They Are Giving Away 1 Million Books. The 100 Best Books of All TIME

Today the Bard died and today has been christened World Book Day. In a vaguely related but unrelated event today has also been named World Book Night and they are giving away 1 million books in England tonight. The supporters of this event include Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers and J.K. Rowling. 20,000 volunteers would give away 25 chosen titles to 1 million people at random, on streets, pubs, gardens, wherever. Coincidentally, one wonders if the books given belong to the supporters of the program. Smirk!

Meanwhile following are the 100 books of all TIME. The compilation is by TIME magazine and these are what they think are the best books to be published in the span of their existence. Only two Indian origin writers feature: Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul (that is if he can be called an Indian origin). Sadly, I have only read 19 of them, or, 20 per cent to be exact. A lot more reading to do in the coming days. Libraries, here I come.

100 Best Books of All Time (I have only given names of authors of books I know about. For the full list with author names, go here.)

1	The Adventures of Augie March	Saul Bellow
2	All the King's Men
3	American Pastoral
4	An American Tragedy
5	Animal Farm	George Orwell
6	Appointment in Samarra
7	Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
8	The Assistant
9	At Swim-Two-Birds
10	Atonement
11	Beloved	Toni Morrison
12	The Berlin Stories
13	The Big Sleep
14	The Blind Assassin
15	Blood Meridian
16	Brideshead Revisited
17	The Bridge of San Luis Rey
18	Call It Sleep
19	Catch-22
20	The Catcher in the Rye	J.D.Salinger
21	A Clockwork Orange
22	The Confessions of Nat Turner
23	The Corrections
24	The Crying of Lot 49
25	A Dance to the Music of Time
26	The Day of the Locust
27	Death Comes for the Archbishop
28	A Death in the Family
29	The Death of the Heart
30	Deliverance
31	Dog Soldiers
32	Falconer
33	The French Lieutenant's Woman
34	The Golden Notebook
35	Go Tell it on the Mountain
36	Gone With the Wind	Margaret Michelle
37	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
38	Gravity's Rainbow
39	The Great Gatsby	Scott Fitzgerald
40	A Handful of Dust
41	The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
42	The Heart of the Matter
43	Herzog	Saul Bellow
44	Housekeeping
45	A House for Mr. Biswas	V.S.Naipaul
46	I, Claudius
47	Infinite Jest
48	Invisible Man
49	Light in August
50	The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
51	Lolita	Vladimir Nabakov
52	Lord of the Flies
53	The Lord of the Rings	William Golding
54	The Moviegoer
55	Loving
56	Lucky Jim
57	The Man Who Loved Children
58	Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie
59	Money
60	Mrs. Dalloway
61	Naked Lunch
62	Native Son
63	Neuromancer
64	Never Let Me Go
65	1984	George Orwell
66	On the Road	Jack Kerouac
67	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
68	The Painted Bird
69	Pale Fire
70	A Passage to India	E.M.Forster
71	Play It As It Lays
72	Portnoy's Complaint
73	Possession
74	The Power and the Glory
75	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
76	Rabbit, Run	John Updike
77	Ragtime
78	The Recognitions
79	Red Harvest
80	Revolutionary Road
81	The Sheltering Sky
82	Slaughterhouse Five
83	Snow Crash
84	The Sot-Weed Factor
85	The Sound and the Fury
86	The Sportswriter
87	The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
88	The Sun Also Rises	Ernst Hemmingway
89	Their Eyes Were Watching God
90	Things Fall Apart
91	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
92	To the Lighthouse
93	Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller
94	Ubik
95	Under the Net
96	Under the Volcano
97	Watchmen
98	White Noise
99	White Teeth
100	Wide Sargasso Sea

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