100 books that changed the world

A survey was conducted by ‘BBC Culture’ among writers and book lovers from 35 countries of the world, where it was asked which books have spread from generation to generation, from one continent to another, and have changed society.

108 writers, educators, journalists, and translators each selected 5 books that have changed the world. Among the books in 33 languages ​​of the world, those who voted included people from Uganda to Pakistan, from Colombia to China, of which only 51 percent were native English speakers.

60 percent of these voters were women and 40 percent were men. William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf each had 3 books on the list.

Let’s see which books changed the world:

1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th century BC)

2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)

3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)

4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)

5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)

6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors)

7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605–1615)

8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)

9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)

10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th century BC)

11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)

12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308–1320)

13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597)

14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown)

15. Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling, 1997–2007)

16. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)

17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)

18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)

19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)

21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321–1323)

22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng’an, c. 1592)

23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866)

24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)

25. Water Margin (Shi Nai’an, 1589)

26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865–1867)

27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)

29. Aesop’s Fables (Aesop)

30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)

31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)

32. Mahabharata (Vedavyas, 4th century BC)

33. King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1608)

34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)

35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774)

36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)

37. Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust, 1913–1927)

38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)

39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)

40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)

41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)

42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)

43. The True Story of Ah Qi (Lu Tsun, 1921–1922)

44. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)

45 Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873–1877)

46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)

47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)

48. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)

49. Oedipus the King (Sophocles, 429 BC)

50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)

51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th century BC)

52. Cinderella (author unknown, date unknown)

53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)

54. Le Miserable (Victor Hugo, 1862)

55. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871–1872)

56. Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)

57. The Butterfly Lovers (folktale)

58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)

59. Panchatantra (Vishnu Sharma, c. 300 BC)

60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim María Machado de Asís, 1881)

61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)

62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressel, 1914)

63. Song of Lawino (Okot P’Bitek, 1966)

64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)

65. Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)

66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangaremboga, 1988)

67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)

68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)

69. Ramayana (Valmiki, 11th century BC)

70. Antigone (Sophocles)

71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)

72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969)

73. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)

74. America (Raul Otero Reich, 1980)

75. Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)

76 Children of Gabelawi (Naguib Mahfouz, 1967)

77. Il Canzoniere (Petrarch, 1374)

78. Kebra Nagast (Various authors, 1322)

79. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868–1869)

80. Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8)

81. Omeros (Derek Walcott, 1990)

82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962)

83. Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)

84. Rainbow Serpent (Australian story)

85. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yeats, 1961)

86. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)

87. Song of Myself (Walt Whitman, 1855)

88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)

89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)

90. The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges, 1945)

91. The Eloquent Pageant (Ancient Egyptian folktale)

92. The Emperor’s New Clothes (Hans Christian Anderson, 1837)

93. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906)

94. The Khamriyat (Abu Nuwas)

95. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth, 1932)

96. The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)

97. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988)

98. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)

99. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Cates, 1962)

100. Toba Tek Singh (Sadat Hasan Manto, 1955)

References: [BBC Culture]

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