Is 'Don Quixote' the No. 1 book of all time?

Yesterday, I posted The Guardian’s “100 Greatest Non-fiction Books” list and while looking around The Guardian’s site (guardian.co.uk) I saw another “best-of” recommended reading list they compiled called “The Top 100 Books of All Time.”

Originally posted on May 8, 2002, this list was compiled by the Norwegian Book Clubs, which polled 100 authors in 54 countries. Each author was asked to nominate 10 books “which have had the most decisive impact on the cultural history of the world and left a mark on the author’s own thinking.”

“Don Quixote” was named the No. 1 book of all time, but no rankings were otherwise provided.

Here’s the complete list.

1984 by George Orwell
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Aeneid by Virgil
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
Blindness by Jose Saramago
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Job
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Complete Poems by Giacomo Leopardi
The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
Gilgamesh
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
History by Elsa Morante
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Idiot by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
The Iliad by Homer, Greece
Independent People by Halldor K Laxness
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Mahabharata
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Mathnawi by Jalal ad-din Rumi
Medea by Euripides
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Njaals Saga
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
The Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus the King Sophocles
Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Orchard by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi
Othello by William Shakespeare
Juan Rulfo by Pedro Paramo Juan Rulfo
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Poems by Paul Celan
The Possessed by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Ramayana by Valmiki
The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Selected Stories by Anton P Chekhov
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
The Stranger by Albert Camus, France
The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Thousand and One Nights
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Trial by Franz Kafka, Bohemia
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Ulysses by James Joyce
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

In the end, how many of these books have you had a chance to read? Which did you like or dislike? Which would you recommend and why? Do you think “Don Quixote” is the No. 1 book of all time? Let us know in the comments section below.