Listmania!!!!

Paul Cranswick gets all the credit for this. Somehow he has me furiously making lists of all kinds , and I thought it might be helpful to post lists here in hopes of being able to find them. Right now we seem to be posting lists anywhere from 1800 to 2010, by year, or by decade......List away, my friends.

Too nice Lucy! Here is my list of my favourite book read from 1813 to 1899 unbroken:

1813 Guy Mannering Sir Walter Scott
1814 Mansfield Park Jane Austen
1815 Emma Jane Austen
1816 Old Mortality Sir Walter Scott
1817 Rob Roy Sir Walter Scott
1818 Frankenstein Mary Shelley
1819 Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott
1820 Melmoth the Wanderer Charles Maturin
1821 Kenilworth Sir Walter Scott
1822 Peveril of the Peak Sir Walter Scott
1823 The Pioneers James Fenimore Cooper
1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner James Hogg
1825 The Talisman Sir Walter Scott
1826 The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper
1827 The Mummy! Jane C Loudon
1828 Lucy Temple Susanna Rowson
1829 Les Chouans Honore de Balzac
1830 The Red and the Black Stendahl
1831 The Hunchback of Notre Dame Victor Hugo
1832 Eugene Aram Edward Bulwer Lytton
1833 Eugenie Grandet Honore de Balzac
1834 Helen Maria Edgeworth
1835 La Pere Goriot Honore de Balzac
1836 The Captain's Daughter Alexander Pushkin
1837 The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens
1838 Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
1839 Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens
1840 Jack Sheppard William Harrison Ainsworth
1841 The Old Curiosity Shop Charles Dickens
1842 The Black Sheep Honore de Balzac
1843 A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
1844 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
1845 The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
1846 Cousin Bette Honore de Balzac
1847 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
1848 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
1849 Shirley Charlotte Bronte
1850 David Copperfield Charles Dickens
1851 Moby Dick Herbert Melville
1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
1853 Bleak House Charles Dickens
1854 Hard Times Charles Dickens
1855 North and South Elizabeth Gaskell
1856 The Dead Secret Wilkie Collins
1857 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
1858 Doctor Thorne Anthony Trollope
1859 A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
1860 The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
1861 Great Expectations Charles Dickens
1862 Les Miserables Victor Hugo
1863 The Water Babies Charles Kingsley
1864 Notes from the Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky
1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
1866 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky
1867 The Gambler Fyodor Dostoevsky
1868 The Moonstone Wilkie Collins
1869 Lorna Doone RD Blackmore
1870 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne
1871 Middlemarch George Eliot
1872 Torrents of Spring Ivan Turgenev
1873 Around the World in 80 Days Jules Verne
1874 Far From the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy
1875 The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
1876 Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
1877 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
1878 Return of the Native Thomas Hardy
1879 The Egoist George Meredith
1880 Nana Emile Zola
1881 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
1882 The Prince and the Pauper Mark Twain
1883 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
1884 Zest for Life Emile Zola
1885 Germinal Emile Zola
1886 Kidnapped Robert Louis Stevenson
1887 Earth Emile Zola
1888 The Steppe Anton Chekov
1889 The Master of Ballantrae Robert Louis Stevenson
1890 La Bete Humaine Emile Zola
1891 Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
1892 The Debacle Emile Zola
1893 Catriona Robert Louis Stevenson
1894 Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling
1895 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau H.G. Wells
1897 Dracula Bram Stoker
1898 Moonfleet J. Meade Falkner
1899 Heart of Darkness Jospeh Conrad

And here is the same thing but covering the years 1900 to 2011.

1900 Love and Mr. Lewisham H.G. Wells
1901 Kim Rudyard Kipling
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan-Doyle
1903 The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
1904 The Napoleon of Notting Hill G.K. Chesterton
1905 The Scarlet Pimpernel Baroness Orzy
1906 The Man of Property John Galsworthy
1907 The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad
1908 The Magician W. Somerset Maugham
1909 Martin Eden Jack London
1910 Clayhanger Arnold Bennett
1911 Ethan Frome Edith Wharton
1912 Riders of the Purple Sage Zane Grey
1913 O'Pioneers Willa Cather
1914 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Robert Tressell
1915 The Thirty Nine Steps John Buchan
1916 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
1917 His Last Bow Arthur Conan-Doyle
1918 The Return of the Soldier Rebecca West
1919 The Moon and Sixpence W. Somerset Maugham
1920 Women in Love DH Lawrence
1921 Chrome Yellow Aldous Huxley
1922 The Waste Land T.S. Eliot
1923 The Inimitable Jeeves PG Wodehouse
1924 A Passage to India E.M. Forster
1925 The Trial Franz Kafka
1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Agatha Christie
1927 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
1928 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Remarque
1929 The Good Companions J.B. Priestley
1930 Cakes and Ale W. Somerset Maugham
1931 The Good Earth Pearl Buck
1932 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons
1933 Man's Fate Andre Malraux
1934 I, Claudius Robert Graves
1935 Swami and Friends R.K. Narayan
1936 In Dubious Battle John Steinbeck
1937 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
1938 Brighton Rock Graham Greene
1939 How Green Was My Valley Richard Llewllyn
1940 Fame is the Spur Howard Spring
1941 The Keys to the Kingdom AJ Cronin
1942 The Stranger Albert Camus
1943 Ministry of Fear Graham Greene
1944 The Razor's Edge W. Somerset Maugham
1945 Animal Farm George Orwell
1946 Bright Day J.B. Priestley
1947 The Plague Albert Camus
1948 The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene
1949 The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles
1950 A Town Like Alice Nevile Shute
1951 The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
1952 The Old Man and the Sea Ernset Hemmingway
1953 The Go-Between L.P. Hartley
1954 Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkein
1955 The Quiet American Graham Greene
1956 Palace Walk Naguib Mahfouz
1957 The Sandcastle Iris Murdoch
1958 Night Elie Wiesel
1959 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Alan Sillitoe
1960 To Kill a Mocking Bird Harper Lee
1961 A House for Mr. Biswas V.S. Naipaul
1962 Another Country James Baldwin
1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold John Le Carre
1964 Herzog Saul Bellow
1965 The Mandelbaum Gate Muriel Spark
1966 The Fixer Bernard Malamud
1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude Garbriel Garcia Marquez
1968 A Kestrel for a Knave Barry Hines
1969 The Hired Man Melvyn Bragg
1970 Fifth Business Robertson Davies
1971 The Drifters James Michener
1972 Watership Down Richard Adams
1973 The Honorary Consul Graham Greene
1974 The Silken Net Melvyn Bragg
1975 Ragtime E.L. Doctorow
1976 The Children of Dynmouth William Trevor
1977 Time to Murder and Create Lawrence Block
1978 Rumours of Rain Andre Brink
1979 Sophie's Choice William Styron
1980 Earthly Powers Anthony Burgess
1981 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
1982 The Sunne in Splendour Sharon Penman
1983 Shame Salman Rushdie
1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
1985 If Not Now, When? Primo Levi
1986 The Sportswriter Richard Ford
1987 The Colour of Blood Brian Moore
1988 Breathing Lessons Anne Tyler
1989 Restoration Rose Tremain
1990 The Innocent Ian McEwan
1991 The Redundancy of Courage Timothy Mo
1992 A Place of Greater Safety Hilary Mantel
1993 The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx
1994 Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernieres
1995 A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry
1996 Last Orders Graham Swift
1997 Jack Maggs Peter Carey
1998 The Last King of Scotland Giles Foden
1999 Ghostwritten David Mitchell
2000 White Teeth Zadie Smith
2001 The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafon
2002 Fingersmith Sarah Waters
2003 Brick Lane Monica Ali
2004 Birds Without Wings Louis de Bernieres
2005 A Long, Long Way Sebastian Barry
2006 Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2007 Tomorrow Graham Swift
2008 The Road Home Rose Tremain
2009 Little Stranger Sarah Waters
2010 Lyrics Alley Leila Aboulela
2011 Song of Achilles Madeline Miller

I will post up my favourites from 70's, 80's, 90's and noughties but first Lucy and others should take a turn!

Here's a start:
1901-1925
1901 Buddenbrooks
1902 The Four Feathers,* The Wings of the Dove
1903 The Ambassadors,* Call of the Wild
1904 Green Mansions,*The Golden Bowl
1905 Where Angels Fear to Tread,* The House of Mirth
1906 Forsyte Saga begins
1907 Hill of Dreams
1908 The Wind in the Willows,!!!!* Anne of Green Gables
1909 The Road to Oz (really any Oz book will do - this was otherwise a blah year for me)
1910 Howard’s End,* La Vagabonde
1911 Zuleika Dobson
1912 Death in Venice
1913 Les Recherches du Temps Perdu, sa commence!
1914 Tarzan of the Apes
1915 The Good Soldier, Metamorphosis, Of Human Bondage,* Herland
1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1917 Summer,* South Wind, Princess of Mars
1918 My Antonia
1919The Haunted Bookshop, Lad a Dog*
1920 The Age of Innocence, This Side of Paradise*
1921 Chrome Yellow
1922 Ulysses, the enormous room,* The Worm Ouroborous
1923 .......
1924 The Constant Nympth, A Passage to India,* The Magic Mountain
1925 Mrs Dalloway !!!!The Great Gatsby!!!!

1926-1950
1926 These Old Shades (The first Georgette Heyer!)
1927 To the Lighthouse,!!! The Bridge of the San Luis Rey, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and THE FIRST NANCY DREW, The Secret of the Old Mill
1928 Decline and Fall*, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Orlando
1929 A High Wind in Jamaica*, Berlin Alexanderplatz, All Quiet on the Western Front, Emil and the Detectives, The Last September
1930 Swallows and Amazons, Vile Bodies !!
1931 All Passion Spent
1932 Cold Comfort Farm, A Glastonbury Romance
1933 When Worlds Collide!!!
1934 After Worlds Collide*, Appointment in Samarra, Independent People, Mary Poppins
1935 The House in Paris
1936 South Riding (first Thirkell)
1937 The Hobbit !!!!!!!!! The Late George Apley, Their Eyes Were Watching God
1938 The Sword in the Stone
1939 The Day of the Locust, The Big Sleep
1940 The Man Who Loved Children, Native Son
1941 Storm, The Black Stallion
1942 Le Silence de la Mer, L’Etranger, The Man Who Loved Children !!
1943 Adam of the Road, Johnny Tremain, Two Serious Ladies
1944 The Razor’s Edge
1945 Pippi Longstocking, Stuart Little, Brideshead Revisited
1946 The Little White Horse !!!!!!!!!!, The Member of the Wedding, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
1947 La Peste, Under the Volcano, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Misty of Chincoteague
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll, I Capture the Castle
1949 The Door in the Wall, Earth Abides
1950 The Thirteen Clocks, Gormenghast

Very cool to have these here so we can compare. I am hopeless at choosing however, no discipline at all!

Ah, I see you put in a Jeeves for 1923. Jolly good idea, wot!

I struggled over Hound of B. for 1902 - I've read pretty much all of them one way or the other..... I was able to admit to myself that Ethan Frome did pretty much nothing for me compared to other Whartons. I think I'm going to try to put a star on the one in each year that somehow 'matters' the most to me. The stars for 1924 and 5 are kind of bogus as the Mann and Woolf are equally important to me. But I wrote my master's thesis on GG so I do know it upside down and backwards and I love Forster so much, overall.

The BOLD exclamation points are on books I have reread and reread and reread, books that really matter.

Too much, we love lists!
Here are the top books published from the years of my life.

2011 A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
2010 none read!
2009 The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2008 City of Thieves by David Benioff
2007 Bit of a Blur by Alex James
2006 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2005 The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
2004 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2003 We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
2002 The Contortionist's Handbook
2001 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
2000 Orchid Fever by Eric Hansen
1999 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
1998 Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
1997 London by Edward Rutherford
1996 Fall on your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
1995 A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
1994 River God by Wilbur Smith
1993 The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
1992 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
1991 Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
1990 Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
1989 Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esqivel
1988 The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
1987 Misery by Stephen King
1986 The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
1985 Davitas Harp by Chaim Potok
1984 The Bone People by Keri Hulme
1983 Pet Cemetery Stephen King
1982 An Ice Cream War by William Boyd
1981 Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magirian
1980 Congo by Michael Crichton
1979 Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews
1978 The World According to Garp by John Irving
1977 Players by Don Delillo
1976 Trinity by Leon Uris
1975 none read

Lucy- Fantastic idea! I have it starred. Every time, I see the thread I think of Lisztomania, the hit song by Phoenix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJDNw7o6so
It's a terrific song. You have to crank it.

Thanks Mark...... unleashing my wild side I guess......

-Ireadtherefore - I am so glad you loved Soul Mountain too. I hardly ever seem to find anyone who loved it.

This is my list! I am still working on the list before 1980...

% marks the years that I only had one book that I had read
** marks the years that I had more than 10 to chose from

2011** The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
2010** Room by Emma Donoghue
2009** The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2008** The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2007** Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
2006** Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
2005** Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling
2004** The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill
2003** (16) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
2002 Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides
2001** Bel Canto by Ann Patchett/ Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

2000 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
1999 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling
1998 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling
1997 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling
1996 Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
1995 Kiss the Girls by James Patterson
1994 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
1993 The Client by John Grisham
1992 She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
1991 Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

1990 Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell
1989 The Pillars of the Eart by Ken Follet
1988 The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
1987 Outbreak by Robin Cook
1986% It by Stephen King
1985 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garia Marquez
1984 Thinner by Stephen King *
1983 Christine by Stephen King
1982 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1981 Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

1980% Petals in the Wind VC Andrews
1979 Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews

Adding to the listmania, here's my list of yearly consecutive books:

