Books: 10 All-Time Greatest

Some pig, and some book. White’s tearjerker made us all feel for that abattoir-destined pet and his arachnid friend.

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Morrison’s intricate novel about a black woman in Ohio after the Civil War, the restless spirit of her dead daughter, and a mysterious intruder called Beloved uses naturalism and supernaturalism to piece together a history of slavery and suffering.

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”Rabbit” Angstrom runs from marriage and responsibility and runs smack into them again in Updike’s masterful chronicle of a man’s four-decade race against the American zeitgeist.

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Surprised to see Harry so high on our list? Well, his is the richest coming-of-age tale ever. Thanks to Rowling’s luminous storytelling and dazzling imagination, people will still be tearing through it in a hundred years.

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Set against the unremitting bleakness of the Nebraska prairie, Cather’s novel is literature’s finest homage to the American West and the pioneers — especially the women — who settled it.

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A family saga entwined with the history of a village, García Márquez’s first masterpiece embraces all the big themes (love, war, death), deeply feeling the tragedy — and wisely seeing the comedy — of existence.

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London is depicted in every shade of the industrial spectrum, from gray to soot-black, through the eyes of a young ragamuffin yearning for a better life. It’s the greatest morality tale ever written — and the greatest soap opera, too.

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The courtship of the spirited, tart-tongued Elizabeth Bennet and the haughty Mr. Darcy is an enormously satisfying love story that still crackles. But what makes the novel truly sing is the deceptive grace of Austen’s prose as she limns the customs of her day with a sharp eye and a satirical wit. England comes alive through her wickedly smart drawing-room banter.

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You were probably forced to read it back when you were 16 — but that’s not Fitzgerald’s fault. Give the novel another try. It’s an extraordinary feat of writing — sparse, cool, and elegant — as well as a riveting dissertation on the hollowness of the American dream as it played out during the champagne-fueled decadence of the Jazz Age.

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A staggering novel about an unhappily married Russian aristocrat who chases what she thinks is love at the expense of everything and everyone else. Novelists generally embrace tragic lovers, but Tolstoy was too hardcore for that. Anna Karenina is both a cautionary tale and an exhortation to live our best lives. There are novels on this list that are more perfectly engineered (No. 2 and No. 3, for instance). And there are definitely books that devote fewer pages to agrarianism (No. 2-No. 10). But Anna Karenina is an immersive contemplation of the heart and the conscience. Long before Oprah praised the novel, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Nabokov knelt before it in awe. We do too.

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