📚 The New LitNet Top 100 Books 📕📗📚📒📘📖📙📕📚

[Desolation]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare


Thank you for voting, everyone. It's been great working with your favorite books.

[Corona]

Interesting one, but not any novels by Beckett?

[Desolation]

The collection Three Novels by Beckett got one vote (from me), and was ranked at #105. It just barely missed the cut.

[Pierre Menard]

I'm going to go ahead and say as a forum, overall, we have far better taste than the majority of other forums :P

[Scheherazade]

I kinda liked the previous list better because I had read more books from that one (only about 35 here).

Still I am glad that LoTR is not in the top 10.

[TaxMan]

Cool list. It reflects my tastes pretty closely.

[Bill 42]

57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin

I believe that these are different names for the same book.

[kelby_lake]

The Bible? :O Nice to see some plays on there though:)

[ennison]

This is an interesting range of texts . It includes some I admire (like the beautiful older girls I could never quite speak to when young) some I enjoy, some I would read again and again (If life were long enough) some I believe are truly great some that I despise and a few I've never heard of "Shanameh"? Shurely shome mistake! I'm off to look it up now .

[Ser Nevarc]

Go, Manfred GO!
:D

[Corona]

Also, Macbeth and King Lear lacking is a bit strange!

[Drkshadow03]

Anyone care to share how many of these they've read?

[kev67]

I've read 14, of which I enjoyed six. Still of those six, I have read one over a dozen times (The Hobbit) and one eight times (Watership Down), although both when I was a boy. Another of the six is really twelve books (Dance to the Music of Time). I am glad to see it sneaked in.

[wordeater]

I'm glad that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are still in the top 10. Good to see "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" on 90, but that's probably due to my own vote. Seven books by female authors is one better than the Modern Library. A bit disappointing that Graham Greene didn't make it.

I read at least portions of every book in the top 21. "Infinite Jest" (22) is unknown to me, but I'll put it on my list.

[Everywhereguy]

I've read 64, taught 27 in college courses, and published about one item that's near the top. I still feel poorly read, compared to what I ought to be. But maybe better read than some.

It's not so much what we've read, though -- but what we've figured out from that, right? Eyes passing over characters in itself is only a means, not a goal.

I'll toss in one worthy alternate -- Perec, _Life A User's Manual_. Best novel of the second half of the twentieth century, maybe. I'm still mulling that last statement for possible truth value :-)

[mortalterror]

Anyone care to share how many of these they've read?


1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

Also, as someone else has already pointed out A Dream of Red Mansions is the same book as The Story of a Stone. Desolation might want to take one of those off and put the next highest book up that didn't make the list.

[mona amon]

Yay, new list! Good work, Desolation!

I've bolded the ones I've read -

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

[Drkshadow03]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

[qimissung]

The New LitNet Top 100 Books
1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

[The Comedian]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

47/100

[Rores28]

I've read 26. Disappointed not to see "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino on there.

[islandclimber]

I've managed to make my way through 91 of these. Someone should do a top 100 books of the last 50 years or so. Maybe the post-war world. 1945-present. I'd be interested to see what a list of top contemporary literature appeared as on here...

[OrphanPip]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

I promised to cut someone if Austen wasn't in the top 10...

[MementoMori]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

23/100.

[Desolation]

Also, as someone else has already pointed out A Dream of Red Mansions is the same book as The Story of a Stone. Desolation might want to take one of those off and put the next highest book up that didn't make the list.

Sorry about that. I didn't have time to reorder the list before I left for the holidays. I will fix it when I get home to my computer next week. For anyone who might be curious, I think the next book on the list would have been Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.

[Eiseabhal]

This is a very interesting list but I confess to having read only a few and mainly from the second half of the list. Not all of what I've read would I rate highly. Henry Miller a writer to compare with FD!- in the name of the wee man!

I've read 36. The Bible more than once. I'm not counting Lord of the Rings because I was seventeen and gave up after a hundred pages realising that I was ten years too old for it. I did read Watership Down (I must have been really stuck for something to read that week!). I wouldn't call it a bad book but I definitely prefer the curried version. There are some great bits of literature in that list though. I guess the inclusion of some dubious texts is because of the proportional representation aspect of your democratic voting system .

[julian94]

Still I am glad that LoTR is not in the top 10.


Bless that comment. And your name. Mostly the comment. People who are always right tend to have an inflated ego.


I see that Atlas Shrugged remains. Wonder how much Rand pundits paid the editor for this...

[Dark Muse]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

[JBI]

I had about 80 or so, just counting up the ones I haven't read, basically all the contemporary-ish American novels that came after #50 on the list, before 50 I hadn't read only like 3 or 4. That being said, this is hardly a good list as nobody actually voted.

[qimissung]

I meant to. Actually, the only ones on the list that I'm really interested in are the ones in the top 12. I am currently reading "Anna Karenina."

[JBI]

I meant to. Actually, the only ones on the list that I'm really interested in are the ones in the top 12. I am currently reading "Anna Karenina."

Me too, but at the same time, the fact that I would have put a bunch of Chinese texts nobody has heard of makes these sort of polls biased to English culture, given that the only possible ones that can go up are books popular in the Anglosphere.

[Eiseabhal]

Hmm but over forty of these texts were not originally written in English. I do like the word Anglosphere. It has an atmospheric sound to it. I guess we here are orbiting in the Anglosphere. Anyway ( to be colloquial about it) I believe Desolation is to be congratulated. It is just a list after all and anyone could have voted. The Internet and life in general likes lists. People have tastes and opinions and we can all make lists. Why don't you JBI make a list of interesting Chinese literature and tell us why you would put each item on it.

[qimissung]

Agreed. I think we should have a list that incorporates the best Asian literature. Or maybe even World Literature.

[Big Dante]

Why don't you JBI make a list of interesting Chinese literature and tell us why you would put each item on it.

That would be a very interesting read. I've been trying to expand past the 'Anglosphere' lately and such recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

[FenwickS]

Agreed. I think we should have a list that incorporates the best Asian literature. Or maybe even World Literature.

