List :: Books of the Century by Waterstone

• 

  #51

  Dune

  by Frank Herbert

  (16 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 87

  214 points

  "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. . . . from "Manual of Muad'dib" by the Princess IrulanIn the week before their departure to Arakis, when all..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #52

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  by John Irving

  (8 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 53

  311 points

  "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #53

  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

  by Patrick Suskind

  (11 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 269

  78 points

  "In eighteenth century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #54

  Doctor Zhivago

  by Boris Pasternak

  (6 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 148

  133 points

  "On they went, singing "Rest Eternal," and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #55

  Gormenghast

  by Mervyn Peake

  (2 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 347

  63 points

  "Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #56

  Cider with Rosie

  by Laurie Lee

  (3 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 302

  71 points

  "I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #57

  The Bell Jar

  by Sylvia Plath

  (7 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 137

  141 points

  "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #58

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  by Margaret Atwood

  (14 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 50

  316 points

  "We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #59

  Testament of Youth

  by Vera Brittain

  (1 Review)

  Overall Rank: 436

  42 points

  "When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #60

  The Magus

  by John Fowles

  (4 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 251

  83 points

  "I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It