1. The Holy Bible – King James Version | Buy

The Bible (from Greek τὰ βιβλία ta biblia “the books”) is the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity.

There is no single Bible, as the individual books (Biblical canon), their contents and their order vary between denominations. Mainstream Judaism divides the Tanakh into 24 books, while a minority stream of Judaism, the Samaritans, accepts only five. The 24 texts of the Hebrew Bible are divided into 39 books in Christian Old Testaments, and complete Christian Bibles range from the 66 books of the Protestant canon to the 81 books in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible.

The Jewish Bible, or Tanakh, is divided into three parts: the five books of the Torah (“teaching” or “law”) comprise the origins of the Israelite nation, its laws and its covenant with the God of Israel; the Nevi’im (“prophets”) containing the historic account of ancient Israel and Judah plus works of prophecy; and the Ketuvim (“writings”), poetic and philosophical works such as the Psalms and the Book of Job.

The Christian Bible is divided into two parts. The first is called the Old Testament, containing the (minimum) 39 books of Hebrew Scripture, and the second portion is called the New Testament, containing a set of 27 books. The first four books of the New Testament form the Canonical gospels which recount the life of Christ and are central to the Christian faith.

Christian Bibles include the books of the Hebrew Bible, but arranged in a different order: Jewish Scripture ends with the people of Israel restored to Jerusalem and the temple and the Christian arrangement ends with the book of the prophet Malachi.

The oldest surviving Christian Bibles are Greek manuscripts from the 4th century; the oldest complete Jewish Bible is a Greek translation, also dating to the 4th century. The oldest complete manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic text) date from the Middle Ages.

During the three centuries following the establishment of Christianity in the 1st century, Church Fathers compiled Gospel accounts and letters of apostles into a Christian Bible which became known as the New Testament. The Old and New Testaments together are commonly referred to as “The Holy Bible” (τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια). The canonical composition of the Old Testament is under dispute between Christian groups: Protestants hold only the books of the Hebrew Bible to be canonical; Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox additionally consider the deuterocanonical books, a group of Jewish books, to be canonical. The New Testament is composed of the Gospels (“good news”), the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles (letters), and the Book of Revelation.

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2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy | Buy

Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with its editor Mikhail Katkov over issues that arose in the final installment; therefore, the novel’s first complete appearance was in book form.

Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, when he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a novel. The character of Anna was likely inspired, in part, by Maria Hartung (Russian spelling Maria Gartung, 1832–1919), the elder daughter of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Soon after meeting her at dinner, Tolstoy began reading Pushkin’s prose and once had a fleeting daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”, which proved to be the first intimation of Anna’s character.

Although Russian critics dismissed the novel on its publication as a “trifling romance of high life”, Fyodor Dostoevsky declared it to be “flawless as a work of art”. His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired “the flawless magic of Tolstoy’s style”, and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as “the best ever written”. The novel is currently enjoying popularity as demonstrated by a recent poll of 125 contemporary authors by J. Peder Zane, published in 2007 in The Top Ten, which declared that Anna Karenina is the “greatest novel ever written”.

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3. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert | Buy

Madame Bovary (1856) is Gustave Flaubert’s first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel’s true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously a perfectionist about his writing and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste (“the right word”).

The novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made the story notorious. After the acquittal on 7 February 1857, it became a bestseller when it was published as a book in April 1857, and now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written.

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4. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy | Buy

War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, Pre-reform Russian: «Война и миръ») is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and a well-known work of fiction. It is regarded as Tolstoy’s finest literary achievement, along with his other work Anna Karenina (1873–1877).

War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version of the novel, then known as The Year 1805, were serialized in the magazine The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869. Newsweek in 2009 ranked it top of its list of Top 100 Books.

Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle.”

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5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov | Buy

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, who becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze for whom his private nickname is Lolita.

After its publication, Nabokov’s Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name “Lolita” has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious girl. The novel was adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne.

Lolita is included on Time’s list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It is fourth on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.

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6. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain | Buy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective).

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics since its publication. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur “nigger”, despite strong arguments that the protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is in fact anti-racist.

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7. Hamlet by William Shakespeare | Buy

The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in the Kingdom of Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius for murdering the old King Hamlet (Claudius’s brother and Prince Hamlet’s father) and then succeeding to the throne and marrying Gertrude (the King Hamlet’s widow and mother of Prince Hamlet). The play vividly portrays real and feigned madness — from overwhelming grief to seething rage — and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

Three different early versions of the play have survived: these are known as the First Quarto (Q1), the Second Quarto (Q2) and the First Folio (F1). Each has lines, and even scenes, that are missing from the others. Shakespeare based Hamlet on the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. He may have also drawn on, or perhaps written, an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet.