A Russian literature list would surely be nice!

[mal4mac]

> 1. The Bible

I think this list is showing a US bias.

> 4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

... I rest my case.

> 9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Surely this should be competing with Hamlet for first position?

> 19. Essays by Montaigne

Surely this should be higher?

> 38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

... and this.

> 72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The first Dickens at 72, and far from his best novel?

I think this list reflects what young adults in the USA might produce, a collection of (mostly US) school books, and "trendy" nihilism. Really great authors like Hardy, Dickens and Tolstoy therefore appear much lower than in lists from people who are older, not American, and far more widely read.

[Drkshadow03]

I think this list is showing a US bias.

I think this list reflects what young adults in the USA might produce, a collection of (mostly US) school books, and "trendy" nihilism. Really great authors like Hardy, Dickens and Tolstoy therefore appear much lower than in lists from people who are older, not American, and far more widely read.

Given that you live in the United Kingdom (yes?), I'm failing to see how your suggestion that Hardy and Dickens should be higher doesn't reflect a UK bias. Pardon my further skepticism, but I doubt that had you actually voted on this list your top 10 would've been full of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Authors reflecting how widely read you supposedly are in comparison to the American readers on this site.


I've managed to make my way through 91 of these. Someone should do a top 100 books of the last 50 years or so. Maybe the post-war world. 1945-present. I'd be interested to see what a list of top contemporary literature appeared as on here...

Wow, 91 out of 100 is really impressive. What are the 9 books you haven't read on the list?

[TheFifthElement]

I have a question - which version of the Bible has been voted no. 1? There are big variations between the different versions.

The one's I've read are in bold.

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus (known as The Outsider in UK)
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

27/100

[ennison]

It may show some "US bias" but that's because it is mainly Americans who post here. I cannot see how the placing of a Group of North African Hebrew texts transmitted to the West via Aramaic and Greek demonstrates US bias really . I'm pretty sure that if it was Nigerians, Ghanians or Ethiopians (a country which had Christianity long before any part of Europe) who were mainly posting here then they too would place The Bible high up on the list. I find this list more interesting the more I look at it.

[Joshua_B]

Wow, I've read only 6 from this list :blush5: (except for the Bible but I was raised Christian so that doesn't really count) and there isn't even one that I enjoyed till Emma and even that I only read because it was assigned reading in my high school literature class.

What's comforting is that almost all the books I'm planning on reading next are on this list.

Here are the ones I have read:

23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Hated it
27. Emma by Jane Austen Interesting though not exciting
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin Loved it, espicially the POV he uses
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
77. 1984 by George Orwell Best prose I've ever read

[mal4mac]

Given that you live in the United Kingdom (yes?), I'm failing to see how your suggestion that Hardy and Dickens should be higher doesn't reflect a UK bias.

I was comparing this list to other lists, including American critics like Harold Bloom and Clifford Fadiman, not just to my own list based on the novels I've read. Can you name one major critic who would put Gatsby ahead of Dickens' major novels? I think I've read all his major novels, and can probably list ten that I prefer to Gatsby, here's four I'd recommend to Gatsby fans for starters: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby. Challenge: read one of these "back to back" with Gatsby, and ask yourself, honestly, which is the better experience.

Just keeping to the other side of the pond, I can't see why Gatsby is ahead of Moby Dick or Huck Finn, two novels fit to stand near Dickens, although still obviously inferior, to me, and other top critics :)

[Drkshadow03]

I was comparing this list to other lists, including American critics like Harold Bloom and Clifford Fadiman, not just to my own list based on the novels I've read. Can you name one major critic who would put Gatsby ahead of Dickens' major novels? I think I've read all his major novels, and can probably list ten that I prefer to Gatsby, here's four I'd recommend to Gatsby fans for starters: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby. Challenge: read one of these "back to back" with Gatsby, and ask yourself, honestly, which is the better experience.

Sure, I could see some critics ranking Bleak House, Copperfield, and Expectations higher than Gatsby, but I doubt many "top critics" (by which you really seem to mean popular ones) would rank Nicholas Nickleby or Oliver Twist or 10 of Dickens novels higher than Gatsby.

I've read all those novels you mentioned and the only Dickens novel that made it into my top 10 was Bleak House. I rank The Great Gatsby higher than any of those works.

[FenwickS]

Is there a link to the previous list?
I'm curious to see the differences.

[stlukesguild]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

A decent list of books... a great many that I have certainly read and would have no problem deeming as "great" reading. Perhaps I'll offer a few alternatives later... but I'm on my way to my studio. Got to get to work on my latest painting.

[B. Laumness]

Yes, a decent list, from what I've read.

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

61/100

[prendrelemick]

Forty four read. Not many remembered in any detail and not many of my favourites



1. The Bible
2.Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

The Bible!!!! That's just silly.

[stlukesguild]

Why is placing the Bible on this list... or even at or near the top silly? I would certainly place it within my top ten as well as would a great many other well-read readers.

Some others that I would add as personal favorites from just a perusal of the original list and my library would be:

