Since it is the time of year for book lists, this one came my way and it's a good one - thanks, Ernie.

New York Public Library's Books of the Century:

"To commemorate our Centennial, librarians identified books that played defining roles in the past 100 years. Included are 'great' books and landmarks in our area of expertise. There are books that influenced the course of events, for good and for bad; books that interpreted new worlds; and books that simply delighted millions of [NYPL] patrons. Our century ranges from 1895 to 1995 -- the Library's first 100 years. The perspective is American urban, but the list ranges worldwide."


Landmarks of Modern Literature:

Chekhov, Anton. The Three Sisters (1901).
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27).
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms (1914).
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis (1915).
St. Vincent Millay, Edna. Renascence and Other Poems (1917).
Yeats, William Butler. The Wild Swans at Coole (1917).
Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921).
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land (1922).
Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922).
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain (1924).
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925).
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927).
Garcia Lorca, Federico. Gypsy Balads (1928).
Wright, Richard. Native Son (1940).
Auden, W. H. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947).
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952).
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (1955).
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones (1944/1956).
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon (1977).


Colonialism and its Aftermath:

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim (1900).
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim (1901).
Gandhi, Mohandas K. Satyagraha [Non-Violent Resistance] (1921-40).
Forster, E. M. A Passage to India (1924).
Camus, Albert. The Stranger (1942).
Various. United Nations Charter (1945).
Steichen, Edward. The Family of Man (1955).
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (1958).
Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea (1964).
El-Salih, Tayeh. Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal [Season of Migration to the North] (1969).
Naipaul, V. S. Guerrillas (1975).
Emecheta, Buchi. The Bride Price (1976).
Kapsinski, Ryszard. Cesarz [The Emperor] (1978).
Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983).
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover (1984).


Protest and Progress:

Riis, Jacob. The Battle with the Slum (1902).
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle (1906).
Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House (1910).
Wald, Lillian. The House on Henry Street (1915).
Steffens, Lincoln. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931).
Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. (1937).
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
Smith, Lillian. Strange Fruit (1944).
Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd (1960).
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time (1963).
Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On (1987).
Kotlowitz, Alex. There Are No Children Here (1991).


Nature's Realm:

Maeterlinck, Maurice. The Life of the Bee (1901).
Curie, Marie Sklodowska. Treatise on Radioactivity (1910).
Einstein, Albert. The Meaning of Relativity (1922).
Peterson, Roger Tory. A Field Guide to the Birds (1934).
Leopold, Aldo. A San County Almanac (1949).
Lorenz, Konrad Z. King Solomon's Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1949).
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring (1962).
Various. The Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health (1964).
Watson, James. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968).
Wilson, Edward O. The Diversity of Life (1992).


Utopias and Dystopias:

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine (1895).
Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State (1896).
Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).
Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906).
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland (1915).
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932).
Hilton, James. Lost Horizon (1933).
Skinner, B. F. Walden Two (1948).
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale (1985).


Mind and Spirit:

Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Suicide (1897).
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901-28).
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet (1923).
Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Chirstian (1927).
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (1943).
Spock, Dr. Benjamin. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946).
Anonymous. The Bible, Revised Standard Version (1952).
Tillick, Paul. The Courage of Be (1952).
Kesey, Ken. One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962).
Leary, Timothy. The Politics of Ecstasy (1968).
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying (1969).
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment (1976).


War, Holocaust, Totalitarianism:

Toynbee, Arnold. Armenian Atrocities: the Murder of a Nation (1915).
Reed, John. Ten Days That Shook the World (1919).
Sassoon, Siegfried. The War Poems (1919).
Has? , Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Svejk (1920-23).
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf (1925-26).
Remarque, Erick Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front (1928).
Akhmatova, Anna. Requiem (1940).
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon (1941).
Hersey, John. Hiroshima (1946).
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl (1947).
Churchill, Winston. The Gathering Storm (1948).
Zedong, Mao. Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966).
Brown, Dee Alexander. Bury My heart at Wounded Knee (1970).
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (1973-75).
Herr, Michael. Dispatches (1977).
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986-91).


Economics and Technology:

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
Friedman, Milton. A Theory of the Comsumption Function (1957).
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society (1958).
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
Leavitt, Helen. Superhighway-- Super Hoax (1970).
Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973).
Krol, Ed. The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog (1992).


Popular Culture and Mass Entertainment:

Stoker, Bram. Dracula (1897).
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw (1898).
Doyle, Arthur Donan. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes (1912).
Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912).
Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind (1936).
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep (1939).
Metalious, Grace. Peyton Place (1956).
Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat (1957).
Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22 (1961).
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood (1965).
Bouton, Jim. Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (1970).
King, Stephen. Carrie (1974).
Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987).


Optimism, Joy, Gentility:

Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
Keller, Helen. The Stoy of My Life (1903).
Chesterton, G. K. The Innocence of Father Brown (1911).
Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Platero and I: An Andalusian Elegy (1914).
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion (1914).
Post, Emily. Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922).
Wodehouse, P. G. The Inimitable Jeeves (1923).
Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926).
Cather, Willa. Shadows on the Rock (1931).
Rombauer, Irma S. The Joy of Cooking (1931).
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit (1937).
Brown, Margaret Wise. Goodnight Moon (1947).
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
Hughes, Langston. The Best of Simple (1961).
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983).


Women Rise:

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence (1920).
Catt, Carrie Chapman and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923).
Sanger, Margaret. My Fight for Birth Control (1931).
Hurson, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (1949).
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (1962).
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (1963).
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (1970).
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975).
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple (1982).


The People's Choice:

Faulkner, William. The Portable Faulkner (1946).
Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country (1948).
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot (1952).
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road (1957).
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged (1957).
Wiesel, Elie. Night (1958).
Roth, Philip. Portnoy's Complaint (1969).


Favorites of Childhood and Youth:

Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901).
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943).
Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950).
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
White, E. B. Charlotte's Web (1952).
Keats, Ezra Jack. The Snowy Day (1962).
Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are (1963).
MacLachlan, Patricia. Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985).