The play’s structure and depth of characterization have inspired much critical scrutiny, of which one example is the centuries-old debate about Hamlet’s hesitation to kill his uncle. Some see it as a plot device to prolong the action, and others see it as the result of pressure exerted by the complex philosophical and ethical issues that surround cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge and thwarted desire. More recently, psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet’s unconscious desires, and feminist critics have re-evaluated and rehabilitated the often maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language. It has a story capable of “seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others.” During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the play was one of his most popular works, and it still ranks high among his most-performed, topping, for example, what eventually became the Royal Shakespeare Company’s list since 1879. It has inspired writers from Goethe and Dickens to Joyce and Murdoch, and has been described as “the world’s most filmed story after Cinderella”.

The title role was almost certainly created for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare’s time. In the four hundred years since, it has been performed by highly acclaimed actors and actresses from each successive age.

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8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald | Buy

The novel takes place following the First World War. American society enjoyed prosperity during the “roaring” 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a literary classic. The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and university courses on American literature in countries around the world and is ranked second in the list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century compiled by Modern Library, an American publishing company.

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9. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust | Buy

n Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the “episode of the madeleine.” The novel is widely referred to in English as Remembrance of Things Past but the title In Search of Lost Time, a literal rendering of the French, has gained in usage since D. J. Enright adopted it in his 1992 revision of the earlier translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. The complete story contains nearly 1.5 million words and is one of the longest novels in world literature.

The novel as it is known today began to take shape in 1909 and work continued for the remainder of Proust’s life, broken off only by his final illness and death in the autumn of 1922. The structure was established early on and the novel is complete as a work of art and a literary cosmos but Proust kept adding new material through his final years while editing one time after another for print; the final three volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages which existed in draft at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.

The work was published in France between 1913 and 1927; Proust paid for the publication of the first volume (by the Grasset publishing house) after it had been turned down by leading editors who had been offered the manuscript in longhand. Many of its ideas, motifs and scenes appear in adumbrated form in Proust’s unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (1896–99), though the perspective and treatment there are different and in his unfinished hybrid of philosophical essay and story, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908–09). The novel has had great influence on twentieth-century literature, whether because writers have sought to emulate it or attempted to parody and discredit some of its traits. Proust explores the themes of time, space and memory but the novel is above all a condensation of innumerable literary, structural, stylistic and thematic possibilities.

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10. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov | Buy

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Антон Павлович Чехов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf] ; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: “Medicine is my lawful wife”, he once said, “and literature is my mistress.”

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896; but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Uncle Vanya and premiered Chekhov’s last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a “theatre of mood” and a “submerged life in the text.”

Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

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11. Middlemarch by George Eliot | Buy

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her companion George Henry Lewes. During the following year Eliot resumed work, fusing together several stories into a coherent whole, and during 1871–72 the novel appeared in serial form. The first one-volume edition was published in 1874, and attracted large sales.

Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life,” the novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch during the period 1830–32. It has multiple plots with a large cast of characters, and in addition to its distinct though interlocking narratives it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, political reform, and education. The pace is leisurely, the tone is mildly didactic (with an authorial voice that occasionally bursts through the narrative), and the canvas is very broad.

Although it has some comical characters (Mr. Brooke, the “tiny aunt” Miss Noble) and comically named characters (Mrs. Dollop), Middlemarch is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters we become aware of various broad issues of the day: the Great Reform Bill, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV and the succession of his brother, the Duke of Clarence (who became King William IV). We learn something of the state of contemporary medical science. We also encounter the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome change.

The eight “books” which compose the novel are not autonomous entities, but merely reflect the form of the original serialisation. A short prelude introduces the idea of the latter-day St. Theresa, presaging the character Dorothea; a postscript or “finale” after the eighth book gives the post-novel fates of the main characters.

In general Middlemarch has retained its popularity and status as one of the masterpieces of English fiction, although some reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction at the destiny recorded for Dorothea. In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millet both remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea’s own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw; however, Virginia Woolf gave the book unstinting praise, describing Middlemarch as “the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have cited it as probably the greatest novel in the English language.

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Best Selling Books of All Time

1. Title: The Holy Bible c.  |  1451-55  |  More than 6 Billion
2. Author: Mao Tse-Tung  |  Quotations from Chairman Mao  |  1966  | 900,000,000
3. Noah Webster  |  The American Spelling Book  |  1783  |  Up to 100,000,000
4. Mark C. Young  |  Guiness Book of World Records  |  1955  |  More than 90,000,000
5. World Almanac Editors  |  World Almanac 1868  |  73,500,000
6. William Holmes McGuffey  |  The McGuffey Readers  |  1836  |  60,000,000
7. Benjamin Spock  |  The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care  |  1946  |  More than 50,000,000
8. Elbert Hubbard  |  A Message to Garcia  |  1899 |  More than 40,000,000
9. Charles Monroe Sheldon  |  In His Steps, What Would Jesus Do?  |  1896  |  More than 30.000,000
10. Jacqueline Susann  |  Valley of the Dolls  |  1966  |  More than 30,000,000

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