A Century Plus of Books

1900: The Wonderful World of Oz by L. Frank Baum
1901: Kim by Rudyard Kipling
1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
1903: Betty Zane by Zane Grey
1904:
1905: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1906:
1907:
1908: Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
1909: Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery
1910: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1911: Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
1912: The Chronicles of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery
1913: Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
1914: Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
1915: Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery
1916: The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad by Thornton W. Burgess
1917: Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
1918: My Antonia by Willa Cather
1919: The Adventures of Ol’ Mistah Buzzard by Thornton W. Burgess

1920: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
1921: The Black Moth by Georgette Heyers
1922: The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
1923: Whose Body? By Dorothy Sayers
1924: So Big by Edna Ferber
1925: The Vanishing American by Zane Grey
1926: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy Sayers
1927: Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers
1928: The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
1929: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

1930: Cimarron by Edna Ferber
1931: The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
1932: The Devil’s Cub by Georgette Heyer
1933: Lost Horizon by James Hilton
1934: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
1935: The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
1936: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1937: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
1938: Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
1939: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

1940: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1941: Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes
1942: The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck
1943: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith
1944: Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
1945: Animal Farm by George Orwell
1946: The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby
1947: The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
1948: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
1949: The Way West by A.B. Guthrie, Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

1950: Jubilee Trail by Gwen Bristow
1951: From Here to Eternity by James Jones
1952: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1953: Battlecry by Leon Uris
1954: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
1955: The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
1956: Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
1957: On The Beach by Nevil Shute
1958: Exodus by Leon Uris
1959: Hawaii by James A. Michener

1960: To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
1961: Mila 18 by Leon Uris
1962: The Thin Red Line by James Jones
1963: The Collector by John Fowles
1964: Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
1965: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
1966: The Magus by John Fowles
1967: Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
1968: Judas, My Brother by Frank Yerby
1969: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

1970: Deliverance by James Dickey
1971: The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
1972: Watership Down by Richard Adams
1973: All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Heriot
1974: Centennial by James Mitchener
1975: Shogun by James Clavell
1976: Roots by Alex Haley, Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice
1977: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
1978: War & Remembrance by Herman Wouk
1979: Ghost Story by Peter Straub

1980: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel
1981: The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
1982: Master of the Moor by Ruth Rendell
1983: The Sunne In Splendor by Sharon Kay Penman
1984 The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
1985: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1986: The Autobiography of Henry VIII with Notes by His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George
1987: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
1988: Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake
1989: A Time To Kill by John Grisham

1990: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
1991: The Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
1992: A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton
1993: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
1994: The Alienist by Caleb Carr
1995: The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
1996: Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
1997: The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
1998: Stardust by Neil Gaiman
1999: In A Dry Season by Peter Robinson

2000: Sushi For Beginners by Marian Keyes
2001: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
2002: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
2003: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
2004: The Walking Dead Vol 1: Days Gone Bye
2005: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
2006: World War Z: A Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
2007: In the Woods by Tana French
2008: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2009: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2010: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
2011: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

What databases are you all drawing from to compile these lists??

Suz - I have three main points of reference:
First is my own database / reading record wherein I also record the year of original publication.
Second I use fantasticfiction.co.uk
Third I use wikipedia and type say '2011 in Literature' or '2011 novels'

Since I can't fill in for a full century, I'll just go with to the year of birth:

2011: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
2010: What I Eat by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Alusio
2009: Soulless by Gail Carriger
2008: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
2007: Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
2006: World War Z by Max Brooks
2005: I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak
2004: To Light a Candle by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory
2003: Stiff by Mary Roach
2002: Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
2001: The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
2000: Essential Spirituality by Roger Walsh

1999: Heir to the Shadows by Anne Bishop
1998: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
1997: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
1996: Callahan's Legacy by Spider Robinson
1995: Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks
1994: Storm Warning by Mercedes Lackey
1993: Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
1992: Sweet Liar by Jude Deveraux
1991: Jack the Bodiless by Julian May
1990: The Stand (Extended Version) by Stephen King

1989: To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl
1988: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1987: Daughter of the Empire by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts
1986: Callahan's Secret by Spider Robinson
1985: Uhura's Song by Janet Kagan
1984: Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
1983: The Non-born King by Julian May
1982: Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey
1981: The Many-Colored Land by Julian May
1980: Firestarter by Stephen King

1979: A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford
1978: The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey
1977: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
1976: Telempath by Spider Robinson
1975: Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
1974: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip
1973: Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
1972: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
1971: Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey
1970: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

1969: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
1968: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
1967: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
1966: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1965: Dune by Frank Herbert

Since I don't have good enough records myself from before I joined LT, I started an RSI thread asking for some help in getting at the data. It seems that just being able to sort our catalogues by original publication date might be the way to go. So, if anyone wants to lend their support there.... ;)

I LOVE LOVE the lists!!! It's like seeing all these old friends, and isn't it fascinating to watch both the evolution of an author and of.... I guess..... themes and obsessions of the past? The evolution of children's literature is also fascinating and of various genres.

Suz: I just bookmarked a wiki 'Category: Books: 1900' - using that you can find all the rest forward or backward. I can't seem to reference my own library here by date of publication, not reliably because I have so many editions that are reprints and don't reflect the original pub date, grrrr.

I'm realizing, because I am a maniac that I will have to have separate children and sf/fantasy lists.

OMG - this thread, which I have now starred, is going to be very dangerous for those of us with book-purchasing problems.......

great lists showing up here, and thorough

I am LOVING this!!!

OMG I'm being reminded that I once read and actually liked the VC Andrews books. I'd totally forgotten about them. I just know I'm going to make one of these lists. I just know it.

Here's a v. rough go at this; there are some years where I simply can't choose. Other years where the most memorable book for me probably has almost zero literary merit -- but it was more compelling reading than many "literary works" published then. This includes plays, poetry and non-fiction, as I don't tend to discriminate in my reading.

2012 Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
2011 The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje; The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern; Gillespie & I by Jane Harris
2010 Room by Emma Donoghue

2009 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2008 Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden; Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
2007 The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid; Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski
2006 The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid
2005 George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin; Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden; The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster; March by Geraldine Brooks; Medici Money by Tim Parks
2004 Occidentalism by Ian Buruma
2003 The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille
2002 Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis; The Siege by Helen Dunmore
2001 Atonement by Ian MacEwan; Back to the Front by Stephen O’Shea
2000 London, a Biography by Peter Ackroyd

1999 Timbuktu by Paul Auster; Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neal Postman
1998 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1997 From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple; The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
1996 Between East and West by Anne Applebaum; Last Orders by Graham Swift
1995 Divine Comedy by Elizabeth Pewsey, Slowness by Milan Kundera
1994 The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas
1993 Watermark by Joseph Brodsky
1992 Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! By Mordecai Richler; Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
1991 Regeneration by Pat Barker; A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
1990 No Talking After Lights by Angela Lambert

1989 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1988 Utz by Bruce Chatwin
1987 Enigma of Arrival – VS Naipaul
1986 The Autobiography of Henry VIII by Margaret George; Past Caring by Robert Goddard
1985 The World, the Flesh and the Devil by Reay Tannahill; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Marioi Vargas Llosa; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
1984 Thursday’s Children by Rumer Godden
1983 Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert
1982 Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys; the Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig (posthumous pub.)
1981 Conducted Tour by Bernard Levin, The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin; Among the Believers by VS Naipaul
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