Anon.- Gilgamesh
Euripides- Medea
Virgil- Aeneid
Anon.- Beowulf
Dante Alighieri- La Vita Nuova
Petrarch- Il Canzoniere
Rabelais- Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Anon.- The Arabian Nights
Spenser- Amoretti and Epithalimion
Donne- poetry
Christopher Marlowe- The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Shakespeare- King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest
Milton- Paradise Lost
Thomas Traherne- poetry
Robert Herrick- poetry
Molière- Tartuffe and The Misanthrope
Voltaire- Candide
Gibbons- Decline and Fall or the Roman Empire
Thomas De Quincey- Confessions of an English Opium Addict and Selected Prose
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Les Liaisons dangereuses
Goethe- The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, Italian Journey, selected poems
Novalis- Hymns to the Night
Hölderlin- Poetry
William Blake- Collected Writings
Byron- Don Juan
Wordsworth- Selected poetry
Coleridge- Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Cristabel
Keats- Collected Poetry
Shelley- Collected Poetry
John Clare- Selected Poetry
Victor Hugo - Notre Dame de Paris, poetry
Théophile Gautier - Mademoiselle de Maupin, tales, poetry
Nathaniel Hawthorne- Tales
Charles Dickens- Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
Emily Brontë- Wuthering Heights
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
Gerard Nerval- poetry, selected prose
Guy de Maupassant- Tales
E.T.A. Hoffmann- Tales
Thomas Hardy- selected poetry
Tennyson- In Memoriam, selected poetry
Robert Browning- Selected Poetry
Edgar Allen Poe- Tales
Dante Gabriel Rossetti- Selected Poetry
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest
Walter Pater- The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
Lewis Carroll- Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Joris-Karl Huysmans- À rebours
Rimbaud- Le bateau ivre, Une Saison en Enfer, Illuminations
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson- Collected Poems
Émile Zola- Nana
Heinrich von Kleist- The Broken Jug, The Prince of Homburg, Penthesilea, The Marquise of O
Heinrich Heine- Selected Poetry
Paul Verlaine- Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes, seleceted poetry
Stéphane Mallarmé- Selected Poetry
Mark Twain- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer
Henry James- Turn of the Screw
Ambrose Bierce- Short Stories
Leo Tolstoy- Short Stories
Anton Chekhov- Stories
Nikolai Gogol- Stories
Anna Akhmatova- Poetry
Ibsen- An Enemy of the People
Yeats- Poetry
Boris Pasternak- My Sister-Life, poetry
Mikhail Bulgakov- The Master and Margarita
Marina Tsvetaeva- Poetry
Isaak Babel- Stories
Hemingway- Short Stories
Franz Kafka- Tales, Stories, Fables, Aphorisms, The Trial
Rilke- The Book of Images, New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets for Orpheus, Uncollected Poems
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf, The Glassbead Game
Thomas Mann- The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, A Death in Venice
T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland and other Poems, Four Quartets
Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
Nathaniel West- Miss Lonelyhearts
Paul Valery- Selected Poems/Prose
Bertolt Brecht- Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children
Günter Grass- The Tin Drum
Heinrich Böll- Billiards at Half Past Nine, The Clown
Paul Celan- Poetry
Max Frisch- Firebugs
Friedrich Dürrenmatt- The Physicists, The Meteor, The Visit
Ingeborg Bachmann- Selected Poems
Jean Genet- The Maids
Federico Garcia Lorca- Selected Poems
Antonio Machado- Selected Poems
Raphael Alberti- Selected Poetry, Concerning the Angels
Jorge Guillen- Cantico
Miguel Hernandez- Selected Poems
Pablo Neruda- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, The Captain's Verses, Residence Earth, Selected Poetry
Pessoa- Selected Prose and Poetry
J.L. Borges- Dreamtigers, Selected Non-Fictions, Collected Poetry, Other Inquisitions
Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities, Baron in the Trees
Julio Cortazar- Hopscotch, Blow-Up and other Stories
Augusto Monterroso- Complete Works and Other Stories
Octavio Paz- Sunstone
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis- The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Yves Bonnefoy- The Curved Planks
Virginia Woolf- Orlando
Flannery O'Conner- Stories
Gore Vidal- Myra Breckenridge
Tennessee Williams- Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Eugene O'Niel- The Iceman Cometh, Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Elektra, A Long Day's Journey into Night
Arthur Miller- The Crucible
Geoffrey Hill- New and Collected Poems, The Triumph of Love...

And I'll leave off here. Mortalterror will likely show up to fill in all the gaps with regard to Roman writers and JBI with the Chinese. While my library and reading has been quite multicultural/multinational, I must admit a bias for Anglo-American literature (as an English language reader), and for Western literature as one raised in a Western culture. I have a fascination for Japanese, Indian, Persian and Arabic especially... but must admit to being limited by that which is available in quality translations. Of the non-English language writers I have read, I will also admit to a bias for French, German, Italian... and more recently Spanish. Again, these are literary traditions that have been well served in translation into English. They are also nations that have a history intimately tied to that of England and America... at least more so than Poland, Hungary, or even Russia... and thus I have a greater grasp of these cultures and histories beyond the literature alone. Beyond that... I will admit that the OP offered far too little in terms of plays, short stories, and poetry... especially poetry... another personal bias... or rather passion.

[lawpark]

Well, being a list-maniac that has created a book list site ... here is a list with religious and literature texts across the globe ... of course many good / great works are left out ... but hopefully in some balanced way. There are some canonical anthologies here too. Details in my site. 67 texts here. Full list includes history and philosophy works making a total list of 150.

Rg Veda*
Iliad Homer
Lyrical Poems* Sapphos
Early Upanisads
Theban Plays Sophocles
Samyutta Nikaya
Mahabharata
Ramayana
On Duties Cicero
Aeneid Virgil
Metamorphoses Ovid
Asvaghosa's Buddhacarita*
Bible Multiple
Vimalakirtinirdesasutra
Wang Bi Ji* Wang Bi
Kalidasa's Works
Pancatantra
Bhartrhari's Satakatraya*
Avesta* Anonymous*
"Hala's" Sattasai
Wenxuan Xiao Tong
Quran Muhammad (reciter)
Maoshi Zhengyi Kong Yingda
Bana's Kadambari
Muallaqat
Diwan Abu Nuwas
Sahih al-Bukhari al-Bukhari
Bhagavata Purana
Manikkavachakar's Tiruvacakam
Shahnama* Ferdowsi
Genji Monogatari Murasaki Shikibu
Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara
Dongpo Quanji Su Shi
Maqamat al-Hariri al-Hariri
Chongyang Quanzhen Ji Wang Zhe
Hemacandra's Trisastisalakapurusacaritra/ Parisistaparvan
Kaviraja's Raghavapandaviya
Arthurian Romances Chretien de Troyes
Jayadeva's Gita Govinda
Huaan Cixuan Huang Sheng
Gulistan Sadi
Masnavi Rumi
Xixiang Ji Wang Shifu
Commedia* Dante
Amir Khusrau's Works
Canzoniere Petrarch
Shuihu Zhuan Shi Naian
Divan Hafez
Tangshi Pinhui Gao Bing
Cantebury Tales Chaucer
Epic of Layla and Majnun Fuzuli*
Lusiads Luis de Camoens
Essays Montaigne
Adi Granth
First Folio Shakespeare
Don Quixote Cervantes
Paradise Lost Milton
Works Matsuo Basho
****ou Ji Cao Xueqin
Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth / Coleridge
Pride and Prejudice Austen
Faust Goethe
Pan Tadeusz (in Polish) Mickiewicz
Les Miserables Hugo
War and Peace Tolstoy
Ghalib's Divan
Leaves of Grass Whitman

[Scheherazade]

All right, I give in. Here is mine:

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

[Silas D]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

I need to read more.

