More books

It turns out there was a US list of favorite novels done by TIME, but I thought I'd post the favorite books of France and Germany here, because, weirdly, I've actually read a few of them (the bolded ones) and because the French seem so well read! :) ...

Big Read (German)

1 The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
2 The Bible
3 The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
4 Perfume by Patrick Süskind
5 The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6 Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
7 The Physician by Noah Gordon
8 The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
9 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling
10 Pope Joan by Donna Cross
11 Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
12 Outlander a.k.a. Cross Stitch by Diana Gabaldon
13 The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
14 The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
15 Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
16 The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
17 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
18 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
19 Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
20 Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
21 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
22 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
23 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
24 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
25 The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
26 The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

1 The Stranger - Albert Camus
2 In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) - Marcel Proust
3 The Trial - Franz Kafka
4 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5 Man's Fate - André Malraux
6 Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline
7 The Grapes of Wrath -John Steinbeck
8 For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
9 Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier
10 Froth on the Daydream - Boris Vian
11 The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir
12 Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
13 Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre
14 The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
15 The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16 Paroles - Jacques Prévert
17 Alcools - Guillaume Apollinaire
18 The Blue Lotus - Hergé
19 The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
20 Tristes Tropiques - Claude Lévi-Strauss
21 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
22 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
23 Asterix the Gaul - René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
24 The Bald Soprano - Eugène Ionesco
25 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality -Sigmund Freud
26 The Abyss - Marguerite Yourcenar
27 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
28 Ulysses - James Joyce
29 The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
30 The Counterfeiters - André Gide
31 The Horseman on the Roof - Jean Giono
32 Belle du Seigneur - Albert Cohen
33 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
34 The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
35 Thérèse Desqueyroux - François Mauriac
36 Zazie in the Metro - Raymond Queneau
37 Confusion of Feelings - Stefan Zweig
38 Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
39 Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
40 The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
41 Bonjour Tristesse - Françoise Sagan
42 Le Silence de la mer - Vercors
43 Life: A User's Manual - Georges Perec
44 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
45 Under the Sun of Satan - Georges Bernanos
46 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
47 The Joke - Milan Kundera
48 A Ghost at Noon - Alberto Moravia
49 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
50 Nadja - André Breton
51 Aurelien - Louis Aragon
52 The Satin Slipper - Paul Claudel
53 Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello
54 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui - Bertolt Brecht
55 Friday - Michel Tournier
56 The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
57 Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi
58 The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
59 Les Vrilles de la vigne - Colette
60 Capital of Pain - Paul Éluard
61 Martin Eden - Jack London
62 Ballad of the Salt Sea - Hugo Pratt
63 Writing Degree Zero - Roland Barthes
64 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll
65 The Opposing Shore - Julien Gracq
66 The Order of Things - Michel Foucault
67 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
68 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils - Selma Lagerlöf
69 A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
70 The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
71 The Ravishing of Lol Stein - Marguerite Duras
72 The Interrogation - J. M. G. Le Clézio
73 Tropisms - Nathalie Sarraute
74 Journal, 1887–1910 - Jules Renard
75 Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
76 Écrits - Jacques Lacan
77 The Theatre and its Double - Antonin Artaud
78 Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos
79 Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
80 Moravagine - Blaise Cendrars
81 The General of the Dead Army - Ismail Kadare
82 Sophie's Choice - William Styron
83 Gypsy Ballads - Federico García Lorca
84 The Strange Case of Peter the Lett - Georges Simenon
85 Our Lady of the Flowers - Jean Genet
86 The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
88 The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
89 No Orchids For Miss Blandish - James Hadley Chase
90 Blake and Mortimer - Edgar P. Jacobs
91 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge - Rainer Maria Rilke
92 Second Thoughts - Michel Butor
93 The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt
94 The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
95 The Rosy Crucifixion - Henry Miller
96 The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
97 Amers - Saint-John Perse
98 Gaston 0 André Franquin
99 Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
100 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie