1999 年，英國《每日電訊》（Daily Telegraph） 集選「世紀鉅著一百部」（100 Books of the Century），由百名學者作家各舉一本。獲選的著作，包括了維根斯坦的邏輯、凱因斯的經濟理論、羅素的哲學，乃至希特勒那煽起浩劫一場的自傳。在從印度到冰島的各國作家之中，納博考夫竟有三本登榜（Lolita、Pale Fire、與自傳 Speak, Memory），使他在獲選次數上，與《一九八四》的作者歐威爾同列魁首，而壓倒了勞倫斯、喬艾斯、海明威、費茨傑羅諸大家（包括史坦貝克在內的許多諾貝爾文學獎得主尚且不在榜上）。

同年，美國「藍燈書屋」（Random House）「現代文庫」（Modern Library）編輯委員會選出的「二十世紀最佳英語小說一百部」（The 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century），納博考夫也有兩本上榜（Lolita 名列第四，Pale Fire 第五十三）。雖然有人懷疑，他精密炫麗、深邃機巧的文 筆經不經得起時間考驗，在品味必然迥異的一百年後是否還有人記得。但對我們這些讀者而言，這只是個多餘的問題。
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世紀鉅著一百部（《每日電訊》）：

J. R. Ackerley - My Father and Myself (Francis King 荐選)

W. H. Auden - Collected Poems (P. D. James)

Ballard, J. G. - The Atrocity Exhibition (Michael Moorcock)

Bateson, Gregory - Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Nicholas Mosley)

Beckett, Samuel  - Waiting for Godot (Simon Armitage)

Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift (Justin Cartwright)

Brophy, Brigid - Flesh (Shena Mackay)

Bulgakov, Mikhail - The Master and Margarita (Elaine Feinstein)

Carson, Rachel - Silent Spring (Artemis Cooper)

Cavafy, Constantine P. - Collected Poems (Paul Bailey)

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley - The Worst Journey in the World (Beryl Bainbridge)

Collis, John Stewart - The Worm Forgives the Plough (Angela Huth)

Connolly, Cyril - The Unquiet Grave (Sybille Bedford)

Corbett, Jim - Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Martin Booth)

Doughty, Charles - Travels in Arabia Deserta (Jan Morris)

Eliot, T. S. - The Waste Land (David Lodge)

Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury (Joyce Carol Oates)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby (Anthony Powell)

Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (William Trevor)

Forster, E. M. - A Passage to India (Anita Desai)

Frost, Robert  - Mountain Interval (Paul Muldoon); North of Boston (D. M. Thomas)

Grahame, Kenneth - The Wind in the Willows (John Bayley)

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - Love in the Time of Cholera (Mary Wesley);  One Hundred Years of Solitude (Rose Tremain)

Green, Henry - Pack My Bag: a Self-Portrait (Emma Tennant)

Grossman, Vasily - Life and Fate (Antony Beevor)

Hardy, Thomas - Collected Poems (Dan Jacobson)

Hemingway, Ernest - In Our Time (Allan Massie)

Hibbert, Christopher - Cavaliers & Roundheads (Barbara Cartland)

Hitler, Adolf - Mein Kampf (Tony Benn)

Hopkins, Gerard Manley - Poems (Rachel Billington)

Housman, A. E. - Last Poems (Penelope Fitzgerald)

Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (J. G. Ballard)

James, Henry - The Golden Bowl (Grey Gowrie)

Junger, Sebastian - The Perfect Storm (Patrick O'Brian)

Joyce, James - Ulysses (Salman Rushdie)

Kafka, Franz - The Trial (Mordecai Richler)

Kerouac, Jack - On the Road (Richard Holmes)

Keynes, J. M. - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Roy Jenkins)

Kipling, Rudyard - Kim (Barbara Trapido)

Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di - The Leopard (Peter Vansittart and William Waldegrave)

Lawrence, D. H. - Sons and Lovers (Claire Tomalin)

Laxness, Halldr - Independent People (Fay Weldon)

Leaf, Munro - The Story of Ferdinand (Victoria Glendinning)

Levi, Primo - If This Is a Man (Marina Warner)

Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt (Jeremy Lewis)

Lewis, Wyndham - Blasting and Bombadiering: an Autobiography 1914-1926 (George Walden)

Loon, Hendrik Willem Van - Van Loon's Lives (Bernard Levin)

Macaulay, Rose - The Towers of Trebizond (Joanna Trollope)

