Book Magazine's The Best of Bookish Characters

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Voila, another list to wrangle over. This time it is other people’s choices of the 100 "best" characters in fiction since 1900. Chosen by a panel appointed by Book magazine, the list leaves loads of room for impassioned disagreement—what constitutes "best," anyway? The panelists include authors, editors, academics and actors, Michael York and Rod Steiger among them, and the outcome is eclectic and fun. Read on.

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  1. 1.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  2. 2.
    The Catcher in the Rye

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  3. 3.
    Lolita
    by Vladimir Nabokov

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  4. 4.
    Ulysses (Vintage International)
    by James Joyce

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  5. 5.
    Rabbit, Run
    by John Updike

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  6. 6.
    The Hound of the Baskervilles (Signet Classics)
    by Arthur Conan Doyle

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  7. 7.
    To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee

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  8. 8.
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    by James Joyce

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  9. 9.
    The House of Mirth (Signet Classics)
    by Edith Wharton

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  10. 11.

  11. 12.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison

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  12. 13.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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  13. 14.
    Mrs. Dalloway
    by Virginia Woolf

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  14. 15.
    A Confederacy of Dunces (Evergreen Book)
    by John Kennedy Toole

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  15. 16.
    Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
    by John le Carre

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  16. 17.
    To the Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf

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  17. 18.
    Native Son (Perennial Classics)
    by Richard A. Wright

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  18. 19.
    In Our Time
    by Ernest Hemingway

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  19. 20.
    Catch 22
    by Joseph Heller

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  20. 21.
    Gone with the Wind
    by Margaret Mitchell

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  21. 22.
    The Big Sleep
    by Raymond Chandler

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  22. 23.
    Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Joseph Conrad

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  23. 24.
    The Remains of the Day
    by Kazuo Ishiguro

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  24. 25.
    The Baron in the Trees
    by Italo Calvino

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  25. 26.
    The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh/WTP
    by A. A. Milne

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  26. 27.
    The Tin Drum (Vintage International)
    by Gunter Grass

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  27. 28.
    Wise Blood: A Novel
    by Flannery O'Connor

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  28. 29.
    Portnoy's Complaint
    by Philip Roth

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  29. 30.
    The Moviegoer
    by Walker Percy

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  30. 31.
    Brideshead Revisited
    by Evelyn Waugh

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  31. 32.
    My Man Jeeves
    by P. G. Wodehouse

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  32. 33.
    Henderson the Rain King (Penguin Classics)
    by Saul Bellow

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  33. 36.
    Swann's Way: Remembrance of Things Past
    by Marcel Proust

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  34. 37.
    The Wind in the Willows
    by Kenneth Grahame

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  35. 38.
    The Cat in the Hat
    by Dr. Seuss

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  36. 39.
    Little White Bird, The
    by James Matthew Barrie

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  37. 40.
    Lonesome Dove
    by Larry McMurtry

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  38. 41.
    The Maltese Falcon
    by Dashiell Hammett

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  39. 43.
    All the King's Men
    by Robert Penn Warren

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  40. 44.
    Master and Commander (Aubrey Maturin Series)
    by Patrick O'Brian

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  41. 45.
    The Little Prince

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  42. 46.
    The Old Man and The Sea
    by Ernest Hemingway

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  43. 47.
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Perennial Classics)
    by Muriel Spark

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  44. 48.

  45. 49.
    The Stories of John Cheever
    by John Cheever

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  46. 50.
    Sula (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Toni Morrison

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Created by starlagurl on Mar 26, 2006.
 

Comments

94? — 1 year ago

Is this list supposed to be 100 long? I couldn’t find a source list to check.