Almost all of those books are from English writers or the Western world. How limiting. What about Cry The Beloved Country or Things Fall Apart or Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood or Dream of the Red Chamber or The Art of War or Raise the Red Lantern...

This doesn't reflect the best critical judgment . . .

I'd be interested to see this matched against high-school required reading lists. My guess is that there'd be a pretty high correlation for a lot of it, and that many of the respondents were naming books they had been made to read in school.

Twilight but no Catcher in the Rye!? What has the world come to?!

Near as I can tell, "Canterbury Tales" isn't in the cloud there. A shame as that teaches, like many of the books listed, how universal and unchanging the human condition is, even 600 years later.

My 2 cents, your mileage may vary.

I am not a proficient reader by any means, but I must mark these things five.

1: There is a staggering lack of nonEnglish books here, and I don't for a minute suppose there's any excusable basis for that. Brendan up there is absolutely correct, and personally I don't think any one who's ever lived can have read a sufficiently significant portion of humanity's defeatingly vast body of literature to even begin to form an objectively important opinion of its best achievements (especially as many books take two or three readings to fully get). And the small body of people involved in these polls sure as hell haven't.

2: I am exceedingly familiar with all of Douglas Adams' work, and 'Hitchhiker' is, at best, merely equal with its first two sequels, but Adams' best novel (he only wrote seven) is 'The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul'. His other best book is 'Last Chance to See', his record of a journey in the late 80s to visit members of nearly extinct species. But 'Hitchhiker' seems to be the only one people have heard of.

3: 'The Road' is not one of McCarthy's best novels, although certainly at least one of his DOES deserve a place here.

4: No list of great literature that includes either 'Twilight', 'Memoirs of a Geisha', 'The Da Vinci Code' or, probably, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' can be trusted.

5: Now actually, I think 'The Lord of the Rings' is placed just about right, a grandly poetic and beautiful contemplation of the passage of time, as well as the best mythology I've ever read. And the last three 'Harry Potter' books are very good. But I'll note here the best books I've read that don't show up in the consensus (Adams having already been covered).

Tim Powers' 'On Stranger Tides', the greatest of all the stories of classical piracy, although I understand his 'Declare' and 'The Stress of her Regard', yet unread by me, are his two best.

Arthur C. Clarke's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (I'm VERY surprised this wasn't on the list), and 'The City and the Stars'.

The deep and genuinely enchanting fairy-tales of George MacDonald, which we should have grown up with in place of 'Rapunzel' et cetera, as well as his realistic novels.

And my favorite, Alan Booth's 'The Roads to Sata', his account of his two thousand mile walk across Japan in the late 70s.

Actually though, the best literature I've read has certainly been Ebert's blog. It's down-hill all the way once we leave this site!

I would respectfully submit Capote's 'In Cold Blood' ...influential and a fantastic read.

For those commenting on the lack of "NonEnglish" books, a couple of points:
1. You didn't look closely enough, you knee-jerk, easily offended fools: I found the following in less than 30 seconds of skimming: All Quiet on the Western Front, Lolita, Les Miserables, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, and Crime and Punishment. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the largest on there! And I didn't go through them all.

2. Even if what you said is true (which it is not), there are reasons for that. Great fiction written by writers who write in English will have better prose than a translated author, simply due to the fact that his/her writing is unaltered. The plots (mostly) carry through, but the quality of writing is harder to transfer. Cultural and linguistic differences exist, and are reflected in writing. Ebert's audience mostly consists of readers of books in English, and thus, the quality of the writing when read in English matters.

Just to be clear, I am NOT saying, for example, that Vonnegut (in English) is a better writer than Tolstoy (in Russian), simply that Vonnegut in English is better than Tolstoy in English.

Ebert: To be sure, Lolita was written in English.

I like most of the titles, but I think the one who complied this based their choices on best-sellers rather than, truly, good books.

Books everyone should read . . . for what? . . . a Protestant upbringing? Reflects a shallow pool and lack of travel.

I was surprised how many of the titles in the cloud I had read, but how few of those I had gone back and reread. There are authors who make it very hard on their readers, so much so that I am relieved to finish the work (i.e, "Whew, another great book off my list.").

A better test is how many books I have gone back to again and again. For me Joseph Conrad always benefits from a second or a third reading; there are also authors who write so very well that I always seek them out (for example, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Salter). Any book that continues to hold me and offer new insights at my present age of 65 just as it did when I was 25 will always be on my 'must read' list.