1979 A Dry White Season by Andre Brink
1978 War & Remembrance by Herman Wouk; The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
1977 A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor; The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
1976 Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
1975 The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
1974 The Property of a Gentleman by Catherine Gaskin
1973 As We Are Now by May Sarton
1972 The Best & the Brightest by David Halberstam
1971 The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
1970 The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart; 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

1969 In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden
1968 The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard
1967 Flambards by K.M Peyton; Nicholas & Alexandra by Robert Masie
1966 A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
1965 The Millstone by Margaret Drabble; We Couldn’t Leave Dinah by Mary Treadgold
1964 This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstader
1963 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan; The Bell Jar by Sulvia Plath
1962 The Group by Mary McCarthy; The Spoilt City by Olivia Manning (Balkan Trilogy #2)
1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark; the Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
1960 The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Read Banks

1959 Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico
1958 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
1957 On the Beach by Nevil Shute
1956 Imperial Woman by Pearl Buck
1955 The Tontine by Thomas Costain
1954 Katherine by Anya Seton; the Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1952 Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert
1951 The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
1950 A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute

1949 In a Dark Wood Wandering by Hella Haasse
1948 The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey; The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen; The Hills of Varna by Geoffrey Trease
1947 The Plague by Albert Camus
1946 The Winslow Boy by Terence Rattigan
1945 The Black Rose by Thomas Costain
1944 The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
1943 The Fancy by Monica Dickens
1942 Embers by Sandor Marai
1941 Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain; Random Harvest by James Hilton
1940 Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease; Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler; Mariana by Monica Dickens

1939 Terre des Hommes - Saint Exupery
1938 Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
1937 Antigua, Penny Puce by Robert Graves
1936 Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
1935 Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
1934 I, Claudius by Robert Graves
1933 Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
1932 Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
1931 The Waves by Virginia Woolf
1930 Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

1929 A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
1928 Short Circuits by Stephen Leacock
1927 Meet Mr. Mulliner by PG Wodehouse
1926 The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery
1927 Therese Dequeyroux by Francois Mauriac
1926 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1924 The Three Hostages by John Buchan
1923 the Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
1922 Just William by Richmal Crompton
1921 Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery

1920 Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
1919 Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
1918 My Antonia by Willa Cather
1917 Under Fire by Henri Barbusse
1916 Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hemon
1915 The 39 Steps by John Buchan; The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
1914 Les Grands Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
1913 La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Proust
1912 Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
1911 Ladies Whose Bright Eyes by Ford Madox Ford

1910 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke
1909
1908 A Room With a View by EM Forster
1907 The Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service
1906 The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
1905 The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baronness Orczy
1904 The Napoleon of Notting Hill by GK Chesterton
1903
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
1901

You'll have to forgive the fact that some of the touchstones are buggered up. I can't change them, as in every single case, I'm offered a choice of the same six Harry Potter-related titles, regardless of what the title is, and I can't "force" them; nor do I have the patience to go back in and manually remove all the brackets I so carefully added....

ETA: And now I notice that despite the touchstones being visible on the right hand side of this page before I hit post/save, the links vanish when I post it. Oh well, so be it.

Wow! I love all the lists!

I'm way to indecisive to make my own, but reading other's is a lot of fun, not to mention dangerous to my tbr mountain.

>7 msf59: Mark - I was thinking the same thing. Lisztomania is one of my favorite go-to songs when I'm in the midst of a long drive and need help in the alertness department.

>20 Chatterbox: impressive list! Maybe the touchstones are on overload on this thread, mine didnt work either.

I'm making my own list but I'm not sure if I'll post it as it's very patchy. One thing I've noticed is that the childrens and teens classic literature really is enduring and is dominating my list. And these are books I read over and over again as a child in the 90's - really good stuff as it turns out!

I'm impressed that all of you can do this. I just can't even imagine the time it would take to go back and consider trying to figure out what my favorite book was published each year, especially considering that the copyrights on my books are often much later because they aren't the original editions. I know there are pages that are designed to help you figure out if a book is in the public domain or not that list the books by year, but those are massive because they include all books, not just the type we are typically including in our lists.

#23 "One thing I've noticed is that the childrens and teens classic literature really is enduring and is dominating my list." Lisa, me too.

#24 There's a Common Knowledge field for the Original Publication Date of each work which you can set to show in your catalogue. Sadly it's not sortable but it's helped me do my list. (This is different to the publication date of your book which is the date your edition was published).

My list:

1900 Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
1901 The Wouldbegoods by E. Nesbit
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
1903 The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
1904 The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit
1905 The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
1906 The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
1907
1908 A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
1909 Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery
1910 Psmith in the City by P. G. Wodehouse
1911 Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
1912 Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
1913 The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
1914 The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle
1915 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
1916 Greenmantle by John Buchan
1917 Summer by Edith Wharton
1918 My Antonia by Willa Cather
1919 Mr Standfast by John Buchan
1920 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1921
1922 Miss Mapp by E. F. Benson
1923 Leave it to Psmith by P. G. Wodehouse
1924 A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
1925 Carry on, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
1926 Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
1927 Lucia in London by E. F. Benson
1928 The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
1929 Summer Lightning by P. G. Wodehouse
1930 Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
1931 Mapp and Lucia by E. F. Benson
1932 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
1933 Heavy Weather by P. G. Wodehouse
1934 Miss Buncle's Book by D. E. Stevenson
1935 The Box of Delights by John Masefield
1936 South Riding by Winifred Holtby
1937 The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
1938 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
1939 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
1940 The Provincial Lady in Wartime by E. M. Delafield
1941 Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham
1942 The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
1943 The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton#
1944 Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer
1945 At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor
1946 The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
1947 A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor
1948 Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
1949 A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor
1950 A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov
1952 The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1954 The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
1955 Moonraker by Ian Fleming
1956 Something Fishy by P. G. Wodehouse
1957 The Master by T. H. White
1958 Things Fall Apart by China Achebe
1959 More About Paddington by Michael Bond
1960 The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
1961 The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
1962 The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
1963 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre
1964 Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken
1965 Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
1966 The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles by Nancy Mitford
1967 The Owl Service by Alan Garner
1968 Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
1969 Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
1970 Troubles by J. G. Farrell
1971 The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide
1972 Watership Down by Richard Adams
1973 The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
1974 Greenwitch by Susan Cooper
1975 The Grey King by Susan Cooper
1976 The Father Christmas Letters by J. R. R. Tolkien
1977 Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
1978 The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
1979 The Neverending Story by Michale Ende
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
1981 Goodnight, Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
1982 Magician by Raymond E. Feist
1983 The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
1984 Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
1985 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
1986 A Taste for Death by P. D. James
1987 Norwegian Wood by Huraki Murakami
1988 The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
1989 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1990 The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
1991 Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
1992 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
1993 A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
1994 Original Sin by P. D. James
1995 The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
1996 Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
1997 The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
1998 The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
1999 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
2000 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
2001 Life of Pi by Yann Martel
2002 Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
2003 Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2004 Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell by Susanna Clarke
2005 The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah
2006 The Observations by Jane Harris
2007 The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
2008 The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
2009 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2011 A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
2012 Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Only two gaps, which was a lot better than I thought I'd do.

