Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century names 100 books, every one listed here. The most approachable of them is Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny (difficulty 25/100, about 22 min); the hardest is Écrits by Jacques Lacan (94/100). 20 of its books are on four or more of the eight great rankings.

• 1984 by George Orwell (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 6.5 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929) — difficulty 57/100, about 2.8 hours
• Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) — difficulty 55/100, about 1.4 hours
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877) — difficulty 56/100, about 26 hours
• Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny (1961) — difficulty 25/100, about 22 min
• Aurélien by Louis Aragon (1944) — difficulty 52/100, about 14 hours
• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943) — difficulty 78/100, about 49 hours
• Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen (1968) — difficulty 51/100, about 24 hours
• Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P. Jacobs (1946) — difficulty 33/100, about 33 min
• Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.5 hours
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) — difficulty 52/100, about 4.4 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard (1926) — difficulty 50/100, about 48 min
• Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig (1927) — difficulty 55/100, about 1.8 hours
• Contempt by Alberto Moravia (1954) — difficulty 48/100, about 3.6 hours
• Écrits by Jacques Lacan (1966) — difficulty 94/100, about 29 hours
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.3 hours
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940) — difficulty 48/100, about 12 hours
• Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier (1967) — difficulty 53/100, about 5.2 hours
• Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian (1947) — difficulty 50/100, about 3 hours
• Furor and Mystery by René Char (1948) — difficulty 59/100, about 2.4 hours
• Gaston by André Franquin (1957) — difficulty 25/100, about 15 min
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936) — difficulty 45/100, about 27 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca (1928) — difficulty 62/100, about 2.3 hours
• Journal by Jules Renard (1887) — difficulty 56/100, about 26 hours
• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932) — difficulty 69/100, about 19 hours
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928) — difficulty 50/100, about 7.9 hours
• Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913) — difficulty 47/100, about 4.3 hours
• Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec (1978) — difficulty 73/100, about 21 hours
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) — difficulty 69/100, about 12 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900) — difficulty 63/100, about 11 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Man's Fate by André Malraux (1933) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.4 hours
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos (1925) — difficulty 76/100, about 16 hours
• Martin Eden by Jack London (1909) — difficulty 65/100, about 13 hours
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) — difficulty 67/100, about 21 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (1926) — difficulty 51/100, about 4.4 hours
• Nadja by André Breton (1928) — difficulty 59/100, about 2.8 hours
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (1939) — difficulty 31/100, about 3.8 hours
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) — difficulty 54/100, about 8.1 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) — difficulty 55/100, about 10 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943) — difficulty 76/100, about 13 hours
• Paroles by Jacques Prévert (1946) — difficulty 37/100, about 1.3 hours
• Seamarks by Saint-John Perse (1957) — difficulty 68/100, about 5.1 hours
• Second Thoughts by Michel Butor (1956) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.4 hours
• Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921) — difficulty 64/100, about 1.9 hours
• Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1980) — difficulty 59/100, about 12 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947) — difficulty 46/100, about 4.2 hours
• The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) — difficulty 60/100, about 11 hours
• The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco (1950) — difficulty 54/100, about 3.9 hours
• The Ballad of the Salty Sea by Hugo Pratt (1967) — difficulty 53/100, about 1 hours
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) — difficulty 53/100, about 4.6 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Blue Lotus by Hergé (1936) — difficulty 31/100, about 26 min
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) — difficulty 58/100, about 5.7 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• The Counterfeiters by André Gide (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947) — difficulty 30/100, about 5.4 hours
• The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare (1963) — difficulty 64/100, about 6.9 hours
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) — difficulty 55/100, about 13 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) — difficulty 52/100, about 3.4 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973) — difficulty 63/100
• The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono (1951) — difficulty 41/100, about 8.7 hours
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) — difficulty 38/100, about 3.6 hours
• The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio (1963) — difficulty 61/100, about 6.7 hours
• The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967) — difficulty 56/100, about 7 hours
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) — difficulty 35/100, about 60 min
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) — difficulty 51/100, about 36 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll (1974) — difficulty 56/100, about 3.3 hours
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924) — difficulty 63/100, about 30 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1930) — difficulty 70/100, about 49 hours
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950) — difficulty 47/100, about 4.2 hours
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) — difficulty 62/100, about 13 hours
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926) — difficulty 51/100, about 4.6 hours
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980) — difficulty 64/100, about 29 hours
• The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910) — difficulty 60/100, about 6 hours
• The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq (1951) — difficulty 59/100, about 8 hours
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault (1966) — difficulty 83/100, about 24 hours
• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951) — difficulty 67/100, about 29 hours
• The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (1964) — difficulty 60/100, about 3.6 hours
• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht (1941) — difficulty 47/100, about 1 hours
• The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 29 hours
• The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel (1929) — difficulty 59/100, about 11 hours
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949) — difficulty 58/100, about 27 hours
• The Silence of the Sea by Vercors (1942) — difficulty 47/100, about 49 min
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) — difficulty 80/100, about 15 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon (1931) — difficulty 34/100, about 2.6 hours
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) — difficulty 64/100, about 3 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.8 hours
• The Tendrils of the Vine by Colette (1908) — difficulty 42/100, about 1.6 hours
• The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud (1938) — difficulty 74/100, about 11 hours
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 9.2 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898) — difficulty 44/100, about 4.4 hours
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf (1906) — difficulty 38/100, about 9.2 hours
• Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac (1927) — difficulty 60/100, about 3.9 hours
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905) — difficulty 65/100, about 5 hours
• Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) — difficulty 61/100, about 14 hours
• Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute (1939) — difficulty 77/100, about 1.4 hours
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) — difficulty 89/100, about 47 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos (1926) — difficulty 52/100, about 5.4 hours
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947) — difficulty 72/100, about 16 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953) — difficulty 74/100, about 2.4 hours
• Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes (1953) — difficulty 66/100, about 2.9 hours
• Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (1959) — difficulty 46/100, about 2.9 hours

Questions

How many books are on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century?

100, all of them listed here with how hard each is to read and how long it takes.

Which book on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century is the easiest to read?

Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny, difficulty 25/100, about 22 min. The hardest is Écrits by Jacques Lacan, at 94/100.

How long would it take to read every book on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century?

About 1,021 hours for the 99 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 510 days at two hours a day.

Other lists: Modern Library 100 Best Novels, TIME All-TIME 100 Novels, BBC Big Read Top 100, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature, Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World. All lists.