Happy National Read a Book Day!

Online Computer Library Center

OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, has shared a list of the Top 100 novels of all time found in libraries around the world. Buzzfeed put together a quiz to see how many of the top 100 novels of all time you’ve read. Take the quiz here!

New York Times Book Review

Below is a complete list of the 10 best books of the year, as selected by the New York Times Book Revieweditors since 1968. How many of the greats have you read?

Titles	Order
Anti-Memoirs by Andre Malraux	1968
A Cab at the Door by V. S. Pritchett	1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 1. An Age Like This: 1920-1940 by George Orwell	1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 2. My Country Right or Left: 1940-1943 by George Orwell	1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 4. In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950 by George Orwell	1968
Confessions of a Disloyal European by Jan Myrdal	1968
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson	1968
The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1968
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs by John Berryman	1968
Lytton Strachey: A Biography by Michael Holroyd	1968
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer	1968
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver	1968
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village by Ronald Blythe	1969
Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Céline	1969
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford	1969
Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence by Erik H. Erikson	1969
Huey Long by T. Harry Williams	1969
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth	1969
Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department by Dean Acheson	1969
The Science of Freedom by Peter Gay	1969
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut	1969
Them by Joyce Carol Oates	1969
Bech: A Book by John Updike	1970
City Life by Donald Barthelme	1970
Cocteau: A Biography by Francis Steegmuller	1970
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology by Alvin W. Gouldner	1970
Crisis In The Classroom, The Remaking of American Education by Charles E. Silberman	1970
Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer	1970
Jefferson the President: First Term 1801-1805 by Dumas Malone	1970
Losing Battles by Eudora Welty	1970
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez	1970
Roosevelt: the Soldier of Freedom by James MacGregor Burns	1970
Sexual Politics: A Surprising Examination of Society’s Most Arbitrary Folly by Kate Millett	1970
Zelda: A Biography by Nancy Milford	1970
Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem	1971
Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash	1971
The European Discovery of America: Vol 1: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500-1600 by Samuel Eliot Morison	1971
The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy by Richard Morris Titmuss	1971
Rabbit Redux by John Updike	1971
Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York by Edmund Wilson	1971
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot	1971
The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War by Robert Manson Myers	1972
The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir	1972
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald	1972
Henry James: The Master, 1901-1916 by Leon Edel	1972
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls	1972
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon	1973
Macaulay, the Shaping of the Historian by John Clive	1973
The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing	1973
All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengarten	1974
Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity by Howard E. Gruber	1974
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone	1974
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1974
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One, Parts I-II) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1974
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese	1974
Something Happened by Joseph Heller	1974
Watership Down by Richard Adams	1974
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller	1975
The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme	1975
Edith Wharton: A Biography by R. W. B. Lewis	1975
Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen	1975
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux	1975
Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul	1975
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume Two, Parts III-IV) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1975
Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow	1975
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 by David Brion Davis	1975
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow	1975
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke	1975
The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945 by Lucy S. Dawidowicz	1975
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could by Leonard Michaels	1975
Andre malraux, une vie dans le siecle by Jean Lacouture	1976
The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez	1976
Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic	1976
The damnable question: A history of Anglo-Irish relations by George Dangerfield	1976
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories by Vladimir Nabokov	1976
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates	1976
Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell	1976
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala	1976
October Light by John Gardner	1976
Roots by Alex Haley	1976
Speedboat by Renata Adler	1976
To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account by Saul Bellow	1976
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim	1976
A Voice from the Chorus by Andrei Sinyavsky	1976
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston	1976
Women of Shadows: A Study of the Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy by Ann Cornelisen	1976
World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe	1976
Afterimages by Arlene Croce	1977
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion	1977
Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys	1977
Coming into the Country by John McPhee	1977
Day by Day by Robert Lowell	1977
Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet by James Atlas	1977
Dispatches by Michael Herr	1977
Every child’s birthright: In defense of mothering by Selma Fraiberg	1977
Falconer by John Cheever	1977
Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties by Morris Dickstein	1977
The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev by V. S. Pritchett	1977
India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul	1977
Letters on literature and politics, 1912-1972 by Edmund Wilson	1977
On Photography by Susan Sontag	1977
