The BBC Named 100 Classic Books That Changed the World

Critics say these literary figures picked only the books they believe changed the world for the better, and ignored the ones that changed it for the worse.

This April the BBC opened nominations for "the 100 fictional stories that shaped thought and history." It went on to collect nominations from 108 literary figures in 35 countries, holding a wide range of positions: well-known critics, novelists, translators, writers, editors, journalists, scholars, and professors of literature and linguistics. The stories that made the final list come from 33 languages and include epics, novels, folk tales, plays, and films.

Unlike earlier lists, this one has two books by women in the top five, and 23 by women among the 100.

Critics say these literary figures picked only the books they believe changed the world for the better, and ignored the ones that changed it for the worse. Plenty of other people were simply glum that their favorite book didn't make it.

The BBC adds that this is not a definitive list, only a starting point. It is meant to get people talking about and reading these lasting classics, in the hope that readers find something of themselves and their own lives in them.

The ranking was decided mainly by how many nominations each book received; each nominator could name up to five. Ties were broken by total score, then alphabetically. In a second list, the BBC published every writer's individual picks. By the count, The Odyssey came first with 25 nominations, Uncle Tom's Cabin second with 16, and Frankenstein third with 15. Every book from 73rd down received the same number of nominations, and given the size of the sample those 28 books tell you little — so QDaily has pulled out the top 72 for readers.

1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th century BC)

The Odyssey may be the most widely circulated classic there is — almost anyone can quote a line or two. It follows Odysseus, the lost king of Ithaca, wandering for ten years after the war ends before he finally gets home. Homer's epic is full of romantic invention and thick with drama, and it lays out the whole range of human nature and a limitless imagination. Readers find something new in it every time. As for influence, the fantastical elements of this Homeric epic have become a source of inspiration for writers in nearly every field — Joyce built Ulysses on it (Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus) — and some in the field argue that The Odyssey laid the foundation for individualism in Western culture.

2. Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)

By describing the lives of Uncle Tom and other Black slaves in the American South, Uncle Tom's Cabin indicted the slavery of its day. In the social climate of the time it caused a violent stir, indirectly pushed the abolitionist movement forward, and became one of the fuses that set off the American Civil War.

"To think that the fuse of that huge war — the Civil War — turned out to be this small, lovable lady. She wrote a book, and it brewed a great victory." — Lincoln

3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)

This 1818 science-fiction novel deserves to be called the mother of the genre. It tells of Frankenstein, a biologist bent on discovering the origins of life, who takes parts from different corpses in a morgue, stitches them together and brings an enormous monster to life. The moment the monster opens its eyes, the man so fascinated by the origins of life bolts in terror — while the monster keeps demanding a mate, warmth and friendship from him. Through the exchanges between the two, Shelley shows the glory of human nature, its darkness and its turning points. Frankenstein has shaped countless science-fiction novels since.

4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)

"He loved Big Brother." This high point of dystopian, anti-totalitarian fiction has probably saved more than a few people.

5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)

Okonkwo, once a big man across nine neighboring villages, comes home after seven years of exile to find everything changed. The village has been knocked about by the new world the white men brought; more and more people take up the new faith and stop keeping the order of the old society. Okonkwo fights the strange newcomers on instinct, while watching the encroaching tide, powerless and low. After humiliation on humiliation, he kills a court official and hangs himself.

The ignorant, bloody old customs are washed away by the culture that has arrived, and Okonkwo's village sprouts all the systems that stand for modern civilization. The resistance of those who refuse to change is doomed to be futile. But should they be crudely and arbitrarily labeled uncivilized, immoral and ignorant under the new order and the new morality? Are they doomed to be spat on and forgotten?

The book tells the story of a weaker civilization dissolving bit by bit under globalization — representative, and hard to stop thinking about.

African media cheered when the book made the list.

6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th–18th century)

One Thousand and One Nights was the favorite of many childhoods. As the story goes, King Shahryar of Sasanian Persia was cruel and jealous by nature; when his queen misbehaved he had her killed, and after that took a new young wife every day and killed her the next morning, by way of revenge. To save the innocent women, the vizier's daughter Shahrazad volunteered to marry the king and held his attention by telling stories. On the first night, day broke just as she reached the best part. Her story caught the king's curiosity, so he made an exception and let her go on the following night. She kept telling stories for a thousand and one nights, until the king was finally moved: "I swear by the name of Allah, I have decided not to kill you — your stories have moved me. I will have them written down and kept forever." And so One Thousand and One Nights was born.