[ladderandbucket]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
25. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
26. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
27. Emma by Jane Austen
28. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
29. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
30. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
31. Watership Down by Richard Adams
32. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
36. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
37. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
38. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
39. The Trial by Franz Kafka
40. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
41. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
42. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
44. Fictions by J.L. Borges
45. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
46. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
47. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48. The Magus by John Fowles
49. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
50. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
51. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
52. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
53. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
54. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
55. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
56. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
57. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin
86. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
87. 2666 by Robert Bolano
88. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
89. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
91. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
92. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
93. The Castle by Franz Kafka
94. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
95. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
96. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
98. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
99. Confessions by Rousseau
100. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

Thanks for making this list. I found a few interesting looking books that I hadn't heard of before.

[Drkshadow03]

For whomever wanted to compare the new list with the old one (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?40711-Lit-Nets-Top-100-Books-Official-List).

For the sake of comparison and because I'm bored here is the top 10 of the new list with a number in parenthesis indicating where it placed in the old list:

1. The Bible (10)
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (4)
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (23)
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (7)
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (3)
6. Ulysses by James Joyce (42)
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (68)
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes (12)
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (9)
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1)


At least four works in the new top 10 didn't place in the top 10 on the old list (Dante, Joyce, Cervantes, and Melville). Three of those four didn't even place in the top 20 last time.
The Bible and Crime and Punishment switched spots on the two lists (#1 and #10).
Hamlet moved up to the coveted 2nd spot replacing 1984 on the old list, which dropped all the way down to # 77 on the new list.
War and Peace, which some people complained should've been up higher, had the # 9 spot on both lists.
The only author with two titles in the top 10 is Dostoevsky, however, both of his works dropped down in ranking from the original list.
On the old list the first novel by Dickens appears at # 14: A Tale of Two Cities, which now dropped down to # 72 on the new list. The first novel by Dickens to appear on the new list is a Christmas Carol at #46.
On the new list, Montaigne’s essays hold the 19th spot, breaking the top 20. Montaigne’s essays were only # 92 on the old list.
Four books that were in the top ten on the old list didn’t even make the top 20 on the new list: 1984 (went from # 2 to 77), Les Miserables (went from # 5 to 33), To Kill A Mockingbird (went from # 6 to 25), Pride and Prejudice (went from # 8 to 37).

[mona amon]

Very interesting, Darkshadow. I think on the whole our tastes have improved. :)

[Calidore]

1) How many people submitted to the new list, and does anyone know how many did to the old list?

2) If whoever compiled the old list is still around, are the point totals still available, so the two lists can be merged?

[Desolation]

The list has been revised very slightly to fix the mix-up with the Cao Xueqin book. Sorry it took so long. Everything after (I think) #24 has been moved up one place, and Julius Caesar by Shakespeare has been added.

[Corona]

Noone did mention Christopher Marlowe?

[FenwickS]

Thanks for the link darkshadow!

I honestly prefer the old one...

[Bibliophile79]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (although, never finished Paradise)
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (currently reading)
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (although I skipped a lot of the historical stuff)
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (only read the first three books so far)
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

[Phangirl7]

Let's see, how many of these have I read? Probably not near enough. Ok, my list.
1. The Bible (the whole thing, took me way more than a year, but I did it!)
2. Hamlet by Shakespeare
12. The Odessy by Homer
17. The Iliad by Homer
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
40. The Trial by franz kafka
the other shakespeare's listed.

[ashulman]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

I'd say 50 read, but a couple of these I've only started and have not got through yet, like Infinite Jest and the Recognitions

[Gladys]

No mention of Dostoevsky's The Idiot anywhere on thread. Fancy that.

[ashulman]

No mention of Dostoevsky's The Idiot anywhere on thread. Fancy that.

I really liked it, but I'd probably put Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov above it.

[Adolescent09]

No offense to anybody but this list is absolutely ATROCIOUS compared to the last one that was up back in like 2008. In my opinion half the books are complete trash, Tolkien although a legend should not have any of his books in the top 10,000 of all time and it is patently obvious that most of you equate quantity with quality. As one poster said, The Idiot was not listed and that book buries most of the crap here with aesthetic style, ascetic characters, intriguing plot, unprecedented dialogue and climactic conclusion. That is just my view. Sorry if I offended anyone but I needed a cathartic outlet. I've been too stressed lately and this was just the lump of solid coal on top of the abysmally baked cake.

[Eiseabhal]

Could you be specific about the "trash" and why? "Most of you"? Quantity.? "Like 2008"?

[Tekin]

Top 3 of the top 10 are just ridiculous IMO. Though the rest of the top 10 are OK for me. There are some unexpected interesting books throughout the list like Essays by Montaigne and two Borges masterpieces along with If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, Meditations and some other stuff. But many atrocious choices as well: Ayn Rand, Ferdowsi (who even knows Ferdowsi here, his book is extremely childish and barbaric), Patrick White, Tolkien?

[ennison]

Perhaps you do not know White yet. I would recommend you tackle him. Saying "who even knows" is an admission of ignorance not a critical judgement. I didn't know him but I assume that those who chose him must find something of value in him. But if you have found him barbaric then you have found him barbaric. Homer is barbaric. So is McCarthy. So is Shakespeare in some texts. It ain't really about being nice and civilised either in language or morality.

