Voting starts May 22 and ends October 2018.  See link for more of the 100 nominees.

 

I'm about this but do wish they had done it by categories or even time periods (I.e., published before 1900, before 1950, before 2000, type of splits).  I agree that those are 100 of the most read, most popular and even most influential books.

 

I just mean it's weird seeing beloved childhood books like Charlotte's Web and Anne of Green Gables up against Carch 22, Then There Were None, and long running contemporary series like Alex Cross and Wheel of Time?

 

Then the hordes of fans for Twilight, Fifty Shades of Gray, Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter  ...

 

(I am not at all disrespecting Harry Potter; frankly I think those books are responsible for an entire generation of readers.  It's just weird to see it up against the other nominees.)

 

How would you vote -- a childhood favorite that made you a reader or your favorite recent read?

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

This book is probably my Catcher in the Rye (I didn't read Catcher in the Rye until I was an adult and I didn't like it).

 

I read this the day after I received it in class junior year of high school. I only remembered the ending and the scene where Phineas breaks the school swimming record. Somehow those two events became my whole memory of this book.

 

Rereading it ten years later, it was difficult for me to remember what drew me in when I was 17. The story is solid if definitely dated. There are several slurs thrown around and the term holocaust is used with shocking casualness.

 

I don't think I'll ever feel the same way about this book that I did when I was 17. Maybe I was sixteen when I read it. There's a good passage about being sixteen in the book. But I'll probably keep it around for the nostalgia factor.

J'ai retrouvé dans ce livre beaucoup d'autres, quelque chose du Cercle des Poètes disparus et du Maître des illusions, le tout accompagné, au fil d'une amitié extrêmement forte aux sentiments de rivalités assez forts... On retrouve le côté strict d'un collège américain, l'amitié forte entre ses membres, ... Le livre est intéressant, tragique aussi, se construisant lentement mais sûrement vers la fin.

Je reste souvent dubitatif avec les "classiques", je crois que c'est un peu la même chose pour celui ci. Si j'y ai retrouvé une certaine beauté, une douceur, des sentiments intéressants, il n'a pour moi pas la même force que certains autres livres du même acabit que j'ai pu lire (comme Le Cercle des Poètes disparus par exemple). Le livre reste très bien écrit, l'histoire et les protagonistes sont intéressants, mais ce n'est pas un coup de coeur.

I went through a phase where I went to the used bookstore once or twice a week and bought a few books every time and Shock of all Shocks I bought things I didn't end up reading. What is actually shocking is I still have some of these books lurking around. Ten Years Later. Any who, I've moved many times and have been dragging these around things around with me and no big surprise I'm not really interested in them anymore but at the same time I can't not read them at this point, I've been carrying them around too long.  I'm also currently working on fixing some of my high school reading failings. So I went down to the bookshelf and picked off the books that fit those two categories (and 5 Agatha Christie books that I can't remember if I bought new or used but associate with ages 14-17).  Basically what I'm saying is I pulled 12 books of my bookshelf and my TBR just grew with books I'm mostly not thrilled about.