100 best novels of all time

Several years ago a friend of mine came across this list of the top 100 novels of all time. The site where it was originally posted no longer exists (Wealth, Wisdom and Success) but we made a copy before the site got taken down and have been reading through it for the past few years. Why this list, you ask? We chose this one because it was created by combining the best of the best-of lists floating around the web. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. all had top 100 novel suggestions and the WW&S folks had the brilliant idea to make an end-all master list of the world’s truly best reads.

The books are carefully ordered according to the number of times they appeared and how high they were ranked on each list. At the time of this post I’ve read 53 of these books. Leave a comment to let us know how many you’ve read!

 

1. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Ulysses — James Joyce
3. 1984 — George Orwell
4. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
5. On the Road — Jack Kerouac
6. The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
7. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
8. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
9. Brave New World –Aldous Huxley
10. Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh
11. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
12. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
13. The Lord of the Rings (3) — J.R.R. Tolkien
14. A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
15. Animal Farm — George Orwell
16. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
17. Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison
18. A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess
19. Gone with the Wind — Margaret Mitchell
20. As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
21. A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway
22. A Passage to India — E.M. Forster
23. Lord of the Flies — William Golding
24. The Call of the Wild — Jack London
25. David Copperfield — Charles Dickens
26. Emma — Jane Austen
27. Tess of the D’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy
28. The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne
29. Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte
30. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter — Carson McCullers
31. Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut
32. Jane Eyre — Emily Bronte
33. Beloved — Toni Morrison
34. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
35. The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
36. Native Son — Richard Wright
37. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. Nostromo — Joseph Conrad
39. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
40. Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry
41. The Good Soldier — Ford Madox Ford
42. Herzog — Saul Bellow
43. The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Graham
44. USA (3) — John Dos Passos
45. Finnegan’s Wake — James Joyce
46. An American Tragedy — Theodore Dreiser
47. Women in Love — D.H. Lawrence
48. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton
49. The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins
50. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
51. Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller
52. My Antonia — Willa Cather
53. Light in August — William Faulkner
54. The Magus — John Fowles
55. The World According to Garp — John Irving
56. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes
57. Tom Jones — Henry Fielding
58. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
59. Moby Dick — Herman Melville
60. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
61. Winnie the Pooh — Alan Milne
62. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens
63. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
64. Tristam Shandy — Lawrence Sterne
65. Little Women — Louisa May Alcott
66. Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackery
67. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
68. In Search of Lost time (7) — Marcel Proust
69. The Ambassadors — Henry James
70. The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand
71. Gravity’s Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon
72. The Awakening — Kate Chopin
73. Dune — Frank Herbert
74. A Town Like Alice — Nevil Shute
75. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
76. Clarissa — Samuel Richardson
77. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
78. A Prayer for Owen Meany — John Irving
79. The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
80. The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James
81. Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
82. All the King’s Men — Robert Penn Warren
83. Go Tell it on the Mountain — James Baldwin
84. Charlotte’s Web — E.B. White
85. Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
86. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
87. The Stand — Stephen King
88. Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier
89. I, Claudius — Robert Graves
90. Howard’s End — E.M. Forster
91. Tender is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. The Rainbow — D.H. Lawrence
93. Bleak House — Charles Dickens
94. Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
95. Absalom, Absalom — William Faulkner
96. The Wings of the Dove — Henry James
97. Austerlitz — W.G. Sebald
98. The Trial — Franz Kafka
99. Wise Blood — Flannery O’Connor
100. Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

 

So far, those of us who are reading through are throughly enjoying it, though we naturally have a few suggestions of our own. The main change I’d like to implement is replacing Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” (seriously, if you ever find yourself in need of a way to liven up a dull dinner party, whip out a copy of FW and read aloud from any old paragraph you come across. Doesn’t matter which one, they’re all equally ridiculous) with Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” (which, according to everyone I’ve ever met that’s read it, is truly one of the best books ever written). What books would you like to see added?