-More lists!

-Morphy - I didn't even try to use the touchstones, appreciate that you did. I have to investigate some you've chosen!
-Interested to see Suz how after 1940 you find it harder to choose just one book.....
-Interesting too, Heather how many of your top early books are children's. That was really an explosive area of development.

What made touchstones easier is that I had created this list on my own thread by decade a few days ago. All I needed to do was copy/paste.

this is a terrible thread...

Lucy, I think it's because after 1940, I've simply read more of the books published that year! There is more "popular fiction" from those years, simply because when I started reading avidly, I was fairly agnostic as to what year I was reading from -- just looking for books that appealed to me. Whereas there are few "popular" authors from the first few decades of the 20th century that hold much appeal. There are one or two books by Frances Parkinson Keyes that I liked, but they wouldn't rise to this level, except by default, and I can't see myself putting Agatha Christie in one of these slots.

#26 Yeah, I felt a bit guilty about including so many children's books but they're all books I would happily reread and they've obviously stood the test of time so... Without the children's books there would have been a lot of years I would have struggled to fill in.

I am loving everyones' lists! I am both getting ideas for filling in my gaps and being reminded of books I had forgotten I had read!

Awk!

I think my onliest list is: The To Do List That Could Eat Chicago

it terrorizes me, every so often

mostly I just lose it

Great lists everybody. Heather's list has some similarities with my own and I note that we both betray our english roots. The YA books listed have all clearly stood the test of time and at the end of the day the power of some of the stories carries the day over verbose prose in some of the more "serious" books.

So, next time I go to a meet-up (or just to a bookstore!), I will be printing and taking with me some of these lists......

32> lol

It's interesting -- do we pick the most "worthy" book that happened to have an impact on us, or the book that we really adored and re-read maniacally? I'm sure there are years that the book I loved most simply wasn't literary at ALL. I tried to draw from my top reads of all time on my profile page, looked up the pub dates and added the books, but the lists I've found tend to be either unwieldy (fantastic fiction) or tilted toward Literature with a capital L. In fact, there's one work of alternate history that I'm simply going to have to squeeze on that last, to make it less literary....

Worthy, schmorthy. I go for sheer enjoyment. Many of my book picks are genre fiction which most people wouldn't consider literary by any shakes of the imagination.

Oh I think that's what my * is for on the years I've put more than one book. But a few of those are books that somehow changed me even if I haven't obsessively reread them.... ...... what would be a good symbol to indicate that, I wonder (two bold exclamation points..... or better yet...... exclamation points indicating how many time you read the book!) When I get to Lord of the Rings it'll look like this:!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...

Here's my contribution to Listmania! (I have a 19th century list underway as well)
For some years, I seem to have read nothing, or nothing that stands out, while for some years it was too hard to choose just one book. This has been an amazing trip down memory lane!

I had some trouble being consistent with dates--for trilogies I sometimes used the publication date of the first book, and sometimes the last, and I was influenced by the desire to fill holes. Likewise translated books sometimes appear in the year of original publication and sometimes the year of an English translation.

1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum, Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov
1901 The Three Sisters – Anton Chekhov, The Tale of Peter Rabbit –Beatrix Potter
1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle
1903 The Call of the Wild - Jack London
1904
1905 A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett
1906 The Railway Children - E. Nesbit
1907 Ozma of Oz - L. Frank Baum
1908 A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
1909
1910 Howard’s End - E.M. Forster
1911 Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
1912 Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
1913 O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
1914 Kokoro –Natsume Soseki
1915 The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford, Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
1916 Understood Betsy - Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
1917 Summer - Edith Wharton
1918 My Antonia – Willa Cather
1919
1920 Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence, The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton, This Side of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald
1921 Kristin Lavransdatter – Sigrid Undset
1922 The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot , Ulysses – James Joyce
1923 The Inimitable Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
1924 A Passage to India - E.M. Forster, So Big - Edna Ferber
1925 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
1926 The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
1927 The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
1928 All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque
1929 A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
1930
1931 The Good Earth - Pearl Buck
1932 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons, Mutiny on the Bounty – Charles Northoff
1933 Man's Fate - Andre Malraux
1934 I, Claudius - Robert Graves
1935 Time Out of Mind – Rachel Field
1936 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
1938 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
1939 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
1940 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
1941 The Song of Bernadette – Franz Werfel
1942 The Stranger - Albert Camus
1943 A Tree Grows In Brooklyn - Betty Smith
1944 A Bell for Adano – John Hersey
1945 Animal Farm - George Orwell, The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andric
1946 The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers, All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
1947 The Plague - Albert Camus, The Diary of Anne Frank
1948 The Lottery – Shirley Jackson, The Caucasian Chalk Circle - Berthold Brecht
1949 1984 – George Orwell
1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
1951 The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
1952 The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1954 The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
1955 The Quiet American - Graham Greene ,
1956 Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz
1957 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
1958 Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe , The Once and Future King – T.H. White , The King Must Die – Mary Renault
1959 Hawaii - James A. Michener
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
1961 Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1963 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John Le Carre, Bride of Pendorric - Victoria Holt ,
1964
1965 Everything that Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
1966 The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1968 The First Circle – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1969 In This House of Brede - Rumer Godden, The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
1970 The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison, The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
1971 The Winds of War - Herman Wouk, Grendel – John Gardner
1972 Watership Down - Richard Adams, Green Darkness – Anya Seton
1973 The Princess Bride – William Goldman
1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig (Jaws – Peter Benchley)
1975 Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
1976 Trinity – Leon Uris, Roots - Alex Haley, Ordinary People – Judith Guest
1977 Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough, The Shining – Stephen King)
1978 The World According to Garp - John Irving
1979 Sophie's Choice - William Styron
1980 The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
1981 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
1982 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant – Anne Tyler
1983 The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley
1984 The War of the End of the World – Mario Vargas Llosa, The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
1985 Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich, Love in the Time of Cholera (orig) – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1986
1987 Beloved – Toni Morrison, Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
1988 Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler
1989 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
1990 Animal Dreams – Barbara Kingsolver
1991 A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley
1992 All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy, At Weddings and Wakes – Alice McDermott, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents – Julia Alvarez
1993 The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
1994 Pereira Maintains – Antonio Tabucchi
1995 Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
1996 Fall on your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald
1997 The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy, Paradise – Toni Morrison
1998 The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
1999 Waiting – Ha Jin
2000 White Teeth - Zadie Smith, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
2001 Atonement - Ian MacEwan
2002 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold, Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
2003 The Known World – Edward P. Jones, The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
2004 Small Island – Andrea Levy
2005 The Book Thief – Marcus Zukas, Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Swed.) – Stieg Larsson
2006 Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2007 The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears – Dinaw Mengestu
2008 Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh, When Will There Be Good News? – Kate Atkinson, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich
2009 Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel, Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann, Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese
2010 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell, Lord of Misrule – Jaimy Gordon, A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
2011 The Memory of Love – Aminatta Forna, The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern, The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes
2012 Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller, Bring up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel, Painter of Silence – Georgina Harding

...wow, still so impressed with everyone's lists.

