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50 Books that Best Defined the 20th Century

This list is the result of a reader's poll by the Guardian Unlimited to select the top 50 books that best defined the 20th century. See 1984 is the definitive book of the 20th century to read about the book that came out on top of the poll.


Books
  • Architecture
  • Art
  • Biography
  • Business
  • Children
  • Comics
  • Computers
  • Cooking
  • Current Events
  • Drama
  • Entertainment
  • Family and Parents
  • Fashion
  • Fiction
  • Film
  • Gay and Lesbian
  • Health, Body and Mind
  • History
  • Home and Garden
  • Horror
  • Internet
  • Investing
  • Law
  • Literature
  • Medicine
  • Music
  • Mystery and Thrillers
  • Nature and Outdoors
  • Nonfiction
  • Performing Arts
  • Philosophy
  • Photography
  • Poetry
  • Politics
  • Professional
  • Reference and Languages
  • Religion
  • Romance
  • Science
  • SciFi and Fantasy
  • Sports
  • Teens
  • Travel
  • Women's Studies

All Book Lists
ALA Outstanding Books for the College Bound Book Lists
Arts and Humanities 2009

History 2004

History and Culture 2009

Humanities 2004

Literature and Language Arts 2004

Literature and Language Arts 2009

Science and Technology 2004

Science and Technology 2009

Social Sciences 2004

Banned Book Lists
ALA The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2007

Banned and Challanged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

Books Challenged or Banned in 2004-2005

The Most Frequently Banned Books in the 1990's

Baseball Book Lists
Baseball Book Survey - Biography

Baseball Book Survey - History

Favorite Baseball Novels

Girls can play baseball too.

Major League Baseball Books

New York Times Baseball Reading List

Peanuts, Cracker Jack and ... Baseball Books?

Rob Neyer Essential Baseball Library

Gay and Lesbian Book Lists
Rainbow List 2008

Rainbow List 2009

Guardian Top 10 Book Lists
Andy Cave's top 10 books on Alpinism

Catherine Sampson's top 10 books on Beijing

Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns

Danny Fingeroth's top 10 graphic novels

Freya North's top 10 romps and romances

Howard Jacobson's top 10 novels of sexual jealousy

James Hopkin's top 10 Polish books

Lee Rourke's top 10 books about boredom

Romesh Gunesekera's top 10 island books

Sarah Anderson's top 10 books about wilderness

Suzanne Munshower's top 10 books about the Berlin Wall

Tim Harford's top 10 undercover economics books

Wesley Stace's top 10 books about children aimed at adults

Literature Book Lists
50 Books that Best Defined the 20th Century

The 50 Books Most Worth Talking About

Time Magazine 100 Best Novels

National Public Radio Books Book Lists
NPR All Things Considered 2004

NPR All Things Considered 2005

NPR All Things Considered 2006

NPR All Things Considered 2007

NPR Fresh Air 2004

NPR Fresh Air 2005

NPR Fresh Air 2006

NPR Fresh Air 2007

NPR Morning Edition 2004

NPR Morning Edition 2005

NPR Morning Edition 2006

NPR Morning Edition 2007

NPR Talk of the Nation 2004

NPR Talk of the Nation 2006

NPR Talk of the Nation 2007

New York Times Best Books Book Lists
The 10 Best Books of 2000

The 10 Best Books of 2004

The 10 Best Books of 2005

The 10 Best Books of 2006

The 10 Best Books of 2008

The 11 Best Books of 1997

The 11 Best Books of 1998

The 11 Best Books of 1999

The 7 Best Books of 2002

The 9 Best Books of 2001

The 9 Best Books of 2003

New York Times Notable Books Book Lists
NYT Fiction and Poetry 2005

NYT Fiction and Poetry 2006

NYT Fiction and Poetry 2007

NYT Fiction and Poetry 2008

NYT Non-fiction 2004

NYT Non-fiction 2005

NYT Non-fiction 2006

NYT Non-fiction 2007

NYT Non-fiction 2008

Newsweek Five Most Important Books Book Lists
Alex Ross's Five Most Important Books

