“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” ― Jorge Luis Borges
Index
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Art
Biography
Culture
Economics
Environment
History
Philosophy
Journalism/Media
Literature
Memoir
Politics
Religion
Science
Society
Travel
Business/Self-Help
Food/Cooking
Health
Non-Fiction Novel
An attempt at compiling the best books of all time better begin with an apology. Any such endeavor is principally flawed by the inherent biases of critics and compilers. It is largely a subjective choice. Reading a book is much like meeting a person. You may or may not get along. There is no way to predict how that first meeting and impression will turn out to be. Every book is an encased soul waiting to be heard. It’s a subjective experience, a picture of the world as the writer saw it. Depending on the core ideas that you tend to resonate with, your experience with the book, will be unique.
Nevertheless, a list of best fiction and non-fiction books of all time is presented here, based on the choice of people with a refined taste for books. This is a list of books to read before you die, as selected by contemporary critics and book lovers. Perhaps what makes these books great is the fact that they contain the core of a great thought inside, clothed in a fine raiment of appealing prose that mesmerizes you with its originality.
Some of these books have been a spontaneous catharsis for a society, capturing its very soul. Some are great meditations on the human condition, while some have been instrumental in introducing an entirely new realm of thought, unexplored till date. Some will take you along on great journeys and some will make you dive inside yourself. A few will feel like a slap on the face or a push into the unknown. In those paper bindings lies a world, calling for you.
Writers have this great intuitive capacity of looking at the big picture, while not missing the smaller details. What I experience reading some of these books is a kind of resonance. It’s the feeling you have when reading a thought that exactly conveys how you feel inside. The best of all time are the ones that help us make sense out of all the chaos around us and show a way out of it. When you have good books to read, time flies. There are many great books that lie in obscurity and you might discover them in some old bookshop somewhere in some corner of the world. They may never make it to the list of the world’s bestselling books of all time, but they have a charm of their own that appeals to you.
In what follows, you will find a list of some of the best books ever written. However, be aware that this is only the tip of the iceberg that English literature is. Bookmark this page as your personal reading list.
Fiction
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading books and especially a novel is experiencing it. It is a silent sojourn into the interiority of a soul. Here are the best works of fiction ever composed.
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Ulysses by James Joyce
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Atonement by Ian McEwan
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Deliverance by James Dickey
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Neuromancer by William Gibson
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
A Passage to India by E.M.Forster
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
The Native Son by Richard Wright
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Wings Of The Dove by Henry James
Appointment In Samarra by John O’Hara
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Trial by Franz Kafka
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Possession by A.S. Byatt
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Ambassadors by Henry James
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Howards End by E.M. Forster
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Light in August by William Faulkner
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
From Here to Eternity by James Jones
The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
The House Of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Loving by Henry Green
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
Ironweed by William Kennedy
The Magus by John Fowles
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
Anthem by Ayn Rand
We The Living by Ayn Rand
Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Shane by Jack Schaefer
Trustee From The Toolroom by Nevil Shute
A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
The Stand by Stephen King
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
Moonheart by Charles de Lint
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
Someplace To Be Flying by Charles de Lint
Yarrow by Charles de Lint
At The Mountains Of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane
Memory And Dream by Charles de Lint
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
On The Beach by Nevil Shute
Greenmantle by Charles de Lint
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The Little Country by Charles de Lint
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
The World According To Garp by John Irving
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy
Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein
It by Stephen King
V. by Thomas Pynchon
Double Star by Robert Heinlein
Citizen Of The Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Mulengro by Charles de Lint
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
Illusions by Richard Bach
The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
The Black Sheep by Honore De Balzac
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Plague by Albert Camus
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Harry Potter Series by J.K Rowling
Money by Martin Amis
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Falconer by John Cheever
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Back to Index
Non-Fiction
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
– Mark Twain
If fiction is a dive into the inner world of a writer, non-fiction is a leap into the unknown outer world. It’s a world bursting with complexities and mysteries waiting to be explored. Here are some of the best works of non-fiction classified into neat categories.
Art
The Story of Art by E.H.Gombrich (1950)
Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich (1960)
The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
Ways of Seeing By John Burger (1972)
Biography
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (1965)
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester (1983)
The Power Broker by Robert Caro (1974)
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Culture
Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow (1980)
The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris (1968)
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949)
A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht (1985)
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus (1975)
Against Interpretation, and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (1966)
The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
Economics
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1936 )
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher (1973)
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo (1817)
Das Kapital by Karl Marx (1867)
Principles of Economics by Carl Menger (1871)
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by (1949)
The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L.Heilbroner (1953)
Environment
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
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History
The Histories by Herodotus (400 BC)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes (1987)
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter (2001)
Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980)
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer (1960)
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam (1972)
The Civil War by Shelby Foote (1958)
Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
The Making of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1987)
The Age of Jackson by Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (1988)
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Philosophy
The Republic by Plato (380 BC)
The Symposium by Plato (380 BC)
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
Phenomenology of Mind by G.W.F.Hegel (1807)
Phenomenology of Spirit by George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807)
Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
Principia Ethica by G. E. Moore (1903)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M.Pirsig (1974)
Philosophy and Civilization by John Dewey (1968)
Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein (1954)
Journalism / Media
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964)
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Literature
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
Selected Essays, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot (1932)
The American Language by H. L. Mencken (1921)
The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams (1953)
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois. (1903)
The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling (2008)
Memoir
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945)
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)
On Writing by Stephen King (2000)
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown (1965)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings By Maya Angelou (1969)
The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964)
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
Maus by Art Spiegelman (1986)
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)
Politics
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
God & Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr. (1951)
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)
The Making of the President by Theodore White (1961)
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961)
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater (1960)
All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1974)
The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter (1964)
What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (1993)
The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington (1996)
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
Back to Index
Religion
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
Science
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1917)
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928)
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman (1965)
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (1967)
The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
The Art of the Soluble by P.B. Medawar (1968)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead (1910)
On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson (1979)
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
The Ants by Bert Holldobler, Edward O. Wilson (1990)
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas (1974)
Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky (1957)
Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman (1994)
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)
Society
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan (1405)
Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)
The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962)
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford (1963)
Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr. (1964)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1971)
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
Working by Studs Terkel (1974)
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
Orientalism by Edward W.Said (1978)
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer (1975)
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (1979)
Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (1983)
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama (1992)
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
Back to Index
Travel
The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
Business/Self-Help
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
The Big Book by Alcoholics Anonymous (1939)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)
Elements of Style by William Jr. Strunk and E.B. White (1959)
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937)
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader (1965)
What Color Is Your Parachute? By Richard Nelson Bolles (1970)
No Logos by Naomi Klein (2000)
Food / Cooking
How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher (1942)
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (1961)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (2006)
Health
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock (1946)
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts (1987)
The Kinsey Reports by Alfred Kinsey (1948)
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1973)
The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort (1972)
Non-Fiction Novel
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979)
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1937)
This list is a continual work in progress. Like wine, choosing good books is largely a matter of taste. What book will strike a chord with which reader is an entirely unpredictable phenomenon. The same book that you read during your teen years may convey something different from what you read it as an older person. There is this one thing about a great book. It grows on you and you grow with the book. With time, the relationship only gets better. Even if you manage to read fifty of these books in your lifetime, you will be left enriched forever.
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