What’s the best book of the past 125 years? According to the readers of the New York Times, it’s Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
The newspaper’s book review recently celebrated its 125th anniversary by asking readers to vote on which title would take home the honor. Voters choose from a shortlist of 25 books, all of them novels.
Readers picked Lee’s book by a “narrow margin,” the newspaper said. In a reconsideration of the novel, Times critic Molly Young wrote, “[W]hat struck me, rereading it, was not the totality of the book but one of its humbler accomplishments, which is how keenly Lee recreates the comforts, miseries and banalities of people gathered intimately in one little space.”
Coming in second place was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of his Lord of the Rings series. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four took the No. 3 spot, followed by Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
More than 1,300 books were nominated for the honor, the Times said, and two-thirds of those received one nomination each. Over 200,000 votes were cast in the poll.
“The story of the nominations we received is not consensus, but diversity—not just in the sheer number of books that readers nominated, but in the ways that they interpreted what ‘best book’ meant,” the Times said.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
