Ultimate Best Books
Ranked by points from the world's most prestigious book lists. How many have you read?
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
One night some twenty years ago, during a siege of mumps in our enormous family, my youngest sister, Franny, was moved, crib and all, into the ostensibly germ-free room I shared with my eldest brother, Seymour.At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I've ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first.
Wise Blood
Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
Men Without Women
Manuel Garcia climbed the stairs to Don Miguel Retana's office. (THE UNDEFEATED).
Henderson the Rain King
What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse and pretty soon they were too complicated.
A Bend in the River
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."
The Sorrows of Young Werther
I have diligently collected everything I have been able to discover concerning the story of poor Werther, and here present it to you in the knowledge that you will be grateful for it.On 30th October 1772, Legation Secretary Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem in Wetzlar hot and killed himself with a pistol borrowed from J. C. Kestner, a friend of Goethe. (Introduction)
Down and out in Paris and London
The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor.
The Counterfeiters
"The time has now come for me to hear a step in the passage," said Bernard to himself.
The Razor's Edge
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it.
🏆 Hall of Fame
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