Bokklubben World Library Top 100
The Bokklubben World Library is a series of classical books, mostly novels, published by the Norwegian Book Club since 2002. It is based on a list of the hundred best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Book Club. This list endeavors to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods. Among the authors polled were Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Carlos Fuentes, and Nadine Gordimer. Each author had to select their own list of ten books. The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that “they are all on an equal footing,” with the exception of Don Quixote, which was given the distinction “best literary work ever written” as it received 50% more votes than any other book (source: Wikipedia)
48 from 100 books available for download
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Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales are like exquisite jewels, drawing from us gasps of recognition and delight. Andersen created intriguing and unique characters — a tin soldier with only one leg but a big heart, a beetle nestled deep in a horse’s mane but harboring high aspirations... read more »
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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish... read more »
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennet is Austen's most liberated and unambiguously appealing heroine, and Pride and Prejudice has remained over most of the past two centuries Austen's most popular novel. The story turns on the marriage prospects of the five daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet: Elizabeth forms a... read more »
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The Arabian Nights by Anonymous
Full of mischief, valor, ribaldry, and romance, The Arabian Nights has enthralled readers for centuries. These are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage. Beginning an enchanting story each evening... read more »
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Perhaps the most haunting and tragic love story ever written, Wuthering Heights is the tale of Heathcliff, a brooding, troubled orphan, and his doomed love for Catherine Earnshaw. His desire for her leads him to madness, however, when Catherine is made to marry a wealthy lord, sending Heathcliff... read more »
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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
In an overgrown churchyard, a grizzled convict springs upon an orphan boy named Pip. The convict terrifies Pip and threatens to kill him unless the boy helps further his escape. Later, Pip finds himself in a ruined garden where he meets the embittered and crazy Miss Havisham and her foster child... read more »
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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The most famous—and perhaps greatest—novel of all time, Tolstoy’s War and Peace tells the story of five families struggling for survival during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.Among its many unforgettable characters is Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud, dashing man who, despising the... read more »
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Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
A gripping tale of capitalist exploitation and rebellion, set amid the mist-shrouded mountains of a fictional South American republic, employs flashbacks and glimpses of the future to depict the lure of silver and its effects on men. Conrad's deep moral consciousness and masterful narrative... read more »
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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will, Raskolnikov, and impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and... read more »
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn, rebel against school and church, casual inheritor of gold treasure, rafter of the Mississippi, and savior of Jim the runaway slave, is the archetypal American maverick. Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "sivilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic... read more »
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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses... read more »
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Moby Dick by Herman Melville
On a previous voyage, a mysterious white whale had ripped off the leg of a sea captain named Ahab. Now the crew of the Pequod, on a pursuit that features constant adventure and horrendous mishaps, must follow the mad Ahab into the abyss to satisfy his unslakeable thirst for vengeance. Narrated by... read more »
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The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
In the summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten young men and women take refuge in the countryside, where they entertain themselves with tales of love, death, and corruption, featuring a host of characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings to devious lovers and false... read more »
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
Often called the greatest nineteenth-century British novelist, George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) created in Middlemarch a vast panorama of life in a provincial Midlands town. At the story’s center stands the intellectual and idealistic Dorothea Brooke—a character who in many ways... read more »
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Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each episode... read more »
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The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoyevsky’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues–brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality–that made his work so immensely popular in... read more »
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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe
Volume two of the complete works in five volumes from one of the leaders of the American Romantics. Macabre parties in isolated castles … Gruesome bestial murders … Talking ravens, hellish black pits, innocents buried alive … Prepare to be chilled and enthralled by the haunting genius of... read more »
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Divine Comedy: Hell by Dante
The first part of Dante's Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Francis Cary), the "Inferno" (or "Hell") begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, "halfway along our life's path". Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblical life expectancy of 70, lost in a dark wood, assailed... read more »
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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns... read more »
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Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
Called the most widely-read English novel of the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence’s largely autobiographical Sons and Lovers tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily... read more »
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The Trial by Franz Kafka
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that... read more »
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Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
At once endlessly facetious and highly serious, Sterne's great comic novel contains some of the best-known and best-loved characters in English literature--including Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, and Dr. Slop--and boasts one of the most innovative and whimsical narrative styles in all... read more »
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The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and be among people. Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna... read more »
