Early 80s: Lamont the Lonely Monster by Dean Walley and Don Page

Best Word Book Ever by Richard Scarry

Please Try to Remember the First of Octember! by Theodore Lesieg and Art Cummings

 

1985: The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

 

1986: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

1987: Please Understand Me by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates

Personality Types by Don Richard Riso

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume

 

1988: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

It by Stephen King

 

1989: Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

Mindscapes: Psychological Mazes for Personality Insight by Pino Gilioli

The Third Millennium: A History of the World, AD 2000-3000 by Brian Stableford & David Langford

 

1990: Taliesin by Stephen R. Lawhead

The Dark Half by Stephen King

Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

 

1991: Dune by Frank Herbert

The Belgariad by David Eddings

The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King

 

1992: The Waste Lands by Stephen King

The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

 

1993: The Collected Dialogues of Plato

The Sandman: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman, Shawn McManus, et al.

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

 

1994: The Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman, Jill Thompson, et al.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

 

1995: The Sandman: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman, Marc Hempel, et al.

The Iliad by Homer

 

1996: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Middlemarch by George Elliott

Paradise Lost by John Milton

 

1997: Ulysses by James Joyce

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

King Lear by William Shakespeare

 

1998: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

1999: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

2000: Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

 

2001: The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

 

2002: Zhuangzi

Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

 

2003: The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon

Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

I Ching

 

2004: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

 

2005: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

2006: Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason

 

2007: Remainder by Tom McCarthy

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

 

2008: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by Alice Sheldon

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh

 

2009: What It Is by Lynda Barry

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

 

2010: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The City & the City by China Mieville

 

2011: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Art as Experience by John Dewey

 

2012: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Zona by Geoff Dyer

 

2013: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Tenth of December by George Saunders

 

2014: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

 

2015: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

 

2016: Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

 

2017: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

 

2018: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Stroke by Stroke by Henri Michaux

 

2019: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

 

2020: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun

 

2021: Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo

An Autobiography by Janet Frame

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

 

2022: Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman

 

2023: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante