The Best Book of the Past 125 Years, According To NYT Book Review Readers

An anonymous reader quotes a summary from Boing Boing, written by David Pescovitz:

This year marked the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review. To celebrate, the editors asked readers to nominate "the best book published" in those 125 years. They culled 200,000 ballots down to the top 25 most-nominated titles and called for a vote. The winner? Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Here are the four runners-up:

  1. The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
  2. 1984 by George Orwell
  3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    5 Beloved by Toni Morrison
    “Three writers – John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner – received nominations for seven of their books,” reports the New York Times. “Other popular authors included James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf, who each had five books nominated. And readers nominated four of Joan Didion’s books: ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’ ‘The White Album’ and ‘Play It as It Lays.’”

Would you agree with the number one pick? Is there a book worthy of this accolade that New York Times readers missed?

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Nice article. Now I have a new list of books to read this year. Happy New Year