One Thousand and One Nights has a sprawling structure and superb plots. Given the culture of its time, some of the ideas its stories carry are not accepted by today's civilization. That has done nothing to diminish the book's greatness or its influence.

7. Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605–1615)

Romantic chivalry: laughed at by everyone, battered bloody, and still never turning back. The code of knighthood is out of its time and looks absurd, but it is Don Quixote's clear sight on his deathbed that feels like the real sorrow. His chivalric spirit has influenced countless people, and the book is taken as one of the works that define Romanticism.

8. Hamlet (Shakespeare, 1603)

Hot blood or contemplation — which do you trust? From beginning to end Hamlet swings between the urge to act and the hesitation of reason, and ends in emptiness and ruin. This classic Shakespearean tragedy has been loved from the day it was written, and Hamlet's "to be or not to be" has crossed time and place to reach countless people.

9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)

One Hundred Years of Solitude is about existence, and it also helped turn people away from a European viewpoint toward the rest of the world — it even shaped the image of Latin America.

One Hundred Years of Solitude coldly lays bare one fact: each time human beings try to go past their own limits to see and think clearly about where they stand, they get nothing but a deeper emptiness and helplessness. We struggle inside pointless knots and fall further into a bottomless pit; we struggle against solitude and are swallowed by it in the end. Every attempt at transcendence, every chase after the final questions, comes to nothing.

10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th century BC)

The other Homeric epic. Like The Odyssey it is set against the Trojan War, but it stays much closer to the fighting. The Iliad carves out a war of the age fought for honor and dignity, played out together by the Greek hero Achilles and the fearless prince Hector. The way it gives the gods human form has likewise shaped countless works of literature since.

11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)

The novel is based on a true event. So that her daughter would not live out a slave's fate again, Sethe, a Black slave, kills the infant Beloved — who has only just learned to crawl — during their escape. But Beloved comes back to the world as a spirit and wrecks at will the ordinary life Sethe reached with such difficulty.

"Your love is too thick."

12. The Divine Comedy (Dante, 1308–1320)

Three books in all, and Virgil's salvation. Life and death, mystery and God. The humanist spirit on show.

13. Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, 1597)

A love tragedy that cannot be crossed.

14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, 22nd–10th century BC)

The world's first epic. Gilgamesh comes back empty-handed from a hard search for the law of life.

"You attained it through your own seeking, on your own path, through thought, through meditation, through knowledge, through enlightenment — not through teachings. No one is delivered by teachings." — Siddhartha

15. The Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling, 1997–2007)

The youngest set of books on the whole list.

The Rest of the Books

16. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)

The Handmaid's Tale tells of a supposed utopia in which women are stripped of every equal right and reduced to appendages of men. Last year's television adaptation was widely praised.

17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)

The defining work of stream-of-consciousness fiction, and a history of the fight between censorship and its opponents.

18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)

"Some animals are born more equal than others."

19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)

Female dignity, and a deep love.

20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)

What Madame Bovary does may at bottom be a refusal of meaninglessness. Existentialist thought put into practice.

21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321–1323)

22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng'en, c. 1592)

23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866)

24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)

25. Water Margin (Shi Nai'an, 1589)

26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865–1867)

27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)

28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)

29. Aesop's Fables (Aesop, c. 620–560 BC)

30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)

31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)

32. The Mahabharata (Vyasa, 4th century BC)

33. King Lear (Shakespeare, 1608)

34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)

35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe, 1774)

36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)

37. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust, 1913–1927)

38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)

39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)

40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)

41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)

42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)

43. The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1921–1922)

44. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)

45. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873–1877)

46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)

47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)

48. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)

49. Oedipus Rex (Sophocles, 429 BC)

50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)

51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th century BC)

52. Cinderella (author and date unknown)

53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)

54. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)

(tied) Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871–1872)

56. Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)

57. The Butterfly Lovers (folk tale, various versions)

58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)

59. The Panchatantra (Vishnu Sharma, c. 300 BC)

60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Machado de Assis, 1881)

61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)

62. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell, 1914)

63. Song of Lawino (Okot p'Bitek, 1966)

64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)

65. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)

66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988)

67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)

68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)

69. The Ramayana (Valmiki, 11th century BC)

70. Antigone (Sophocles, 441 BC)

71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)

72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969)

Cover image: GIPHY