Originally Posted by pdurrant

The best books of the 21st century thread made me think that a MobileRead list of the ten best books of the 20th century would be fun.

To avoid, as much as possible, recentness bias, let's go for the best book of each decade of the 20th century. That is books first published:

1901-1910, 1911-1920, 1921-1930, 1931-1940, 1941-1950, 1951-1960, 1961-1970, 1971-1980, 1981-1990, 1991-2000

So this is the nomination thread. Please post your nominations for the best book of each decade of the 20th century. If you don't have a nomination for a particular decade that's fine. Please identify the decade for every nomination. No more than one nomination per decade per person.

Please only nominate books that you have actually read: don't nominate based on reviews, TV programmes or films.

- snip -

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'm tempted to suggest a voting rule: Do not vote for a book unless you have at least read the free preview available at your favourite ebook reseller. (Just to make sure you don't hate it, after all.)

Originally Posted by treadlightly

Or very easy!

I would think that you would have had to read the whole book in order to vote for it. That was why it would be more useful to know how many of the nominees a voter had read rather than gender, education, etc.