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 by David McCullough	1977
Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing by Richard Poirier	1977
Samuel Johnson by W. Jackson Bate	1977
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison	1977
Staying On by Paul Scott	1977
The Coup by John Updike	1978
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault	1978
E. M. Forster: A Life by P. N. Furbank	1978
The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews by Eudora Welty	1978
The Facts of Life by Maureen Howard	1978
Final Payments by Mary Gordon	1978
The Flounder by Günter Grass	1978
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin	1978
Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills	1978
Lying Low by Diane Johnson	1978
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne	1978
Stories by Doris Lessing	1978
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever	1978
Trotsky by Irving Howe	1978
The World According to Garp by John Irving	1978
Wrinkles by Charles Simmons	1978
A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul	1979
The Boer War by Thomas Pakenham	1979
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch	1979
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov	1979
The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson	1979
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer	1979
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth	1979
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter	1979
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor	1979
King of the Jews by Leslie Epstein	1979
The man who kept the secrets: Richard Helms & the CIA by Thomas Powers	1979
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris	1979
Sideshow by William Shawcross	1979
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick	1979
Too Far to Go by John Updike	1979
The White Album by Joan Didion	1979
White House Years by Henry A. Kissinger	1979
China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston	1980
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century by John Boswell	1980
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty	1980
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century by Ian Watt	1980
The cost of good intentions : New York City and the liberal experiment, 1960-1975 by Charles R. Morris	1980
Falling in Place by Ann Beattie	1980
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino	1980
Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow	1980
Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch	1980
Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 by Barbara Novak	1980
Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan	1980
Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, New and Expanded Edition by James H. Jones	1981
The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley	1981
A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone	1981
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution by Jonathan D. Spence	1981
Haydn : chronicle and works / Haydn : the years of ‘The creation’, 1796-1800 by H.C. Robbins Landon	1981
Haydn : the early years, 1732-1765 by H.C. Robbins Landon	1981
Haydn at Eszterhaza, 1766-1790 (Haydn : Chronicle and Works) by H.C. Robbins Landon	1981
Haydn in England 1791-1795 (Haydn : Chronicle and Works) by H.C. Robbins Landon	1981
Haydn the Late Years, 1801-1809. (Haydn: Chronicles and Works, Volume 5) by H.C. Robbins Landon	1981
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson	1981
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie	1981
Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi by Jonathan Raban	1981
Philosophical Explanations by Robert Nozick	1981
Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number by Jacobo Timerman	1981
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike	1981
The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas	1981
World Without End by Francine du Plessix Gray	1981
Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth	1981
Aké: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka	1982
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa	1982
Bech is Back by John Updike	1982
Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood by Kate Simon	1982
The Burning House by Ann Beattie	1982
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler	1982
The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell	1982
Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman	1982
Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally	1982
Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1949-1953 by Robert J. Donovan	1982
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee	1982
Years of Upheaval by Henry Kissinger	1982
The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth	1983
Attlee by Kenneth Harris	1983
Cathedral by Raymond Carver	1983
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez	1983
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase	1983
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism by John Updike	1983
Ironweed by William J. Kennedy	1983
Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Perennial Classics) by Paul Johnson	1983
The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro	1983
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco	1983
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House by Seymour M. Hersh	1983
The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh	1983
The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry by Paul Starr	1983
Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman	1984
Deadly gambits : the Reagan administration and the stalemate in nuclear arms control by Strobe Talbott	1984
Education of the Senses by Peter Gay	1984
Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories by Saul Bellow	1984
In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Elisabeth Griffith	1984
Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee	1984
Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella by E. L. Doctorow	1984
Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips	1984
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence	1984
The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience by William Shawcross	1984
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera	1984
Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet by Paul Zweig	1984
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa	1984
With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson by Mary Catherine Bateson	1984
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 by David S. Wyman	1985
All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran by Gary Sick	1985
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas	1985
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes	1985
Footsteps: adventures of a romantic biographer by Richard Holmes	1985
House by Tracy Kidder	1985
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich	1985
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White by Joseph Lelyveld	1985
Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino	1985
The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court : Stories by Peter Taylor	1985
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi	1985
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land by David K. Shipler	1986
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez	1986
Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid by William Finnegan	1986
FDR: New York Years 1928-1933 by Kenneth S. Davis	1986
FDR: The New Deal Years 1933-1937 by Kenneth S. Davis	1986
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood	1986
John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 by Robert Skidelsky	1986
The Life of Langston Hughes. Volume 1, 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad	1986
A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture by Michael Kammen	1986
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks	1986
Out of India: Selected Stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala	1986
A Perfect Spy by John le Carré	1986
The Progress of Love by Alice Munro	1986
Roger’s Version by John Updike	1986
Saint and Strangers (Black Venus) by Angela Carter	1986
The Vanished Imam: Musa Al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon by Fouad Ajami	1986
Velazquez: Painter and Courtier by Jonathan Brown	1986
Whites by Norman Rush	1986
An Arrow in the Wall: Selected Poetry and Prose by Andrei Voznesensky	1987
Beloved by Toni Morrison	1987
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe	1987
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick	1987
The Counterlife by Philip Roth	1987
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture In the Golden Age by Simon Schama	1987
Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903-1939 by Martin Stannard	1987
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes	1987
The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica by Stephen J. Pyne	1987
Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng	1987
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes	1987
More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow	1987
Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes	1987
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy by William Julius Wilson	1987
Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 by Bob Woodward	1987
World’s End by T. C. Boyle	1987
Arabesques by Anton Shammas	1988
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson	1988
Bernard Shaw, Volume 1: 1856-1898; The Search for Love by Michael Holroyd	1988
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking — not in English Common Knowledge	1988
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan	1988
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris	1988
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words {unspecified Editions} by Milorad Pavić	1988
Libra by Don DeLillo	1988
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez	1988
The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography by Ingmar Bergman	1988
Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution by Leonard W. Levy	1988
Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch	1988
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy	1988
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey	1988
The Tenants of Time by Thomas Flanagan	1988
Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver	1988
Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow	1989
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama	1989
Federico García Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson	1989
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman	1989
Harold Macmillan: Volume 1: 1894-1956 by Alistair Horne	1989
Harold Macmillan: Volume 2: 1957-1986 by Alistair Horne	1989
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes	1989
How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War by Donald Cameron Watt	1989
If the River Was Whiskey by T. C. Boyle	1989
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin	1989
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro	1989
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie	1989
The Shawl: A Story and Novella by Cynthia Ozick	1989
Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair by Padraig O’Malley	1990
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova	1990
Friend of My Youth: Stories by Alice Munro	1990
Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T.E. Lawrence by Jeremy Wilson	1990
London Fields by Martin Amis	1990
My Son’s Story by Nadine Gordimer	1990
Omeros by Derek Walcott	1990
Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt	1990
Rabbit at Rest by John Updike	1990
The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence	1990
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography by Deirdre Bair	1990
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien	1990
Tropical Gangsters: One Man’s Experience With Development And Decadence In Deepest Africa by Robert Klitgaard	1990
Vladimir Nabokov: the Russian years by Brian Boyd	1990
Complete Collected Stories by V. S. Pritchett	1991
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett	1991
Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory by Lawrence L. Langer	1991
The Journals Of John Cheever by John Cheever	1991
A Life of Picasso, Volume 1: 1881-1906 by John Richardson	1991
Mating by Norman Rush	1991
Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman	1991
The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev	1991
Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria by William Trevor	1991
Wartime Lies: A Novel by Louis Begley	1991
The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today by Helena Cronin	1992
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje	1992
Jazz by Toni Morrison	1992
Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson	1992
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America by Garry Wills	1992
The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France by W. S. Merwin	1992
Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone	1992
Regeneration by Pat Barker	1992
Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean	1992
Across the Bridge by Mavis Gallant	1993
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan	1993
Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas	1993
Collected Stories by William Trevor	1993
The Fate of the Elephant by Douglas H. Chadwick	1993
The Island: Three Tales by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński	1993
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson	1993
Judge On Trial by Ivan Klima	1993
The Last Panda by George B. Schaller	1993
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick	1993
Mazurka for Two Dead Men by Camilo José Cela	1993
A Moment of War by Laurie Lee	1993
Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy by John Gross	1993
Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner	1993
Balzac: A Biography by Graham Robb	1994
Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas	1994
A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis	1994
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien	1994
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker	1994
The Moral Animal : Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright	1994
Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson	1994
Open Secrets by Alice Munro	1994
Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 by David Holloway	1994
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race (Owl Books) by David Levering Lewis	1994
A Way in the World by V. S. Naipaul	1994
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism by Tina Rosenberg	1995
In confidence : Moscow’s ambassador to American’s six Cold War presidents by Anatoly Dobrynin	1995
Independence Day by Richard Ford	1995
The Information by Martin Amis	1995
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco	1995
The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II: 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry	1995
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald	1995
Overcoming Law by Richard A. Posner	1995
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth	1995
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov	1995
Zola: A Life by Frederick Brown	1995
After Rain: Stories by William Trevor	1996
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt	1996
Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban	1996
The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant	1996
The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller by Cary Reich	1996
Selected Stories by Alice Munro	1996
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen	1996
American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier	1997
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald	1997
Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest by Adrian Desmond	1997
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer	1997
Mason & Dixon: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon	1997
The Puttermesser papers by Cynthia Ozick	1997
Toward the End of Time by John Updike	1997
Underworld by Don DeLillo	1997
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee	1997
The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report by Timothy Ferris	1997
Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore	1998
Cloudsplitter: A Novel by Russell Banks	1998
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard A. Fortey	1998
The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro	1998
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver	1998
Preston Falls: A Novel by David Gates	1998
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow	1998
To End a War by Richard Holbrooke	1998
The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling	1998
Victor Hugo: A Biography by Graham Robb	1998
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch	1998
An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton by Richard A. Posner	1999
Close Range by Annie Proulx	1999
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 by Richard Holmes	1999
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee	1999
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio	1999
The First World War by John Keegan	1999
Headlong by Michael Frayn	1999
Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse	1999
Reading the Holocaust by Inga Clendinnen	1999
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman	1999
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle	1999
Being Dead by Jim Crace	2000
Beowulf by Beowulf Poet	Seamus Heaney translation, 2000
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley	2000
Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike	2000
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers	2000
The Human Stain by Philip Roth	2000
One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate by Tom Segev	2000
Rimbaud: A Biography by Graham Robb	2000
Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War by Frances FitzGerald	2000
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald	2001
Borrowed Finery: A Memoir by Paula Fox	2001
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen	2001
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro	2001
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead	2001
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand	2001
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey	2001
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks	2001
Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter	2002
Atonement by Ian McEwan	2002
Bad blood by Lorna Sage	2002
Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides	2002
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan	2002
Roscoe by William Kennedy	2002
Seeing in the dark by Timothy Ferris	2002
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander	2003
Brick Lane by Monica Ali	2003
Drop City by T. C. Boyle	2003
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem	2003
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman	2003
The Known World by Edward P. Jones	2003
Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez	2003
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc	2003
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow	2004
Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan	2004
The Master by Colm Tóibín	2004
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth	2004
Runaway by Alice Munro	2004
Snow by Orhan Pamuk	2004
War Trash by Ha Jin	2004
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer	2005
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami	2005
de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens	2005
The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece by Jonathan Harr	2005
On Beauty by Zadie Smith	2005
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt	2005
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld	2005
Saturday by Ian McEwan	2005
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill	2005
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion	2005
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart	2006
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel	2006
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud	2006
Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni	2006
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford	2006
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright	2006
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick	2006
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan	2006
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart	2006
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl	2006
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran	2007
Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish	2007
Man Gone Down: A Novel by Michael Thomas	2007
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin	2007
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Colley	2007