I am very impressed as well **gauk* , started my own now as well, but will take some time. There appear toooooooo many books I very much liked which were published in the same year, therefore I find it very difficult to make up my mind

Okay, I'm finally finished with my list. I'll only post down through 1900 here (see my thread for how ridiculously out of control this list-making became for me...)

2012 (The Wind Through the Keyhole) King
2011 A Dance with Dragons Martin
2010 The Lion and the Mouse Pinkney
2009 Where the Mountain Meets the Moon Lin
2008 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Shaffer
2007 The Invention of Hugo Cabret Selznick
2006 A Dirty Job Moore
2005 A Feast For Crows Martin
2004 When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? Carlin
2003 The Devil in the White City Larson
2002 Kafka on the Shore Murakami
2001 American Gods Gaiman
2000 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Chabon
1999 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Rowling
1998 The Professor and the Madman Winchester
1997 Harry Potter and the Socerer's Stone Rowling
1996 The Sparrow Russell
1995 Blindness Saramago
1994 Chaos and Order Donaldson
1993 A Dark and Hungry God Arises Donaldson
1992 Male Subjectivity at the Margins Silverman
1991 Imajica Barker
1990 Good Omens Prachett & Gaiman
1989 Sorceress of Darshiva Eddings
1988 Waiting for the Galactic Bus Godwin
1987 The Tommyknockers King
1986 Speaker for the Dead Card
1985 Ender's Game Card
1984 Small World Lodge
1983 Magician's Gambit Eddings
1982 The Gunslinger King
1981 George's Marvelous Medicine Dahl
1980 Housekeeping Robinson
1979 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Adams
1978 The Westing Game Raskin
1977 Silver on the Tree Cooper
1976 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Taylor
1975 Danny the Champion of the World Dahl
1974 Greenwitch Cooper
1973 The Dark Is Rising Cooper
1972 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Thompson
1971 The Lathe of Heaven LeGuin
1970 Runaway Ralph Cleary
1969 Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut
1968 The High King Alexander
1967 Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead Stoppard
1966 Fantastic Voyage Asimov
1965 I, Juan de Pareja Trevino
1964 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Dahl
1963 Death and the Labyrinth Foucault
1962 The Bronze Bow Speare
1961 The Phantom Toll Booth Juster
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird Lee
1959 The Haunting of Hill House Jackson
1958 A Bear Called Paddington Bond
1957 Rifles for Watie Keith
1956 Carry on, Mr. Bowditch Latham
1955 A Death in the Family Agee
1954 The Fellowship of the Ring Tolkien
1953 The Silver Chair Lewis
1952 East of Eden Steinbeck
1951 Prince Caspian Lewis
1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lewis
1949 The Door in the Wall D'Angeli
1948 Cheaper by the Dozen Gilbreth
1947 The 21 Balloons Du Bois
1946 The Little Island Brown
1945 The Red Pony Steinbeck
1944 Rabbit Hill Lawson
1943 Adam of the Road Gray
1942 Go Down, Moses Faulkner
1941 Call It Courage Sperry
1940 Sad Cypress Christie
1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios Ambler
1938 The White Stag Seredy
1937 The Hobbit Tolkien
1936 Gone with the Wind Mitchell
1935 The Boomerang Clue Christie
1934 Mary Poppins Travers
1933 Down and Out in Paris and London Orwell
1932 Little House in the Big Wods Wilder
1931 The Good Earth Buck
1930 As I Lay Dying Faulkner
1929 The Trumpeter of Krakow Kelly
1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train Christie
1927 The Big Four Christie
1926 The Sun Also Rises Hemingway
1925 The Secret of Chimneys Christie
1924 The Dark Frigate Hawes
1923 Murder on the Links Christie
1922 The Velveteen Rabbit Williams
1921 The Story of Mankind Van Loon
1920 Mysterious Affair at Styles Christie
1919
1918 The Magic Pudding Lindsay
1917
1916
1915 The Good Soldier Ford
1914 Dubliners Joyce
1913
1912 The Dutch Twins Perkins
1911 The Phantom of the Opera Leroux
1910 The Emerald City of Oz Baum
1909 The Secret Garden Burnett
1908 The Wind in the Willows Grahame
1907 The Secret Agent Conrad
1906 Peter Pan Barrie
1905 White Fang London
1904 The Marvelous Land of Oz Baum
1903 The Call of the Wild London
1902 Just So Stories Kipling
1901 Peter in Blueberry Land Beskow
1900 Lord Jim Conrad

I may have to steal some ideas from you, Amber, for some of my missing years.

Lovely list Amber!

I've posted the next bit of my 20th century list -- from 1926-1950- up at >4 PaulCranswick:

Morphy: Steal away! Although, really, for some years I've only read the one book, and in some cases I didn't care for it much (Lord Jim, for example - hated it).

lurking my way through. List making is just not my thing but it is fun to lurk.

#43 Lucy I love the exclamation points on your list :-)

#41 Amber, wow - "see my thread for how ridiculously out of control this list-making became for me..." - you weren't exaggerating! I love all your lists!

46> Yes, I also love the exclamation points on Lucy's list. Makes me think I should go read The Little White Horse (of which I have never heard). I've read your other exclamation-earning books, Lucy.

Since I love lists and I already list all my books read by year published in a timeline format in one of my myriad book-related databases, of course I have to get in on the fun here! My reading is spotty before the twentieth century, so I'm just going to list books published between 1900 and 2012.

NOTES:

* Indicates years for which I chose the least-unfavored (for lack of a favorite), or years where the choice was made for me by virtue of having only one book from which to choose, despite not liking the book. (Clearly I need to read more from the 1980s.)

For years where two or more books were favorites, I listed one runner-up as well as my favorite for the year.

I think Agatha Christie wins the prize for most-listed, but Laurie R. King, J. K. Rowling, Jasper Fforde, and Dorothy L. Sayers also make strong showings.

