the best books of the NYT readers

Two years after Le Monde reported on the list of the 101 favourite novels of [some of] its readers, which I found most fascinating as a sociological entry on said readers, rather than a meaningful ordering of literary monuments (!),  even though it led me to read Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, as well as Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s Gagner la Guerre [To the victors go the spoils], The New York Times did something similar to celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary. If on a lesser scale, as it only produces

1. 1. 1. 1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
         2. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
         3. 1984 by George Orwell
         4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
         5. Beloved by Toni Morrison

as the top five books of the last 125th years, Lee’s, Tolkien’s, and Garcia Márquez’s appearing in both lists, if with a different ranking. (The nomination rules were not exactly the same, though, with only novels for Le Monde and only “recent” books and only one per author for the New York Times.) Here is a longer list of the 25 top contenders, from which NYT readers voted [an opportunity I missed!]:

• 1984 by George Orwell
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• Ulysses by James Joyce

some of which I had never heard of. And not including a single Faulkner’s… Except for One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published as Cien años de soledad, all novels there were originally written in English. Sadly, the number one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is also one of the most censored by school boards in the USA! (And so are books by Toni Morrison.)