# Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century: the top 50

Camus's The Stranger on top, ahead of In Search of Lost Time and The Trial: the first 50 of the "100 books of the century", the ranking drawn up in 1999 by Fnac and Le Monde from the votes of 17,000 readers, with author, year and original language.

- 21 votes · 50 items
- Jun 1, 2024 · vinyle_sudiste
- https://even.best/en/l/5128/le-monde-s-100-books-of-the-century-the-top-50

## Top 50

1. **The Stranger** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Albert Camus, 1942 (French).
2. **For Whom the Bell Tolls** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Ernest Hemingway, 1940 (English).
3. **In Search of Lost Time** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Marcel Proust, 1913–27 (French).
4. **The Little Prince** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943 (French).
5. **Journey to the End of the Night** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932 (French).
6. **The Grapes of Wrath** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — John Steinbeck, 1939 (English).
7. **Le Grand Meaulnes** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Alain-Fournier, 1913 (French).
8. **Froth on the Daydream** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Boris Vian, 1947 (French).
9. **The Second Sex** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 (French).
10. **Paroles** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Jacques Prévert, 1946 (French).
11. **Tristes Tropiques** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955 (French).
12. **Nineteen Eighty-Four** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — George Orwell, 1949 (English).
13. **Zazie in the Metro** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Raymond Queneau, 1959 (French).
14. **Under the Sun of Satan** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Georges Bernanos, 1926 (French).
15. **The Great Gatsby** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 (English).
16. **Contempt** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Alberto Moravia, 1954 (Italian).
17. **Waiting for Godot** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Samuel Beckett, 1952 (French).
18. **The Trial** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Franz Kafka, 1925 (German).
19. **Man's Fate** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — André Malraux, 1933 (French).
20. **Being and Nothingness** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943 (French).
21. **The Name of the Rose** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Umberto Eco, 1980 (Italian).
22. **The Gulag Archipelago** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973 (Russian).
23. **Alcools** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913 (French).
24. **The Blue Lotus** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Hergé, 1936 (French).
25. **The Diary of a Young Girl** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Anne Frank, 1947 (Dutch).
26. **Brave New World** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Aldous Huxley, 1932 (English).
27. **Asterix the Gaul** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, 1959 (French).
28. **The Bald Soprano** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Eugène Ionesco, 1952 (French).
29. **Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Sigmund Freud, 1905 (German).
30. **The Abyss** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Marguerite Yourcenar, 1968 (French).
31. **Lolita** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Vladimir Nabokov, 1955 (English).
32. **Ulysses** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — James Joyce, 1922 (English).
33. **The Tartar Steppe** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Dino Buzzati, 1940 (Italian).
34. **The Counterfeiters** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — André Gide, 1925 (French).
35. **The Horseman on the Roof** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Jean Giono, 1951 (French).
36. **Belle du Seigneur** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Albert Cohen, 1968 (French).
37. **One Hundred Years of Solitude** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Gabriel García Márquez, 1967 (Spanish).
38. **The Sound and the Fury** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — William Faulkner, 1929 (English).
39. **Thérèse Desqueyroux** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — François Mauriac, 1927 (French).
40. **Confusion of Feelings** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Stefan Zweig, 1927 (German).
41. **Gone with the Wind** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Margaret Mitchell, 1936 (English).
42. **Lady Chatterley's Lover** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — D. H. Lawrence, 1928 (English).
43. **Bonjour Tristesse** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Françoise Sagan, 1954 (French).
44. **Le Silence de la mer** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Vercors, 1942 (French).
45. **Life: A User's Manual** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Georges Perec, 1978 (French).
46. **The Hound of the Baskervilles** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1901–02 (English).
47. **The Joke** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Milan Kundera, 1967 (Czech).
48. **The Murder of Roger Ackroyd** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Agatha Christie, 1926 (English).
49. **Nadja** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — André Breton, 1928 (French).
50. **The Magic Mountain** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — Thomas Mann, 1924 (German).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.