A list of 100 great novels that I will consider reading over the next 20 years.
I’ve written before about how important it is to read great books rather than merely good ones. Below is a list of 100 novels that are widely considered to be great.
Drawing up a list of great books is problematic, as different people have very different ideas of what constitutes a great novel. To make this list, I came up with a system for ranking books based on various lists I found on the web. The idea is that books that are rated high on multiple lists would find their way into the top 100. Whilst I appreciate this approach is somewhat arbitrary, it is at least based on something.
So, what do you think of my list? What novels are on your reading list? Have I missed anything really important from mine?
| Number | Title | Author | Read | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | Yes | “He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.” |
| 2 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Yes (2015-08) | “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” |
| 3 | Ulysses | James Joyce | ||
| 4 | The Catcher in the Rye | J. D. Salinger | ||
| 5 | To Kill A Mockingbird | Harper Lee | Yes | “It’s not time to worry yet.” |
| 6 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | Yes (2016-10) | |
| 7 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding | Yes | |
| 8 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | Yes (2016-08) | Miserable from start to finish. |
| 9 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | Yes (2017-01) | |
| 10 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | Yes | |
| 11 | The Lord of the Rings | J. R. R. Tolkien | Yes | “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” |
| 12 | 1984 | George Orwell | Yes | |
| 13 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac | Yes | |
| 14 | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | ||
| 15 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | Yes (2016-01) | |
| 16 | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | Yes (2014-08) | |
| 17 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | Yes (2015-06) | Nothing happens. Time passes. Nothing continues to happen. |
| 18 | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | Yes | |
| 19 | As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | Yes (2017-03) | |
| 20 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 21 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | ||
| 22 | A Passage to India | E. M. Forster | Yes (2017-08) |
|
| 23 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | Yes (2017-11) | “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.” |
| 24 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | ||
| 25 | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame | ||
| 26 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | Yes (2019-06) | The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder |
| 27 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | Yes (2014-04) | |
| 28 | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier | Yes
(2019-03) |
|
| 29 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | Yes
(2019-02) |
|
| 30 | The Count of Monte Christo | Alexandre Dumas | Yes (2018-01) | Long |
| 31 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | Yes (2016-10) | “She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter.” |
| 32 | Little Women | Louisa May Alcott | Yes (2017-06) | |
| 33 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 34 | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | Yes (2016-04) | Linguistically compelling, disturbingly brutal, mercifully short. |
| 35 | Charlotte’s Web | E. B. White | Yes | |
| 36 | Emma | Jane Austen | ||
| 37 | Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence | Yes | |
| 38 | Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | Yes | |
| 39 | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | Yes (2014-08) | |
| 40 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | Yes (2017-09) | “Little gold fishes” |
| 41 | A Prayer For Owen Meany | John Irving | Yes | |
| 42 | The Call of the Wild | Jack London | Yes (2014-08) | |
| 43 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | Yes (2016-03) | |
| 44 | Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck | Yes (2016-05) | |
| 45 | Native Son | Richard Wright | ||
| 46 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | ||
| 47 | The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | Yes (2015-12) | |
| 48 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | ||
| 49 | Dune | Frank Herbert | Yes | |
| 50 | His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | Yes | |
| 51 | I, Claudius | Robert Graves | ||
| 53 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 53 | Winnie the Pooh | A. A. Milne | Yes | |
| 54 | An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser | ||
| 55 | Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | ||
| 56 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | ||
| 57 | Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | ||
| 58 | Birdsong | Sebastian Faulks | Yes (2016-09) | Absorbing. |
| 59 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | ||
| 60 | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | ||
| 61 | The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | ||
| 62 | Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller | ||
| 63 | Don Quixote | Miguel De Cervantes | Yes (2019-05) | “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” |
| 64 | Vanity Fair | William Thackeray | ||
| 65 | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 66 | Crime And Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | ||
| 67 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | ||
| 68 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | ||
| 69 | The Hobbit | J. R. R. Tolkien | Yes | |
| 70 | Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | Yes (2018-02) | |
| 71 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | Yes (2020-02) | “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.” |
| 72 | Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | ||
| 73 | The French Lieutenant’s Woman | John Fowles | Yes (2016-04) | |
| 74 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford | ||
| 75 | The Stand | Stephen King | ||
| 76 | Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | ||
| 77 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | ||
| 78 | A Town Like Alice | Nevil Shute | Yes | Bonzer! |
| 79 | Howards End | E. M. Forster | ||
| 80 | Persuasion | Jane Austen | Yes | |
| 81 | Wise Blood | Flannery O’Connor | ||
| 82 | Go Tell it on the Mountain | James Baldwin | ||
| 83 | Watership Down | Richard Adams | Yes | |
| 84 | Light in August | William Faulkner | ||
| 85 | A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | Yes (2018-11) | |
| 86 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | ||
| 87 | Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie | ||
| 88 | The Rainbow | D. H. Lawrence | ||
| 89 | Women in Love | D. H. Lawrence | ||
| 90 | The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood | ||
| 91 | The BFG | Roald Dahl | Yes | |
| 92 | The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | ||
| 93 | Tristram Shandy | Laurence Sterne | ||
| 94 | The Magus | John Fowles | Yes (2015-03) | |
| 95 | The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | ||
| 96 | Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather | Yes (2018-10) | “Where there is great love, there are always miracles.” |
| 97 | A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | ||
| 98 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | Yes (2015-02) | |
| 99 | The World According to Garp | John Irving | ||
| 100 | Of Human Bondage | W. Somerset Maugham |
Acknowledgements
- Image courtesy Ove Topfer via FreeImages.