[chrisvia]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (own it)
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes (own it)
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (own it)
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (own it)
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (own it)
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (own it)
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (own it)
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (own it)
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (own it)
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka (own it)
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (own it)
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges (own it)
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (own it; have read pieces here and there)
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (own it)
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (own it)
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (own it)
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (own it; have read The Fountainhead)
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (own it)
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino (own it)
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka (own it)
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer (own it; have read bits)
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare (own it)

Amazing how many I own but have not read!

Question: are the George R. R. Martin books really that good? I don't read a lot of popular fiction, but I see it made this list.

Some other lists I've used to guide my reading choices:

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Best_Books_of_All_Time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde%27s_100_Books_of_the_Century


I would add Virgil, Ovid, and Goethe to the list.

[ennison]

Just looked up the French list there. Like all lists there is something to appeal to a male's inherent autism and often there are new considerations to feed the brain but Asterix the Gaul at number 23! I think that is carrying Francocentrism a wee bit far. I'd have put it at number 49.

[ennison]

"Popular fiction" sometimes gets a bad name but what exactly is unpopular fiction - to gloss Mr Shaw a bit. Some very good books don't sell well when they come out: some do. What can we say about that. Not much probably. My young fellow reads fairly widely and I recently saw a Martin novel in his room. He said he was enjoying it. Should I be worried doc?

[chrisvia]

Just looked up the French list there. Like all lists there is something to appeal to a male's inherent autism and often there are new considerations to feed the brain but Asterix the Gaul at number 23! I think that is carrying Francocentrism a wee bit far. I'd have put it at number 49.

That LeMonde list is based on a poll conducted at French reseller Fnac. I was in Lyon back in December, at a Fnac, purchasing a Houellebecq novel, when a fellow approached me and started raving about these ultimate French culture comics. He then proceeded to lead me to a section filled with Asterix books, pulling them from the shelves and giving me hyperenthusiastic discourses on the background of each and why they are so entertaining to the French people. It was quite amusing and educational!

[kev67]

Interesting German list of the top 100 books. I am glad to see The Jungle Books is up there.

http://www.abebooks.de/Buecher-Highlight/Hundert-beste-Buecher.shtml

[Jassy Melson]

I'm between readng Austin's Persuasin and Mansfield Park

[ennison]

Wunderbar Kev. Verfall und Untergang des Romischen Reiches is there but no Aufstieg und Fall des Dritten Reiches

[WyattGwyon]

The ones I have read:


1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare


Thank you for voting, everyone. It's been great working with your favorite books.

A number of the books I've read don't belong on the list (Ayn Rand, Proust, The Stranger, among others) Some I have read major parts of (Proust, Chaucer, Dante, Decameron), but not beginning to end. I have probably read The Arrow of Gold by Conrad, since I pretty much read all of his fiction. I just don't have any particular memory of it.

[ennison]

Wow! Very impressive mr WyattGwyon. I'm reading kids' books at the moment and reinforcing what I thought. There ain't no such thing as adult literature

[Darcy88]

The Iliad, Wuthering Heights and Canterbury Tales should really be higher on the list. Rand should not be on it. Don't think I would put Gatsby that high. Thucydides and Herodotus ought to be on there somewhere. Same with Stendhal. Other than that the list is pretty decent. Happy to see Marquez and Camus in the top 20.

[hannah_arendt]

For me number 1 is "Wuthering Heights". I am reading now. It`s my 5 time:)

If it comes to "Great Gatsby", I am going to see the film today.

[Darcy88]

The absence of D.H. Lawrence depresses me.

[hypatia_]

what did you guys get out of war and peace, and how difficult a read is it?

[Lykren]

what did you guys get out of war and peace, and how difficult a read is it?

To me, War and Peace is a very fun, light read with a tendency to meander. It isn't entirely deserving of its length, but if you're curious, by all means read it. I would put Anna Karenina ahead of it, however.

[Calidore]

what did you guys get out of war and peace, and how difficult a read is it?

I'm finding it a bit of a slog, honestly, but I'm not a great ways into it. Before reading it, I watched several movie versions to help me retain the characters, and that has worked like a charm. The book opens at a society party and throws many people at you right off the bat, and I already knew who was who and what they were about, so I could carry on reading without having to refer to outside notes.

Also, thanks to the movies, I know good stuff is coming up (the war part; too much peace right now), which is enabling me to keep reading.

[Lykren]

Also, thanks to the movies, I know good stuff is coming up (the war part; too much peace right now), which is enabling me to keep reading.

Interesting. I found the peace fascinating, the war boring.

[Drkshadow03]

Interesting. I found the peace fascinating, the war boring.

Me too.

[papillondemai]

"what did you guys get out of war and peace, and how difficult a read is it?"

I thought it was great and not difficult at all to read (I am finding Moby Dick more difficult). Contrary to what others are saying I thought the peace was boring. The first third to half is so slow but once you get to the war you realize that Tolstoy had to set everything up to put the war in context. The "peace" gives a great description of Russian culture at the time. But the description of the French invasion, the Russian tactics in response to the invasion, the sacking and burning of Moscow, and the slow, disastrous retreat of the French and their cohorts as they tried to get out of Russia in the winter while the Russians slowly picked them off was great. It took me six months to read through the boring crap about the parties and social life of the Russian aristocracy but once the invasion started I found it so fascinating I couldn't put it down.

[Calidore]

"what did you guys get out of war and peace, and how difficult a read is it?"

I thought it was great and not difficult at all to read (I am finding Moby Dick more difficult). Contrary to what others are saying I thought the peace was boring. The first third to half is so slow but once you get to the war you realize that Tolstoy had to set everything up to put the war in context. The "peace" gives a great description of Russian culture at the time. But the description of the French invasion, the Russian tactics in response to the invasion, the sacking and burning of Moscow, and the slow, disastrous retreat of the French and their cohorts as they tried to get out of Russia in the winter while the Russians slowly picked them off was great. It took me six months to read through the boring crap about the parties and social life of the Russian aristocracy but once the invasion started I found it so fascinating I couldn't put it down.

