New York's Public Library Top 50, 1956-2005
Compiled by Francie Einenkel and Susan Chut, librarians of the New York Public Library in 2005. A representative selection from over 1500 titles on annual lists of Books to Remember from 1956 to 2005. The original list was divided in categories such as: "Continental Drift: Traveling the globe on wings of imagination", "The Great American Novel: Top-notch tellers of American tales", "Going to the Sources: Classic chronicles of our collective past."
- 1
African Stories
Doris Lessing · 1901 · 1 list
- 2
The Cunning Man
Robertson Davies · 1994 · 2 lists
- 3
The Fall
Albert Camus · 1776 · 4 lists
- 4
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul · 1961 · 10 lists
- 5
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende · 1982 · 6 lists
- 6
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie · 1995 · 3 lists
- 7
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 8
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989 · 14 lists
- 9
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass · 1959 · 9 lists
- 10
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera · 2006 · 7 lists
- 11
The American Way of Death
Jessica Mitford · 1901 · 1 list
- 12
And the Band Played On
Randy Shilts · 1987 · 4 lists
- 13
The Armies of the Night
Norman Mailer · 1968 · 2 lists
- 14
Children of Crisis
Robert Coles · 1967 · 3 lists
- 15
Race Matters
Cornel West · 1994 · 1 list
- 16
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Philip Gourevitch · 1998 · 3 lists
- 17
Why We Can't Wait
Martin Luther King · 1963 · 1 list
- 18
Another Country
James Baldwin · 1962 · 3 lists
- 19
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 31 lists
- 20
A Death in the Family
James Agee · 1957 · 5 lists
- 21
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 22
The Plot Against America
Philip Roth · 2004 · 8 lists
- 23
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver · 1998 · 8 lists
- 24
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · 19 lists
- 25
The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever · 1978 · 9 lists
- 26
The Violent Bear it Away
Flannery O'Connor · 1960 · 3 lists
- 27
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver · 1981 · 4 lists
- 28
- 29
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde · 1997 · 1 list
- 30
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore · 1967 · 1 list
- 31
For the Union Dead
Robert Lowell · 1964 · 1 list
- 32
On the Bus With Rosa Parks
Rita Dove · 1999 · 1 list
- 33
Poems
Adrienne Rich · 2001 · 1 list
- 34
The Affluent Society
John Kenneth Galbraith · 1958 · 3 lists
- 35
Cod
Mark Kurlansky · 1997 · 2 lists
- 36
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Timothy Ferris · 1988 · 1 list
- 37
The Double Helix
James D. Watson · 1968 · 6 lists
- 38
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond · 1991 · 3 lists
- 39
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Jung · 1963 · 1 list
- 40
The Mismeasure of Man
Stephen Jay Gould · 1981 · 3 lists
- 41
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard · 1974 · 3 lists
- 42
Citizens
Simon Schama · 1989 · 2 lists
- 43
A Distant Mirror
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman · 1600 · 1 list
- 44
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1973 · 5 lists
- 45
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes · 1986 · 5 lists
- 46
The Power Broker
Robert Caro · 1974 · 5 lists
- 47
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer · 1960 · 2 lists
- 48
Rising Tide
John Barry · 1997 · 2 lists
- 49
This Hallowed Ground
Bruce Catton · 1956 · 1 list
- 50
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Boston Women's Health Collective · 1973 · 2 lists