The Globe and Mail 50 Greatest Books, in chronological order

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any quibbles with my ordering.  I’ve tried to order based on when each text was first available in what we would think of as its finished or canonical form.  As you might expect, the second number before each title refers to the order in which the books were revealed in the Globe; you can view the list in that order here.

  1. 20) The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
  2. 27) The Histories, Herodotus
  3. 35) The Theban Trilogy, Sophocles
  4. 5) The Republic, Plato
  5. 36) The Mahabharata
  6. 9) The Confessions, St. Augustine
  7. 24) The Koran [sic]
  8. 48) The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
  9. 4) The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
  10. 46) The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
  11. 10) The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
  12. 39) Essays, Michel de Montaigne
  13. 17) King Lear, William Shakespeare
  14. 31) The King James Bible
  15. 6) Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
  16. 34) Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
  17. 32) Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton
  18. 15) Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
  19. 42) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
  20. 38) The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  21. 49) Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot
  22. 13) The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
  23. 18) The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
  24. 45) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
  25. 19) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  26. 40) Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  27. 28) Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  28. 29) Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  29. 3) On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
  30. 25) Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
  31. 37) Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
  32. 44) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  33. 12) Middlemarch, George Eliot
  34. 21) The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  35. 50) The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
  36. 1) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  37. 8) Das Kapital, Karl Marx
  38. 14) The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
  39. 43) Anton Chekhov’s Stories
  40. 7) Ulysses, James Joyce
  41. 30) The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka
  42. 11) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  43. 2) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
  44. 33) The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
  45. 26) Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
  46. 47) Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
  47. 23) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  48. 22) Collected Poems, 1909-1962, T. S. Eliot
  49. 41) Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
  50. 16) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

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