That's what I'm waiting on. I know what's coming up; it's just the getting there.

[papillondemai]

That's what I'm waiting on. I know what's coming up; it's just the getting there.

LOL. It's worth it, though. A great read. And afterwards you can say you read War and Peace; Mere mortals will be impressed and beautiful women or handsome men (whichever is applicable) will want to sleep with you.

[Lykren]

You guys are so funny! I've always felt that love, as something beautiful, was inherently fascinating, and that war, as something stupid, was usually pretty dull. War and Peace pretty much bore out my expectations, though I can't say I was ever REALLY bored while reading it - Tolstoy is simply a great writer.

[WICKES]

Also, Macbeth and King Lear lacking is a bit strange!

No-one will ever convince me that The Great Gatsby is better than King Lear!!!

[Nelsondaniel59]

Well I've read 31 and loved 26 of those. There is another dozen or so that I tried to read but couldn't finish. A bit surprised at no Rushdie, Pynchon or Barth, but it seems that 'a light touch' is something I value more than most. Great list though, and more than a few I've been meaning to get to. Thanks!

[finestglasses]

It that is helpful makes a situation more pleasant or more easy

[haydenliu]

I think A farewell to Arms is better than the ssun also rises

[hypatia_]

I don't think The Great Gatsby is nearly universal enough of a topic to be #4.

But I suppose I am bias due to my belief that the strength of a piece of literature is its ability to describe an original thought/problem/idea/emotion.

[Tallulah]

I've only read 24 of these! Some of them I'm not even familiar with which is cool...gives me something to look up. Like most other posters, Rand and Tolkein wouldn't have made the cut with me and The Great Gatsby is overrated but probably would've made my list towards the bottom...

[Bad Horse]

Anyone care to share how many of these they've read?
I've read 45 and five-halves of them. I'm pretty pleased with this list. There are a few I'd count as pretentious and over-rated, but some people count some of my favorites (Dostoyevsky, Moby Dick, Lolita) as pretentious. I'm pleased to see Cervantes, Camus, Conrad, Borges, & Miller up there. Shakespeare still tops the list, but at least people managed to limit themselves to his non-crap plays.

[Bad Horse]

No mention of Dostoevsky's The Idiot anywhere on thread. Fancy that.

The Idiot is a very Christian novel. It has one central philosophical view / assumption, and not enough outside of that for people not sharing that assumption to get around it.

[Bad Horse]

what did you guys get out of war and peace, and how difficult a read is it?
War and Peace is an in-depth, hyper-realistic study of many different characters. When I say "hyper-realistic" I mean that Tolstoy portrays his characters so realistically that they can't function as characters in a novel are supposed to, to generate sympathy and tension. None of them are villainous or completely admirable; you never know who to root for; you often follow their actions with interest yet wouldn't mind if they were killed off. They have little impact on their world, and when they have impact, it's generally by accident.

All very realistic and insightful, but it's a very long book that at no point gives you a compelling reason to pick it back up if you put it down. To me, as a writer, it's a study in how fiction differs from reality, and why. Authors always think they want to write realistic and complex characters, but War & Peace shows what happens if you manage to do that.

[Anne Catherick]

I kinda liked the previous list better because I had read more books from that one (only about 35 here).

Still I am glad that LoTR is not in the top 10.

Sure - but how the hell is the Hobbit in the top 100!?

[Anne Catherick]

I think A farewell to Arms is better than the ssun also rises

Hmm ... personally I'm not sure - but I think The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls are better than both. Funny, I thought that was a pretty strong consensus. Well, always nice to be surprised!

PS: apologies for double posting ...

[R.F. Schiller]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

Eh, 26/100. Not great, but most of my literary interests are with American literature with a sprinkle of Russian literature. Surprised only one Nabokov work made it, I was sure Pale Fire would have been included, and Speak, Memory as well, seeing as there are non-fiction books listed there. Pleasantly surprised Walden was so high at #35. Very disappointed that Resurrection made it on the list, it was one of the few Tolstoy works that I didn't enjoy; The Death of Ivan Illyich is far better in my opinion. Also thought As I Lay Dying was better than The Sound and the Fury.

[Whosis]

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a book of poems. I'm surprised you counted it as a literary book. I think Don Quixote is generally considered the best book ever written, usually.

[desiresjab]

Many great books, and quite a few that should never be allowed near a list like this. Iam only batting .450.

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

[desiresjab]

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is a book of poems. I'm surprised you counted it as a literary book. I think Don Quixote is generally considered the best book ever written, usually.

What is more literary than poetry?

[Marcus1]

Hello, I'm new to this site. This top 100 list is actually quite good and better than many other lists I've read. I'm pleased to see that there is a mixture of literature, poetry and philosophical works in the mix. Also, there's a healthy number of foreign literature represented. It will be interesting to see how another poll turns out 2 years on.

[Francis Meadows]

Here are the one's I've read with a short personal impression behind. Not that many read, I'm afraid

1. The Bible : only read the New Testament entirely, the Old only parts.
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: read it when I was about twelve. If my memory is not playing tricks on me, I generally enjoyed it.
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus: read it in French when I was in highschool, mainly inspired by Killing an Arab of the Cure which is Robert Smith's popmusic take on the book. Should probably give it a new read as I fear I actually missed a lot.
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift : read it long ago.
77. 1984 by George Orwell: deserves to be higher imo.
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: this was a struggle to get to the end, mainly because the philosphical side of it resulted in a very long book. The general plot is very good imo, where the successive actions of the looters that Rand imagines, betray a strong capacity to tell a story. However, it could have been told with much less words imo. The whole John Galt-radio speech e.g. I failed to see the added value of that. I understand that it's considered the basis of Ayn Rand's philosophy, but I feel it doesn't belong in the book. The root of money-speech and the conversations taking place in Galt's Gulch already more than amply covered the topic imo.
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: too long ago. Should reread this.

In general it seems a good list and I'm pretty sure that I will use it as a starting point to pick books to read.

