"Don Quixote, the tale of a Spanish knight driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, was yesterday voted the best book of all time in a survey of around 100 of the world's best authors.
"If there is one novel you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote," the Nigerian author Ben Okri said at the Norwegian Nobel Institute as he announced the results of history's most expansive authors' poll. "Don Quixote has the most wonderful and elaborated story, yet it is simple."
Around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the "most meaningful book of all time" in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo.
Voters included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Seamus Heaney, Carlos Fuentes and Norman Mailer. Isabel Allende boycotted the exercise on the grounds that she objected to "book surveys".
The Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren managed to vote just before her death in January, and her book Pippi Longstocking made the list.
Lessing said the authors aimed to spark a thirst for reading in a young generation that preferred TV and Playstations. "They should be called educated barbarians," she said.
Miguel de Cervantes' tale of misguided heroism gained 50% more votes than any other book, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer and Tolstoy.
Ten authors got more than one book on to the list, which was not ranked. After Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky emerged as the most worthwhile read with four books listed: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.
The only Shakespeare plays the authors agreed on were Hamlet, King Lear and Othello.
The Bard was matched by Franz Kafka, who was virtually unknown during his lifetime. His three angst-ridden tales of grotesque alienation on the list were The Trial, The Castle and the Complete Stories.
Three works by Leo Tolstoy made it: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
The American William Faulkner and the Briton Virginia Woolf both scored twice, along with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who declined to vote.
Living writers were few and far between . Notable examples were Doris Lessing - whose Golden Notebook featured - and Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison.
Alf van der Hagen, an editor with the Norwegian Book Clubs, said: "The unique element to this list is that we didn't just ask authors from Europe or the US, we took a worldwide survey for the first time."
He said more than two-thirds of the 100 titles were written by Europeans, almost half were written last century and 11 were by women. "
A lista é:
Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus The Stranger
Paul Celan Poems
Louis-Ferdinand Celine Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer Canterbury Tales
Joseph Conrad Nostromo
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens Great Expectations
Denis Diderot Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Euripides Medea
William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Anon The Epic of Gilgamesh
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust
Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls
Günter Grass The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun Hunger
Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea
Homer The Iliad; The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen A Doll's House
Anon The Book of Job
James Joyce Ulysses
Franz Kafka The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle
Kalidasa The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi Complete Poems
Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Anon Mahabharata
Naguib Mahfouz Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne Essays
Elsa Morante History
Toni Morrison Beloved
Murasaki Shikibu The Tale of Genji
Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita; Njal's Saga
George Orwell 1984
Ovid Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo
Jalalu'l-Din Rumi The Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children
Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)
Tayeb Salih A Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago Blindness
William Shakespeare Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles Oedipus the King
Stendhal The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov Selected Stories; Thousand and One Nights
Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki Ramayana
Virgil The Aeneid
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar Memoirs of Hadrian "
Maio de 2002 in The Guardian.
Dois livros portugueses na lista é bom..Mas tinha que ser o Saramago um deles?
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