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson	2007
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross	2007
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño	2007
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris	2007
Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson	2007
2666 by Roberto Bolaño	2008
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser	2008
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer	2008
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins	2008
A Mercy by Toni Morrison	2008
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill	2008
Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes	2008
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library) by Drew Gilpin Faust	2008
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri	2008
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French	2008
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes	2009
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy	2009
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem	2009
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore	2009
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel	2009
Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls	2009
Lit by Mary Karr	2009
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed	2009
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka	2009
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert	2009
Apollo’s Angels : A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans	2010
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff	2010
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee	2010
Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim	2010
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen	2010
The New Yorker stories by Ann Beattie	2010
Room by Emma Donoghue	2010
Selected Stories by William Trevor	2010
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan	2010
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson	2010
11/22/63 by Stephen King	2011
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens by Christopher Hitchens	2011
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach	2011
The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son by Ian Brown	2011
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable	2011
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell	2011
Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson	2011
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman	2011
The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht	2011
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman	2011
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel	2012
Building Stories by Chris Ware — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
NW: A Novel by Zadie Smith — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers — not in English Common Knowledge	2012
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie	Fiction, 2013
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner	Fiction, 2013
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt	Fiction, 2013
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson	Fiction, 2013
Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders	Fiction, 2013
After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder	Nonfiction, 2013
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker	Nonfiction, 2013
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink	Nonfiction, 2013
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark	Nonfiction, 2013
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala	Nonfiction, 2013
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr	Fiction, 2014
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill	Fiction, 2014
Euphoria by Lily King	Fiction, 2014
Family Life by Akhil Sharma	Fiction, 2014
Redeployment by Phil Klay	Fiction, 2014
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast	Nonfiction, 2014
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss	Nonfiction, 2014
Penelope Fitzgerald: a life by Hermione Lee	Nonfiction, 2014
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert	Nonfiction, 2014
Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp by Lawrence Wright	Nonfiction, 2014
The Door by Magda Szabó	Fiction, 2015
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin	Fiction, 2015
Outline by Rachel Cusk	Fiction, 2015
The Sellout by Paul Beatty	Fiction, 2015
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante	Fiction, 2015
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates	Nonfiction, 2015
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert	Nonfiction, 2015
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald	Nonfiction, 2015
The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf	Nonfiction, 2015
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad	Nonfiction, 2015
The Association of Small Bombs: A Novel by Karan Mahajan	Fiction, 2016
The North Water by Ian McGuire	Fiction, 2016
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead	Fiction, 2016
The Vegetarian by Han Kang	Fiction, 2016
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans	Fiction, 2016
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell	Nonfiction, 2016
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer	Nonfiction, 2016
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond	Nonfiction, 2016
In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi	Nonfiction, 2016
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar	Nonfiction, 2016
Autumn by Ali Smith	Fiction, 2017
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid	Fiction, 2017
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee	Fiction, 2017
The Power by Naomi Alderman	Fiction, 2017
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward	Fiction, 2017
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us by Richard O. Prum	Nonfiction, 2017
Grant by Ron Chernow	Nonfiction, 2017
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr.	Nonfiction, 2017
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser	Nonfiction, 2017
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood	Nonfiction, 2017
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday	Fiction, 2018
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai	Fiction, 2018
The Perfect Nanny: A Novel by Leïla Slimani	Fiction, 2018
There There by Tommy Orange	Fiction, 2018
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan	Fiction, 2018
American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer	Nonfiction, 2018
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover	Nonfiction, 2018
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight	Nonfiction, 2018
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan	Nonfiction, 2018
Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs	Nonfiction, 2018

Links to the lists on the NYT website:

2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995 | 1994 | 1993 | 1992 | 1991 | 1990 | 1989 | 1988 | 1987 | 1985 | 1984 | 1983 | 1982 | 1981