GMG's 100 Most Important Books Ever Written!

[Todd]

If we get to add more titles, then clearly the Koran, mentioned earlier, should be added.  Since I was not first to mention it, and I'd like my three, I'd also like to throw in the Bhagavad Gita, and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes. 

[Opus106]

I'd also like to throw in the Bhagavad Gita.

Why not go the whole distance and include the Mahābhārata itself? It is, after all, the longest epic ever written.

[offbeat]

MMMMM most important to who
Anyway my choice
Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys 

[Opus106]

Dave, is this allowed: the Dictionary? (Not language-specific... just any dictionary.)

[springrite]

Dave, is this allowed: the Dictionary? (Not language-specific... just any dictionary.)

Even the Devil's Dictionary?

[karlhenning]

The OED (a suggestion; I'm all voted out, so to speak)

Even the Devil's Dictionary?

A good book (if not The Good Book) . . . one of the 100 Most Imp. ever written? Interesting hypothesis . . . .

[AndyD.]

The OED (a suggestion; I'm all voted out, so to speak)
 
A good book (if not The Good Book) . . . one of the 100 Most Imp. ever written? Interesting hypothesis . . . .

Ambrose Bierce? Very entertaining.

[karlhenning]

Ambrose Bierce? Very entertaining.

Yes. The Devil's Dictionary must certainly be the 101^st Most Important Book Ever Written ; )

[Todd]

Why not go the whole distance and include the Mahābhārata itself? It is, after all, the longest epic ever written.

Sounds good to me.

[Opus106]

Even the Devil's Dictionary?

I suppose not. I hadn't heard of the book before, but sounds interesting enough to read.

The OED (a suggestion; I'm all voted out, so to speak)
 
A good book (if not The Good Book) . . . one of the 100 Most Imp. ever written? Interesting hypothesis . . . .

As I said, I don't want to restrict it to any particular language. (And given recent reports, future editions of the OED might not be available in book form.) But putting it that way, it becomes very vague and resembles more of an "idea" than one or more bound volumes of dead trees. (Perhaps saying "the first ever dictionary" makes it more concrete?) But dictionaries certainly deserve their place in history.

[karlhenning]

So . . . Mr Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), then?  Certainly ranks in importance worthy of the list; it is The Mother of all Dictionaries.

[Opus106]

I will stick to the vague concept.

[karlhenning]

Vague concepts, and lists, do not really mix.

But I respect your efforts! : )

[MN Dave]

Andy, you've already had your three choices, you naughty boy.

Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil
Ulysses
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Charles Darwin-On the Origin of Species
Dhammapada - Buddha
Elements (consider it as one book in thirteen volumes) - Euclid
The Bible
Everyone Poops - Taro Gomi
Prose Edda
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead
The C Programming Language, Kerninghan and Ritchie (1978)
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy - War and Peace
Dostoevsky 'Crime and Punishment'
Simon Vestdijk, De kellner en de levenden
The Rights of Man:  Thomas Paine
Immanuel Kant "Critique of Pure Reason"
James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock - The Calculus of Consent
Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
Niccolo Machiavelli - Il Principe
The Communist Manifesto; Marx/Engels
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
The GULAG Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn
The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis
Dostoevsky The Idiot
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Mary Wollstonecraft)
The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
Principia - Isaac Newton
Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo (Galileo Galilei)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Andreas Vesalius)
PG Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective
Zola, Germinal
Shakespeare's Collected works
Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
"The Master and Margarita", Mikhael Bulgakov
John Ruskin: Modern Painters
The Rupert Bear Annual
Aristotle, Opera Omnia
Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Albert Einstein, Collected Works
Boswell Life of Johnson
Euripides The Bacchae
Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit
Thomas Mann Magic Mountain
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Edward R. Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
John James Audubon: Birds of America
Divine Comedy - Dante
collected Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Franz Kafka The Trial
Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo
Suetonius: The 12 Caesars
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Nabokov's Pale Fire
To Kill A Mockingbird-Harper Lee
All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriot
Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Clock without Hands.  Carson McCullers.
William Blake Jerusalem (original illuminated version, not just the text)
Samuel Beckett: Collected Works
Sigmund Freud: Collected Works
Cervantes - Don Quijote
Goethe - Faust
Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-Roald Dahl
Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Koran
Mahābhārata
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys
THE DICTIONARY
(80)

[MN Dave]

Regarding collections, I have no idea. Maybe if they've ever been bound between only two covers we can include them.

[Opus106]

THE DICTIONARY
(80)

w00t!

[karlhenning]

Regarding collections, I have no idea. Maybe if they've ever been bound between only two covers we can include them.

Shakespeare's good to go, then: The Riverside Shakespeare.

[MN Dave]

Has everyone who's going to play picked three books?

[karlhenning]

Who can answer?

[knight66]

Dave, You are not going to tell us that you neglected to rtetain the poster's names along with their selections!

I have had my three, to remind you.........

Peyton Place
The Bunty Annual 1972
The Genius of Mozart by Rob Newman

Mike