Still, as it is a mainly anglosaxon list, I'm surprised to see none of the more contemporary American and UK-writers such as, e.g., Tom Wolfe or Brett Easton Ellis, or the English writers Douglas Adams or Nick Hornsby.

FM

[ennison]

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

[Marcus1]

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

Sure.

[R.F. Schiller]

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

I wasn't here when the last one was done, so I'm down. LitNet's been pretty inactive lately though.

[ennison]

I think it was a member with the moniker Desolation who organised the list before. I assume it requires a bit of Internet savvy and some free time. Personally I am enough of the autistic male to get a kick out of lists like this. What we would get would perhaps be different this time but I suspect much would still be the same. I doubt if any "serious" reader would object if big beasts like Hugo and Tolstoy were on the list but at the same time it's not very original. If nearly all of us agree that Les Miserables is a bit of genuine genius then we are saying only what we'd expect any fairly well-read person to say. Course if we have a hundred text list then there is room for a bit of diversity and the personal interests of the contributors. I guess a few of the lesser known texts were my single vote. I have noticed though that "Life and Fate" was republished recently so there must be those out "there" who agree with me about the stature of that text.

[ennison]

I might add that the Bible top of the list perplexes me, especially when that anthology is followed by a play. Some texts are the result of the voters being young. " TKaM" is a great novel but I suspect it was voted for by those who have read forty or fifty books... youngsters. Not a bad reason to vote for it but I am making the simple observation that there is really quite a wide difference between the texts. I doubt if I would ever vote for Joyce's more accessible but still little read tome (rather than the often talked about but seldom read tome) over say his short stories or the Portrait. Which brings me to another point. Poets and poetry don't feature (I guess Old Will was primarily a poet) and non-fiction ( although whole slews of the Bible are non-fiction or poetry!) So I guess if we made the rules a little different we might end up with quite a difference in the list. Ah but would the members want the site headed by a list that did not include a very large number of texts regarded as canonical. There have been some warm arguments about the "canon" in the last few years on these threads. ( I always feel uncomfortably geeky and trendy using words like "thread"! Don't know why though as my cousin Joey - long deceased - often spoke of "losing her thread" if she wandered off topic in a conversation)

[Marcus1]

I don't see a problem with listing "canonical" works in your top 25 or 50 favourite books. I consider myself more well-versed in cinema than literature, having lost a lot of interest in pursuing lengthy novels for the past couple of years. The "canon" is not a restrictive list, it's basically the beginning of an exploration into the literature from different countries. Nevertheless, I do enjoy seeing more eclectic lists which indicate that the person has ventured beyond the "canon".

[hazelk]

A wonderful book for me was "A Fine Balance' by Rohiton Mistry.

[Toryhere]

I note that no-one here seems to have read what I think is by far the best 20th work on the list: A Dance to the Music of Time. Do you want the depth of Proust but with a finer appreciation of art and literature and a lot more humour? Do want a sweeping 12 volume sequence of novels that takes you from 1914 to 1970 and gives you a marvelllous cast of characters ranging from utterly bohemian to the ristocratic? Do you want subtle tricks of narrative and time shifts that make Joyce look like an amateur? Do yo want a marvellous comic villain who is like someone we have all met in our lives? Then A Dance to the Music of Time is for you.

It's almost worth reading the sequence for the titles, especially Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.

[Poetaster]

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare


30 of them. Not bad, I could do better I suppose. Also, I've read the first book of A Song of Fire and Ice, but not the whole series thus far, so I decided to leave that one out.

[Pompey Bum]

I note that no-one here seems to have read what I think is by far the best 20th work on the list: A Dance to the Music of Time. Do you want the depth of Proust but with a finer appreciation of art and literature and a lot more humour? Do want a sweeping 12 volume sequence of novels that takes you from 1914 to 1970 and gives you a marvelllous cast of characters ranging from utterly bohemian to the ristocratic? Do you want subtle tricks of narrative and time shifts that make Joyce look like an amateur? Do yo want a marvellous comic villain who is like someone we have all met in our lives? Then A Dance to the Music of Time is for you.

It's almost worth reading the sequence for the titles, especially Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.

Thank you for the recommendation and welcome to the site. Unfortunately for those of us who rely on ebooks, this series is only offered by Amazon in paper (a no-no for those of us with lives on the go-go). It would be nice if those clowns would get a clue about some of the great out-of-print books that need to be digitalized, but lots of things would be nice. :-(

[nourel]

Hello. Please I am a moroccan girl. I have a BA dissertation to write. I decided to deal with superstition in ' the adventures of Huckleberry Finn ' Mark Twain. Is it a good choice ? can you guide me please ?

[entropic island]

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

Being completely new to this site, I don't know if my input is needed/wanted here, but I'd be down. Not to say this isn't a great list (Gaddis!).

[Pompey Bum]

Hello Entropic Island. Sorry no one's talked to you yet. It helps if you post on the introductions thread, but you know, it's not that big a deal. Please allow me, as the site's unofficial greeter to extend a heartfelt if retroactive and ultimately unofficial welcome. We are very friendly here, but we tend to talk with books in front of our faces so we don't always notice when someone walks through the door. We'll have to get a bell or something. Welcome again. Please enjoy yourself! :)

[entropic island]

Thanks, Pompey Bum! I got a nice welcome from bounty earlier, but it was in a forum game thread which I couldn't contribute to further, so I didn't want to derail.

[mal4mac]

Italics - those I have tried very hard to read and like but had to admit defeat, and gave up before finishing.

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
24. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
27. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
51. Testament by R.C. Hutchinson
52. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
79. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramagos
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

I think that's 56 completed. I've read a lot of Conrad but haven't even heard of "The arrow of gold"! Why not Lord Jim, Nostromo or Victory? In general I think this list is missing some heavy hitters, and substituting some lightweights. Why would you have A Christnas Carol instead of Bleak House? Where's Geroge Eliot(Middlemarch)?

[Clopin]

I've read 49 of the current list, but I think this site is really biased towards the types of books I've been reading. I don't usually score so well on these lists.

