100 books that changed the world
100 books that changed the world
It is difficult to find a person in the world who has not heard the story. Everyone has more or less heard and read the story. But there are some stories that have changed the world radically. Those stories are not limited to stories. People learn from stories, change themselves, help change the world. I will discuss about 100 such stories today.
The stories were not chosen by me or by any one person. Experts have selected these stories. In 2018, the BBC selected stories with information from 108 writers, academics, journalists, critics and translators from 35 countries. Actually by story we are talking about the story of the book. It can be a novel, play, poem or folk tale. Everything has a story. Experts have selected 100 such stories from 33 languages.
Homer's Odyssey tops this list. There are also 19th century novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Frankenstein. Two of the top 5 stories were written by women authors. In all, 23 of the top 100 authors are women. Top popular authors include popular writers like Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Kafka. Let's see the list of top 100 story books in history.
Book Name - Author - Period
1. The Odyssey - Homer (8th century BC)
2. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
3. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1818)
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (1949)
5. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (1958)
6. One Thousand and One Nights - various authors (8th-18th century)
7. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes (1605-1615)
8. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (1603)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
10. Iliad - Homer (8th century BC)
11. Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)
12. The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri (1308-1320)
13. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare (1597)
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh - author unknown (22nd-10th century BC)
15. Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (1997-2007)
16. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (1985)
17. Ulysses - James Joyce (1922)
18. Animal Farm - George Orwell (1945)
19. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (1847)
20. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (1856)
21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong (1321-1323)
22. Journey to the West - Wu Cheng'en (circa 1592)
23. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
24. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (1813)
25. Water Margin - Shi Nai'an (1589)
26. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (1865-1867)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (1960)
28. Wide Sargasso Sea - Gene Rice (1966)
29. Aesop's Fables (ca. 620 to 560 BC)
30. Candide - Voltaire (1759)
31. Medea - Euripides (431 BC)
32. Mahabharata - Vyasadeva (4th century BC)
33. King Lear - William Shakespeare (1608)
34. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu (before 1021)
35. The Sorrow of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
36. The Trial - Franz Kafka (1925)
37. Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
38. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (1847)
39. The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (1952)
40. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville (1851)
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
42. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)
43. The True Story of Ah Qi - Lu Sun (1921-22)
44. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (1865)
45. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (1873-1877)
46. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (1899)
47. Monkey Grip - Helen Garner (1977)
48. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (1925)
49. Oedipus the King - Sophocles (429 BC)
50. The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (1915)
51. The Oresteia - Aeschylus (5th century BC)
52. Cinderella (name and date unknown)
53. Howl - Allen Ginsberg (1956)
54. La Miserable - Victor Hugo (1862)
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot (1871-72)
56. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo (1955)
57. The Butterfly Lovers (Folktale)
58. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer (1387)
59. Panchatantra - Vishnu Sharma (c. 300 BC)
60. The Postimus Memories of Brass Cubas - Joaquim Maria Machado de Asis (1881)
61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark (1961)
62. The Ragged-trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressel (1914)
63. Song of Lovino - Okot P'Beats (1966)
64. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing (1962)
65. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (1981)
66. Nervous Condition - Tsitsi Dangarembaga (1988)
67. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
68. The Master of Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
69. Ramayana - Valmiki (11th century BC)
70. Antigone - Sophicles (441 BC)
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker (1897)
72. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
73. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (1843)
74. America - Raul Otero Reiche (1980)
75. Before the Law - Franz Kafka (1915)
76. Children of Gebeloi - Nagib Mahfouz (1967)
77. Il canzonier - Petrarch (1374)
78. Kebra Nagast - various authors (1322 AD)
79. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (1868-69)
80. Metamorphosis - Ovid (8th century AD)
81. Omeros - Derek Walcott (1990)
82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
83. Orlando - Virginia Woolf (1928)
84. Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal Australian Tale)
85. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yeats (1961)
86. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe (1719)
87. Song of Myself - Walt Whitman (1855)
88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (1884)
89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (1876)
90. The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges (1945)
91. The Eloquent Patient - Ancient Egyptian Folktale (c. 2000 BC)
92. The Emperor's New Clothes - Hans Christian Andersen (1837)
93. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair (1906)
94. The Khamriyat - Abu Nuwas (8th–9th century)
95. The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth (1932)
96. The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
97. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie (1988)
98. The Secret History - Donna Tartt (1992)
99. The Snowy Day - Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
100. Toba Tek Singh - Sadat Hasan Manto (1955)