1900: The Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum); Alice of Old Vincennes (Maurice Thompson)
1901: The Bears of Blue River (Charles Major)
1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)
1903: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Kate Douglas Wiggin)
1904: Freckles (Gene Stratton-Porter)
1905: A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett); The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
1906: *The Story of Miss Moppet (Beatrix Potter)
1907: *The Tale of Tom Kitten (Beatrix Potter)
1908: Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery); The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
1909: Anne of Avonlea (L. M. Montgomery)

1910: The Window at the White Cat (Mary Roberts Rinehart)
1911: Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie)
1912: Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
1913: Pollyanna (Eleanor H. Porter)
1914: *The Adventures of Peter Cottontail (Thornton W. Burgess)
1915: Michael O’Halloran (Gene Stratton-Porter); The Valley of Fear (Arthur Conan Doyle)
1916: *Just David (Eleanor H. Porter)
1917: His Last Bow (Arthur Conan Doyle)
1918: The Magnificent Ambersons (Booth Tarkington)
1919: *Rainbow Valley (L. M. Montgomery)

1920: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie)
1921: Her Father’s Daughter (Gene Stratton-Porter)
1922: The Enchanted April (Elizabeth von Arnim)
1923: Whose Body? (Dorothy L. Sayers); Emily of New Moon (L. M. Montgomery)
1924: The Man in the Brown Suit (Agatha Christie)
1925: Emily Climbs (L. M. Montgomery); The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
1926: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie); Clouds of Witness (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1927: Emily’s Quest (L. M. Montgomery); Unnatural Death (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1928: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1929: Partners in Crime (Agatha Christie); Freckles Comes Home (Jeannette Porter Meehan)

1930: Strong Poison (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1931: Five Red Herrings (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1932: Have His Carcase (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1933: Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1934: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Agatha Christie)
1935: Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers)
1936: The ABC Murders (Agatha Christie)
1937: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Winifred Watson); Hamlet, Revenge! (Michael Innes)
1938: Appointment with Death (Agatha Christie)
1939: And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)

1940: Sad Cypress (Agatha Christie)
1941: N or M? (Agatha Christie)
1942: The Moving Finger (Agatha Christie); The Body in the Library (Agatha Christie)
1943: *Homer Price (Robert McCloskey)
1944: Red Rackham’s Treasure (Hergé)
1945: Animal Farm (George Orwell)
1946: Pippi Goes on Board (Astrid Lindgren)
1947: A Night of Errors (Michael Innes)
1948: I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
1949: The Door in the Wall (Marguerite de Angeli)

1950: A Murder is Announced (Agatha Christie); The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
1951: Ginger Pye (Eleanor Estes); Spiderweb for Two (Elizabeth Enright)
1952: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C. S. Lewis); The Borrowers (Mary Norton)
1953: Mara, Daughter of the Nile (Eloise Jarvis McGraw); The Silver Chair (C. S. Lewis)
1954: The Horse and His Boy (C. S. Lewis); The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien)
1955: The Return of the King (J. R. R. Tolkien); Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (Jean Lee Latham)
1956: The Last Battle (C. S. Lewis)
1957: Citizen of the Galaxy (Robert A. Heinlein); Calico Captive (Jean Craighead George)
1958: The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Elizabeth George Speare)
1959: My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George)

1960: The Cricket in Times Square (George Selden)
1961: The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster); Return to Gone-Away (Elizabeth Enright)
1962: The Mirror Crack’d (Agatha Christie)
1963: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn); The Dot and the Line (Norton Juster)
1964: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
1965: Dune (Frank Herbert); Fox in Socks (Dr. Seuss)
1966: *Mustang (Marguerite Henry)
1967: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (E. L. Konigburg)
1968: *A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin)
1969: *The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle)

1970: The Trumpet of the Swan (E. B. White)
1971: Nemesis (Agatha Christie)
1972: Lord Peter (Dorothy L. Sayers, published posthumously)
1973: *The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Italo Calvino)
1974: *There’s a Wocket in My Pocket (Dr. Seuss)
1975: Curtain (Agatha Christie); The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Ursula K. Le Guin)
1976: Sleeping Murder (Agatha Christie, posthumously)
1977: *Ramona and Her Father (Beverly Cleary)
1978: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Judi Barrett)
1979: If on a winter’s night a traveler (Italo Calvino); The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

1980: The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
1981: *Three Days on the River in a Red Canoe (Vera B. Williams)
1982: The Compass Rose (Ursula K. Le Guin)
1983: *Alanna (Tamora Pierce)
1984: *In the Hand of the Goddess (Tamora Pierce)
1985: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Laura Joffe Numeroff)
1986: *The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (Tamora Pierce)
1987: *Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (John Steptoe)
1988: *Love Takes Wing (Janette Oke)
1989: *The Mitten (Jan Brett)

1990: Possession (A. S. Byatt)
1991: Mairelon the Magician (Patricia C. Wrede)
1992: *Misty’s Twilight (Marguerite Henry)
1993: *More Rootabagas (Carl Sandburg, published posthumously)
1994: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (Laurie R. King)
1995: A Monstrous Regiment of Women (Laurie R. King); Once on This Island (Gloria Whelan)
1996: *The Music of Dolphins (Karen Hesse)
1997: To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis); The Magician’s Ward (Patricia C. Wrede)
1998: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J. K. Rowling)
1999: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling); O Jerusalem (Laurie R. King)

2000: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J. K. Rowling)
2001: The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)
2002: Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde); Justice Hall (Laurie R. King)
2003: The Well of Lost Plots (Jasper Fforde); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J. K. Rowling)
2004: Something Rotten (Jasper Fforde); The Game (Laurie R. King)
2005: Locked Rooms (Laurie R. King); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)
2006: *The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)
2007: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J. K. Rowling); First Among Sequels (Jasper Fforde)
2008: Lavinia (Ursula K. Le Guin)
2009: Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (Jasper Fforde); The Calligrapher’s Daughter (Eugenia Kim)

2010: Blackout/All Clear (Connie Willis); The God of the Hive (Laurie R. King)
2011: One of Our Thursdays is Missing (Jasper Fforde)
2012: *Yesterday’s Dead (Pat Bourke)

Thanks for another great list, Casvelyn. Lots of your books bring back memories for me. If You Give A Mouse A Cookie was one of my grandson's favorite books, we used to get it out of the library every other week!

>49 DeltaQueen50: I'm glad you liked it! I think it reflects the fact that I'm only 25 and have spent over half my life reading children's books. I'm interested to see what my list looks like in five or 10 years.

When I eat cookies, I somewhat-involuntarily say, "If you give (insert casvelyn's real name here) a cookie..." in the hopes that someone will reply, "she'll want a glass of milk to go with it." It never works, unless I'm talking to my mom.

I stumbled across this thread the other day and really wanted to create a list of my own. I hope that no one mind's my posting it here, even though I'm not an official member of this group...

I forced myself to include only one entry for each year--no matter how difficult the decision. Also, giving rein to my own quirky propensities, I permitted only one book per author (this lead to some interesting, and sometimes heartwrenching, negotiations). In partial compensation, I listed several sets (The Age of the French Revolution, The Sea of Fertility, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Lord of the Rings, The U.S.A. Trilogy)--but only when I was confident that each book in the set was worthy of inclusion.

Finally, I make no apologies for the books listed during "lean" years; if a book was good enough to breach my increasingly niggardly reading habits, then it's good enough to appear on this list.