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Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
Pere Goriot is the tragic story of a father whose obsessive love for his two daughters leads to his financial and personal ruin. Interwoven with this theme is that of the impoverished young aristocrat, Rastignac, come to Paris from the provinces to make his fortune, who befriends Goriot and... read more »
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels. Created from two short stories, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street and the unfinished The Prime Minister, the novel's... read more »
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Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
An extremely political book, Demons is a testimonial of life in Imperial Russia in the late 19th century. As the revolutionary democrats begin to rise in Russia, different ideologies begin to collide. Dostoyevsky casts a critical eye on both the radical idealists, portraying their ideas and... read more »
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Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
'I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass.' So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the... read more »
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A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's classic play about the struggle between independence and security still resonates with readers and audience members today. Often hailed as an early feminist work, the story of Nora and Torvald rises above simple gender issues to ask the bigger question: 'To what extent have we sacrificed... read more »
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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
It is 1984. The world is in a state of perpetual war and Big Brother sees and controls all. Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party and propaganda-writer at the Ministry of Truth, is keeping a journal he should not be keeping and falling in love with Julia, a woman he should not be seeing... read more »
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The Red and the Black by Stendhal
A landmark in the development of psychological realism, Stendhal's masterpiece chronicles a young man's struggles with the dualities of his nature. Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces whose imagination is afire with Napoleonic ideals, sets off to make his fortune in Parisian society... read more »
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Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
A stranger arrives in a Russian backwater community with a bizarre proposition for the local landowners: cash for their 'dead souls,' the serfs who have died in their service. A comic masterpiece. Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere... read more »
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Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in... read more »
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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. In a perfectly crafted story, which won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge... read more »
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The Captive by Marcel Proust
In The Captive, Proust's narrator describes living in his mother's Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. The Prisoner (also translated as The Captive) is the first volume of the section within In Search of Lost Time known as the Albertine novel... read more »
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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust
When publiched, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann's Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to... read more »
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Time Regained by Marcel Proust
The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princesse de... read more »
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To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Set in the summer home of an English family, the novel unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character's stream of consciousness, recalling childhood emotions and highlights of adult relationships. Shifts occur even mid-sentence, and in some sense they resemble the rotating beam of the... read more »
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The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov
During the last ten years of his life, Anton Chekhov penned his great plays, spent time treating the sick, and wrote a small number of stories that are considered his masterpieces. The eleven stories collected here-The Lady with the Little Dog, The House with the Mezzanine, My Life, Peasants, A... read more »
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Hunger by Knut Hamsun
A must-read for fans of modernist literature, Hunger is a literary tour de force that was influenced equally by Dostoyevsky and Zola but made new by author Knut Hamsun's unique creative approach. The novel details the descent into near-starvation of a young intellectual and the downward spiral of... read more »
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The Iliad of Homer by Alexander Pope
Pope had been fascinated by Homer since childhood and in 1713 announced his plans to publish a translation of the Iliad. The work would be available by subscription, with one volume appearing every year over the course of six years. Pope secured a revolutionary deal with the publisher Bernard... read more »
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The Sweet Cheat Gone by Marcel Proust
Albertine has finally escaped her 'imprisonment' from Marcel's Paris apartment... Not only is Marcel quite unprepared for the effect her flight has on him, but also soon he is devastated by news of an even more irreversible loss. read more »
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Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Hamlet is the story of the Prince of Denmark who learns of the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, Claudius. Claudius murders Hamlet's father, his own brother, to take the throne of Denmark and to marry Hamlet's widowed mother. Hamlet is sunk into a state of great despair as a result... read more »
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Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowledge, it became the life's work of Germany's greatest poet, Goethe. Beginning with an intriguing wager between God and Satan, it charts the life of a deeply flawed individual, his struggle against the nihilism of his... read more »
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Othello by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage that begins with fascination (between the exotic Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona), with elopement, and with intense mutual devotion and that ends precipitately with jealous rage and violent deaths. He sets this story in the romantic... read more »
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King Lear by William Shakespeare
King Lear, one of Shakespeare's darkest and most savage plays, tells the story of the foolish and Job-like Lear, who divides his kingdom, as he does his affections, according to vanity and whim. Lear’s failure as a father engulfs himself and his world in turmoil and tragedy. read more »
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The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, Le Côté de Guermantes opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons... read more »
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The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the... read more »
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Don Quixote, Part 1 by Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances, that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray – he tilts at... read more »