McAlmon, Robert/Boyle, Kay - Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930 (Carmen Callil)

Magris, Claudio - Danube (Nicholas Shakespeare)

Manchester, William - The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill-Alone1932-1940 (George V. Higgins)

Mann, Thomas - Joseph and His Brothers (David Malouf)

Maurier, Daphne du - Rebecca (Patrick Gale)

Moorcock, Michael - Jerusalem Commands (Iain Sinclair)

Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire (William Boyd); Speak, Memory (Penelope Lively); Lolita (Auberon Waugh)

O'Brien, Flann - The Third Policeman (A. L. Kennedy)

Oliver, F. S. - The Endless Adventure (W. F. Deedes)

Orwell, George - Animal Farm (Ruth Rendell); Homage to Catalonia (Michael Shelden);  Nineteen Eighty-four (Alan Judd and Jane Gardam)

Partridge, Frances - Good Company: Diaries (Susan Hill)

Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago (Clare Francis)

Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (Hilary Spurling)

Powys, John Cowper - A Glastonbury Romance (Margaret Drabble)

Proust, Marcel - A la recherche du temps perdu (Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Doris Lessing)

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front (Dirk Bogarde)

Richardson, Henry Handel - The Getting of Wisdom (Germaine Greer)

Rushdie, Salman - Midnight's Children (Malcolm Bradbury)

Russell, Bertrand - The Problems of Philosophy (Francis Partridge);  History of Western Philosophy (John Cole)

Salinger, J. D. - The Catcher in the Rye (Christopher Hope)

Schwarz-Bart,  Andr - The Last of the Just (Bernice Rubens)

Sellar, W. C./ Yeatman, R. J. - 1066 and All That (Philip Ziegler)

Seth, Vikram - A Suitable Boy (Gerald Kaufman)

Sholokov, Mikhail - Quiet Flows the Don (Hilary Mantel)

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr - The Gulag Archipelago (Brian Aldiss)

Stapledon, W. Olaf - Last and First Men (Arthur C. Clarke)

Thomas, Edward - Poems (Andrew Motion)

Trevor, William - The Collected Stories (David Profumo)

Tuchman, Barbara - The Proud Tower (John le Carr)

Updike, John - Pigeon Feathers (Carol Shields)

Vonnegut, Kurt - Breakfast of Champions (Maggie Gee)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend – Mr. Fortune's Maggot (Michael Holroyd)

Waugh, Evelyn - The Loved One (Alice Thomas Ellis)

Wells, H. G. - The History of Mr. Polly (Michael Foot)

Willans, Geoffrey - Down with Skool (Wendy Cope)

Williams, Tennessee - A Streetcar Named Desire (Christopher Bigsby)

Wilmot, Chester - The Struggle for Europe (John Keegan)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (David Sylvester)

Wodehouse, P. G. - The Inimitable Jeeves (John Mortimer)

Woolf, Virginia - The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Isabel Colegate)

Yeats, W. B. - The Tower (Barry Unsworth)

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二十世紀最佳英語小說一百部（「現代文庫」）：

   1. Ulysses, James Joyce
   2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
   3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
   4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
   5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
   6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
   7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
   8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
   9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
  10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
  12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
  13. 1984, George Orwell
  14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
  15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
  17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  18. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  20. Native Son, Richard Wright
  21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
  22. Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara
  23. U.S.A.  (trilogy), John Dos Passos
  24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
  25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
  26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
  27. The Ambassadors, Henry James
  28. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell
  30. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
  31. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
  33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
  34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
  35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  36. All the King's Men, Robert Penn
  37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
  38. Howards End, E.M. Forster
  39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
  41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  42. Deliverance, James Dickey
  43. A Dance to the Music of Time  (series), Anthony Powell
  44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
  45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
  47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence
  49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
  50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  52. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
  53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
  54. Light in August, William Faulkner
  55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
  57. Parade's End, Ford Maddox Ford
  58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
  60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
  61. Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
  63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
  64. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  66. Of Human Bondage, W.Somerset Maugham
  67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
  69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
  71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
  72. A House for Ms. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
  73. The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West
  74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
  76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
  77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
  78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
  79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
  80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
  82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
  83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
  84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
  85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
  86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
  87. The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett
  88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  89. Loving, Henry Green
  90. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
  91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
  92. Ironweed, William Kennedy
  93. The Magus, John Fowles
  94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
  96. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
  97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
  98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
  99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington


【圖：Lolita (Paris: Olympia Press, 1955, first edition)】