2012 Monstress: Stories by Lysley Tenorio
2011 The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
2010 daytripper by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon
2009 Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling
2008 Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West by Benazir Bhutto
2007 Before I Forget by André Brink
2006 The Absolute Sandman, Volume I by Neil Gaiman
2005 Saturday by Ian McEwan
2004 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
2003 The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
2002 Snow by Orhan Pamuk
2001 The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
2000 The She-Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya
1999 Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
1998 A Widow for One Year by John Irving
1997 An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
1996 Canone Inverso by Paolo Maurensig
1995 Blindness by José Saramago
1994 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt
1993 Rasero by Francisco Rebolledo
1992 Tinisima by Elena Poniatowska
1991 Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
1990 Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
1989 Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
1988 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
1987 The Age of the French Revolution by Claude Manceron
1986 Maus: a Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
1985 Perfume by Patrick Suskind
1984 The Bone People by Keri Hulme
1983 The Dogs of Paradise by Abel Posse
1982 Broken April by Ismail Kadare
1981 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
1979 Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
1978 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1977 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Enquiry by William H. Gass
1975 Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
1973 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
1972 Watership Down by Richard Adams
1971 The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima
1970 Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
1968 The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander
1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
1966 The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
1965 Dune by Frank Herbert
1964 The Face of Another by Kobo Abe
1963 The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
1962 Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
1961 The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector
1960 The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
1959 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
1958 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
1957 The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
1956 The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
1955 Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
1954 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
1953 The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
1952 The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
1951 The Hive by Camilo José Cela
1950 The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer
1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
1948 The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
1947 The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
1946 Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
1945 The Bridge on the River Drina by Ivo Andrić
1944 Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
1943 Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
1942 The Stranger by Albert Camus
1941 Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons by Igor Stravinsky
1940 The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
1939 Moment in Peking by Lin Yutang
1938 U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
1937 The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
1936 Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
1935 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
1934 The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
1933 Lost Horizon by James Hilton
1932 The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi by Junichiro Tanizaki
1931 Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill
1930 7 Types of Ambiguity by William Empson
1929 The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas K. Gandhi
1928 Orlando by Virginia Woolf
1927 Selected Stories of Lu Hsun by Lu Hsun
1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
1925 The Decapitated Chicken and other stories by Horacio Quiroga
1924 A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
1923 Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo
1922 The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke
1921
1920 Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
1919 The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham
1918
1917 Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
1916 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
1915 The 39 Steps by John Buchan
1914 Platero y Yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez
1913 Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
1911 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
1910 Gertrude by Hermann Hesse
1909 Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser
1908 The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
1907 The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge
1906 The Three-Cornered World by Natsume Soseki
1905
1904 The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello
1903 The Call of the Wild by Jack London
1902 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
1901 Kim by Rudyard Kipling
1900 The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

#51: That's a great list, it sort of makes me feel I should read a few more books before making my own list as several of yours are sitting on my tbr pile and others I have loved reading as well.

I had similar doubts as I was preparing my list. There's always the fear (or, rather, the hope) that the next book you read will change everything. Perhaps these lists are, in more ways than one, yardsticks for measuring the extent of our addictions...

My thoughts exactly...... I'm delighted you posted your list. Pleased too, to see Buzzati, although that's not one I've read. In my humble it's good to change a list if something new and fabulous turns up. I see you put NF in there too - I've got a plan to look at the NF's from the same period, if I ever get done with fiction, and see what turns up.

Buzzati: If the oeuvres of Kafka and Beckett were to have an affair in Italy, their love child would grow up to become The Tartar Steppes!!

NF: Oops...were the lists supposed to include only fiction? If so, that could certainly be arranged...

Nah, I put nonfiction in my list. It's a list of favorite BOOKS not favorite novels.

Yeah, I've got non-fiction on my list too.

I limited mine to fiction, just because I read so much more fiction than non, but I generally include things like plays and epic poetry under fiction.

I'm so hopeless - what I'd like to do is a fiction list, a sf/fantasy list, a children's list, a non-fiction list.......the latter would/will probably have some holes in it, but I'm very curious to see!

Well, having spent a few weekends trying to come up with a year-by-year list, I'm going to try to set forth years 1950 to 2010. Unfortunately, I couldn't limit it to one for many of the years.

2010. Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes; The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (NF)
2009. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
2008. My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates; Nixonland by Rick Perlstein (NF)
2007. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid; The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (NF)
2006. The Book of Dave by Will Self; The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2005. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
2004. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell; 2666 by Roberto Bolano; Chronicles I by Bob Dylan (NF)
2003. The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers; Property by Valerie Martin
2002. Spies by Michael Frayn; Wish You Were Here by Stewart O'Nan
2001. This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar ben Jelloun
2000. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey; Runnersup: Under the Skin by Michel Faber; Ben in the World by Doris Lessing
1999. A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee; The Last Life by Claire Messud
1998. Blindness by Jose Saramago; The Boy by Naeem Murr
1997. Underworld by Don Delillo; Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
1996. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
1995. The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie; A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
1994. In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien; Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore (NF)
1993. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx; Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
1992. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth; Before and After by Rosellen Brown
1991. (This was a year of riches!): The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers; Possession by A.S. Byatt; The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks; American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis; Wild Swans by Jung Chang (NF)
1990. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; The Quincunx by Charles Palliser
1989. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes; Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1988. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
1987. Beloved by Toni Morrison; The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
1986. Replay by Ken Grimwood
1985. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; Perfume by Patrick Susskind
1984. The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks
1983. The Bone People by Keri Hulme
1982. The Assault by Harry Mulisch; The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1981. War at the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa; The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas; Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson
1980. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
1979. Sophie's Choice by William Styron; The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer; The Right Stuff by Thomas Wolfe
1978. Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec; The Stories of John Cheever
1977. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
1976. Will You Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver; Roots by Alex Haley

I think I will start a new comment for the next 25.

Continued:

1975. Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz; The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna; The Commandant by Jessica Anderson
1974. The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum by Heinrich Boll; Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
1973. Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell
1972. The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi
1971. August, 1914 by Alexandre Solzhenitsyn; Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Boll; The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
1970. A World for Julius by Bryce Echenique; The Vivisector by Patrick White; The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
1969. Ada by Vladimir Nabokov; The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
1968. Couples by John Updike
1967. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
1966. The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott (and subsequent volumes of the Raj Quartet); The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurty
1965. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinki
1964. The Spire by William Golding
1963. The Group by Mary McCarthy; The Collector by John Fowles; The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
1962. (Another year with an embarassment of riches): A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey; Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandre Solzhenitsyn
1961. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller; The Wall by Marlen Haushofer; The Movie Goer by Walker Percy
1960. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1959. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
1958. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe; Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado
1957. On the Beach by Neville Shute; The Law by Roger Vaillard; Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
1956. Train to Pakistan by Khuswant Singh
1955. The Inheritors by William Golding;; Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
1954. Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
1953. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
1952. East of Eden by John Steinbeck; Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
1951. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
1950. The Town by Conrad Richter; The Family Moskat by I.B. Singer

This list are fabulous :). I am still working on my one. I have got quite a few books which could go into one year and all of them from different genres. So I feel like you Lucy, I think I would love to make different list's although they would have holes all over the place :)

I know -- I've sort of slowed down because of a feeling I'd like to do, say, Children's, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and SF&F at least. I'm not such a big mystery reader so that probably wouldn't be doable.