Le Monde's 100 books of the century, the top 20

1999 poll, French readers voting for what stuck with them. less anglo and more existentialist than every other list like this

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The Stranger - Albert Camus (1942)

won by a wide margin, still the book people bring up first

In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust (1913-1927)

everyone owns it, ask around who's really finished it

The Trial - Franz Kafka (1925)

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

technically a children's book, ranked here anyway

Man's Fate - André Malraux (1933)

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)

the author's politics are indefensible, the book still made the list. worth sitting with both facts

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (1939)

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (1940)

Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier (1913)

his only novel, he died in WWI the following year

Froth on the Daydream - Boris Vian (1947)

also translated as Mood Indigo depending which edition you find

The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett (1952)

Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)

not exactly light reading, it's on here for a reason though

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (1980)

newest book in the top 20 by a couple decades

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)

Paroles - Jacques Prévert (1946)

Alcools - Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)

The Blue Lotus - Hergé (1936)

a Tintin book, in the top 20 of a literary poll. French readers don't separate comics the way we do

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank (1947)

Tristes Tropiques - Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955)

anthropology, not fiction - still made it in ahead of half the novels here

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