Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
Le Monde asked its readers in 1999 to name the century's books, and the answers came back French and severe. Titles out of copyright are open; the rest count down.
- gemeinfrei ab 2042
- Fair warning, the sentences wander for pages and almost nothing happens fast, but if you let it slow you down, that famous madeleine scene really does change how you notice your own memories. Read it in small pieces over months, not weeks.
- gemeinfrei ab 2033
- gemeinfrei ab 2039
- gemeinfrei ab 2030
- gemeinfrei ab 2030
- gemeinfrei ab 2035
- gemeinfrei ab 2036
- gemeinfrei ab 2063
- gemeinfrei ab 2049
- gemeinfrei ab 2049
- gemeinfrei ab 2052
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2070
- gemeinfrei ab 2042
- gemeinfrei ab 2048
- gemeinfrei ab 2057
- gemeinfrei ab 2028
- gemeinfrei ab 2045
- gemeinfrei ab 2046
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2051
- You’re glad you read it for the strange intimacy of spending a day inside Leopold Bloom’s mind, where errands, advertisements, hunger, and memory keep turning unexpectedly funny and tender. It’s demanding and occasionally maddening, but the jokes, wordplay, and Molly Bloom’s closing monologue reward patience.
- gemeinfrei ab 2048
- Fair warning, it's a hall of mirrors: Édouard is a novelist writing a novel called The Counterfeiters while Gide watches him do it. But if you like books that think out loud, the tangle of Bernard, Olivier, and all those slippery adults is quietly gripping stuff.
- gemeinfrei ab 2050
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2066
- Fair warning, the first section drops you into Benjy's mind with no timeline and no hand-holding, and it feels like drowning until it suddenly doesn't. Push through and the Compsons' slow collapse, especially Quentin's day in Cambridge, will sit in your chest for years.
- gemeinfrei ab 2055
- gemeinfrei ab 2032
- Forget the scandal, it's really about Connie coming back to life in that gamekeeper's hut while Clifford talks coal profits up at the house. Lawrence preaches a bit, he can't help it, but the tenderness is real and it lands if you let it.
- Hans Castorp goes up to a Davos sanatorium for three weeks and stays seven years, and somehow you feel time warp right along with him. It's slow and talky (Settembrini's arguments go on for pages), but if you like ideas as drama, it rewards patience.
- gemeinfrei ab 2051
- gemeinfrei ab 2040
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- Doyle sends Watson off alone to a fog-soaked moor with a family curse and something howling in the dark, and it's genuinely eerie, not cozy. Holmes vanishes for long stretches, which somehow makes it better.
- gemeinfrei ab 2036
- You watch Gatsby stare at that green light across the bay and slowly realize the whole glittering party is built on wanting one thing he can't have. It's short, sad, and gorgeous sentence by sentence, best read in a couple of quiet sittings.
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2051
- Poirot has retired to a village to grow vegetable marrows, and it goes about as well as you'd expect once a neighbor turns up dead. Half the fun is the doctor narrating and his gossipy sister Caroline; the other half you'll want to discuss immediately after.
- gemeinfrei ab 2056
- gemeinfrei ab 2043
- gemeinfrei ab 2041
- You get a wonderfully unsettling theatre rehearsal where six unfinished characters interrupt the actors and insist their suffering is more real than performance. It’s funny, argumentative, and deliberately slippery, especially if you enjoy questions about identity and art more than tidy emotional resolution.
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2063
- Wells writes the invasion like a newspaper report gone wrong, all named Surrey towns and refugee crowds, which makes it eerier than any spectacle. You'll spend chapters hiding in a wrecked house with a panicking curate, and honestly that dread stays with you longer than the Martians do.
- gemeinfrei ab 2055
- gemeinfrei ab 2051
- gemeinfrei ab 2050
- gemeinfrei ab 2050
- You watch Martin teach himself grammar, literature, and the manners of the people he wants to join, while his love for Ruth keeps tangling ambition with humiliation. It’s rough-edged and sometimes argumentative, but its account of writing against poverty and respectability feels startlingly honest.
- gemeinfrei ab 2063
- gemeinfrei ab 2071
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2066
- gemeinfrei ab 2053
- Nils starts out mean, honestly, a boy who torments the farm animals, and watching him earn the trust of Akka and the wild geese as they fly the length of Sweden is quietly moving. It's episodic and folkloric, better savored a chapter a night than rushed.
- gemeinfrei ab 2046
- gemeinfrei ab 2062
- gemeinfrei ab 2060
- gemeinfrei ab 2035
- gemeinfrei ab 2060
- If you've ever done one cowardly thing and never quite forgiven yourself, Jim's leap off the Patna will sit in your chest for weeks. Marlow tells it slantwise and slow, so give it patience; the reward is watching a man try to outrun his own shame.
- gemeinfrei ab 2073
- You have to be okay with drift here, since it jumps between dozens of lives (Ellen the actress, Jimmy the restless reporter, poor Bud fresh off the ferry) and never settles. But if you like cities more than plots, the noise of 1920s New York gets into you.
- gemeinfrei ab 2064
- gemeinfrei ab 2067
- noch nicht gemeinfrei
- gemeinfrei ab 2029
- gemeinfrei ab 2045
- gemeinfrei ab 2057
- gemeinfrei ab 2047
- gemeinfrei ab 2035
- gemeinfrei ab 2054
- gemeinfrei ab 2047
- gemeinfrei ab 2063
- gemeinfrei ab 2055
- gemeinfrei ab 2035
- gemeinfrei ab 2043
- noch nicht gemeinfrei