink ones reading teeth (and me a veggie)! 😉
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Definitely! I’m enjoying the challenge but I really need to speed up on it!
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It looks to me as if you’re doing really well.
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Thanks 🙂
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