Cornel West's 5 most import books

Steven Pinker's 5 most important books

Non-fiction Book Lists
Andrew Ellson Picks Six Books on Cash Crashes

Politics Book Lists
5 Best Political Convention Books by Jeff Greenfield

Progressive Book Lists
Read, Then Act - Ralph Nader recommends 10 Muckraking Books

The Economist Best Books Book Lists
Best Books of 2008 in Biography

Best Books of 2008 in Culture and Digressions

Best Books of 2008 in Economics and Business

Best Books of 2008 in Fiction and Memoirs

Best Books of 2008 in History

Best Books of 2008 in Politics and Current Affairs

Best Books of 2008 in Science and Technology

Wall Street Journal Top 5 Book Lists
Andrew Klavan's 5 best psychological crime novels

Anthony Rudel's Best Books About the Golden Age of Radio

Damian Thompson's 5 books that emphatically debunk pseudohistory and spurious 'knowledge'

Elvin T. Lim's 5 Books on Presidential Rhetoric

Frederic Spotts 5 essential books about France under Nazi Occupation

Jeremy Schaap's 5 best books on the Olympics

Jerome Groopman's best books about doctors and patients

Peter Conn's 5 Books From the Great Depression

R.A. Scotti chooses books about nefarious art-world doings

Tina Brown's Books on Reputation
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1990's
Fever Pitch
Nick Hornby Riverhead Trade

This is a book about identity, belonging, obsession; about afternoons in the driving rain and bitter cold and glorious, unforgettable goals; getting your head read in Hampstead and punched at Highbury; the dazzling skills of the gods of football and leaving your girlfriend lying fainted on the terraces because Arsenal are about to score. It's about the moments of ecstasy in one man's life. And his pain. And it's about the only true question there is: Which comes first, Football or Life?
list Price: $15.00 our price: $7.00
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1990's
Bridget Jones's Diary
Helen Fielding Penguin (Non-Classics)

Bridget Jones's Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of a thirty-something Singleton on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between the joys of Singleton fun, and the fear of dying alone and being found three weeks later half eaten by an Alsatian; tortured by Smug Married friends asking, "How's your love life" with lascivious, yet patronizing leers, Bridget resolves to reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible ...
list Price: $15.00 our price: $0.95
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1990's
No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
Naomi Klein Picador

With a new Afterword to the 2002 edition. No Logo employs journalistic savvy and personal testament to detail the insidious practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing—and the powerful potential of a growing activist sect that will surely alter the course of the 21st century. First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement.

As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers ...
list Price: $16.00 our price: $5.95
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1990's
The Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi Penguin (Non-Classics)

A love story for at least two generstions, a high-spirited comedy of sexual manners and social turmoil, The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the most enchanting, provocative, and original books to appear in years. "A wickedly funny novel that's at once a traditional comedy of manners and a scathing satire on race relations in Britain."--The New York Times.
list Price: $15.00 our price: $6.95
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1990's
Birthday Letters: Poems
Ted Hughes Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.

The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes ...
list Price: $15.00 our price: $5.95
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1980's
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking Bantam

A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, was a landmark volume in science writing and in world-wide acclaim and popularity, with more than 9 million copies in print globally. The original edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the ensuing years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic world--observations that have confirmed many of Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book.

Now a decade later, this edition updates the chapters throughout ...

list Price: $18.00 our price: $10.82
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1980's
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie Penguin (Non-Classics)

The author of The Stananic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people--a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy. "Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction."--The Philadelphia Inquirer.
list Price: $15.00 our price: $8.96
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1980's
Money
Martin Amis Penguin (Non-Classics)

The story of John Self and his insatiable appetite for money, alcohol, drugs, porn and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, it is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money and the disasters it can precipitate.
list Price: $15.00 our price: $6.90
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1980's
Beloved
Toni Morrison Vintage

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.
list Price: $15.00 our price: $7.45
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1980's
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe Dial Press Trade Paperback

Tom Wolfe’s modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all — a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress.

Suddenly, one wrong turn makes it all go wrong, and Sherman spirals downward in a sudden fall from grace that sucks him into the ravenous heart of a New York City gone mad during the go-go, racially turbulent, socially hilarious 1980s.
list Price: $16.00 our price: $8.75
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