Top 10 Books of All Time

What a daunting task it would be to write a list like this, but fortunately for us, Norton (of the Norton Anthologies) asked 125 of the greatest living writers to select their top 10, and then (using statistics) produced a final list of the ten greatest books ever written. I certainly agree with the majority of the selections. This is a list of the top 10 fictional books of all time – needless to say, if you have not read these books, you probably should.
10. Middlemarch George Eliot

Middlemarch is considered by many scholars to be one of the most important novels of the Victorian era. It was written by George Eliot (pen name of Mary Anne Evans) and was first published in 1871 to 1872. It is set in the 1830s in Middlemarch, a fictional provincial town in England, based on Coventry.
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9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was a Russian short story writer and playwright. He was born in Taganrog, southern Russia, on 29 January 1860. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later employed by Virginia Woolf and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure.
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8. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

I appreciate the great artistic merit in Proust’s writing, but I have to be honest and say that I have never managed to get more than half way through the first book of this multiple-book novel. I found it extremely slow paced and boring. This is Proust’s most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the “episode of the madeleine” in which he describes in great (boring) detail, eating a madeleine dipped in tea.
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7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

I agree with the inclusion of this book – it is one of my favorites and one of the best examples of Fitzgerald’s writing. The Great Gatsby is a tale from the Jazz age of Gatsby – a wealthy man whose life is surrounded by mystery. A brilliant read.
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6. Hamlet William Shakespeare

It is no surprise that Mr Shakespeare is on the list. I am not sure that I would have picked Hamlet as his best book, but who am I to debate 125 brilliant authors? Hamlet is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, probably written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle for murdering Hamlet’s father, the King, gaining the throne through this treachery, and subsequently marrying his mother.