In early 2010 Harvard Book Store employees worked together to come up with a list of our favorite books. Each staff member submitted a list of their favorite books of all time, in (rough) order of preference. Their selections were then weighted according to the order and the results were tabulated. It was by no means a perfect system, but it was the best way we could think of to quantify opinions that are in no way quantifiable.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
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For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
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Leaves of Grass: The First by Walt Whitman
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
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Breakfast of Champions: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
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Beloved by Toni Morrison
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Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
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A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel by John Irving
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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
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Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
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Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
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Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Editon by Anne Frank
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
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The Bell Jar (P.S.) by Sylvia Plath
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I, Claudius by Robert Graves
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Hamlet by William Shakespeare
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The Histories by Herodotus
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Moby-Dick: or, The Whale by Herman Melville
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
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Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
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The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text by William Faulkner
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion
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If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
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Dubliners by James Joyce
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Midnight’s Children: A Novel by Salman Rushdie
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White Noise by Don DeLillo
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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
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Watchmen by Alan Moore
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Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
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In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
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Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random… by Tracy Kidder
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass / the Subtle Knife / the Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt, Jr. Vonnegut
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Dealing with Dragons: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Book One by Patricia C. Wrede
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
Shadow & Claw: The First Half of ‘The Book of the New Sun’ by Gene Wolfe
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew/The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe/The Horse and H by C.S. Lewis
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Jayber Crow: A Novel by Wendell Berry
Little, Big by John Crowley
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life by Dennis Tedlock
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Drown by Junot Diaz
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
The Odyssey by Homer
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random… by Tracy Kidder
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass / the Subtle Knife / the Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt, Jr. Vonnegut
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Dealing with Dragons: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Book One by Patricia C. Wrede
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
Shadow & Claw: The First Half of ‘The Book of the New Sun’ by Gene Wolfe
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew/The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe/The Horse and H by C.S. Lewis
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Jayber Crow: A Novel by Wendell Berry
Little, Big by John Crowley
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life by Dennis Tedlock
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Drown by Junot Diaz
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
The Odyssey by Homer
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