[entropic island]

I don't think I could pick just 10 candidates for a revision, though. Maybe...

[Marcus1]

We had to submit a top 25. You just list down whatever comes to your mind.

[Lykren]

I thought we did a top ten where order mattered?

[Marcus1]

Oh my bad, yes the voting was on this thread: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?71400-LitNet-Top-100-Books-Revisited

Anyway if we should do another list, I feel that a top 25 would be more ideal. The film discussion forum (mubi.com) used to have polls where users submitted a list of 25 films, and it turned out that there was more representation for personal choices rather than what you get from a standard canon.

Furthermore, I tend to be more interested in the individual lists than the final list.

[Lykren]

Well, I for one am ready for another list. 25 choices sounds good to me.

[entropic island]

I agree, a top 25 would allow for greater diversity in the final "canon."

[Tweedledum]

Too bad I didn't participate in this one. This list is a good one. But perhaps it would be a little bit more interesting to create a top 25 books that were written/started/pubublished in 21st century. Because I have a feeling that if we would create top 25 of all times we would end up with well-known and already read books.

[Pike Bishop]

My Top Ten of the excluded novels:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot (no-brainer)
2. Beloved by Toni Morrison
3. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
4. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
5. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
6. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
7. The Ambassadors by Henry James
8. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
9. Neuromancer by William Gibson
10. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

Ten more excluded and deserving:

1. Underworld by Don DeLillo
2. White Noise by Don DeLillo
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
4. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
5. Ubik by Philip K. Dick
6. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
7. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
8. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
10. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

[ennison]

I like that selection PB though I do not know the last two, don't care for Woolf and was very disappointed by Bulgakov - much preferring his other work.

[Pike Bishop]

Snow Crash is a brilliant Pynchon-esque Cyberpunk novel about a hilarious, yet frightening, near future and the fascinating virtual reality world within it. Austerlitz is an elegant novel about memory and the Holocaust's lingering residual effects.

[ennison]

You are tempting me PB to abandon my distaste for the stranger shores to try Snow Crash. Ok I give in. I will. But no promises that I won't be scathing

[Eiseabhal]

Ok Ennison. Money where the mouth is. Did you?

[ennison]

Sorry to say Eiseabhal - not yet. I still have not acquired it. But I recently read Unsworth's Morality Play (very good but too short) I'm well into Kennedy's The Feast (What a terrific little book!) I've also been dipping in and out of a collection of Collier tales (beautifully written oddities) Catriona and Their Eyes were Watching God are getting near the top of the pile!

[Eiseabhal]

I take it that's RLS' Catriona. Kidnapped is a novel I loved when young but it ends so flat that he just had to write a sequel. Kennedy I confess to never having heard of but now that I've looked her up I reckon I should give her a go. Have you read any more of her work?

[ennison]

No but there is one in the pile: The Constant Nymph. It is quite far down the pile. One cannot read everything. A colleague (A very beautiful colleague!) has just given me The Letters of Ivor Punch to read and it will go to the top once Catriona is finished. Stevenson's use of dialogue in Catriona is brilliant.

[Eiseabhal]

Ah Ennison. Having your reading directed by the beauty of a bint! IsN't that written by a folk singer? I think we should have a list of 100 books excluding novels just to make a change

[BartV90]

Let's what I've read from this list...

2. Hamlet
4. The Great Gatsby
15. Lolita
23. Heart of Darkness
29. Jane Eyre
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
43. The Canterbury Tales (well parts of it)
47. A Christmas Carol
56. The Hobbit
58. Waiting for Godot
65. Othello
70. Wuthering Heights
77. 1984
81. Of Mice and Men

Fourteen books in total. That's not a lot, but a lot of them are on my to-read list. Seems like a good list anyway! Gatsby at 4 is really high though it seems to me. It's a good book, but that's very extreme.

[UlyssesE]

Great list. I've read:

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

[Alhena12]

I was comparing this list to other lists, including American critics like Harold Bloom and Clifford Fadiman, not just to my own list based on the novels I've read. Can you name one major critic who would put Gatsby ahead of Dickens' major novels?

[ennison]

Ah now my autistic side needs a list of "major" critics and their works. Not that I'd feel any requirement to read them. There is however a lot of pleasure to be had from reading the likes of Rexroth or Massie (arch-unionist) on other writers. Maybe I should check out if they thought Gatsby was "ahead of" Victorian Spitting Images!

[CWolfieVan]

Interesting, fun list. Thanks for putting it together. To nitpick, I agree with Corona, and I'd put Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, and a few other Shakespeare plays high up on the list, certainly above the Great Gatsby. I've read around 54 of these. I'm surprised Manfred by Lord Byron is on the list, but I didn't see Don Juan. I'm glad Don Quixote isn't in the top 5. I think the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann should be on the list. I don't think Ayn Rand should be on the list, personally, but I understand she's been influential; I'd rather see Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather or even the short stories of Lorrie Moore. I think Euripedes should be listed above Arthur Miller.
I think the Aeneid should be on the list. As for Dickens, I think Great Expectations or Bleak House should be on the list, and above Tale of Two Cities.

[Eiseabhal]

Here Ennison that bint who directed you to Macintyre must know a thing or two: he's just won the Festival First Book Award.

[ennison]

Guess the arty-farties would vote for it but I found it pretty awful. One thing I cannot abide is anachronism and that text has it. I'm not fond of gratuitous foulness either but that text fits in with the modern muck of Scotland purdy damned well. So I ain't too surprised it has been given a pat by the prat brigade. It is not without imagination. He comes of a creative pedigree: grandad a caelidh poet; uncle an avante-gardish scribbler. It figures I guess and one should never be too graceless in saying ok it deserves some acknowledgement. Howzat for a damning by faint praise! Oh and the "bint" knows a thing or three.

[The Joker]

Amazingly, I've read about a quarter of these. I must be better read than I thought I was. As you said though, Everywhereguy, it's not what we've read but what we've taken from it. Which means I probably know jack sh*t, having the memory of a goldfish.

Some interesting choices. A Christmas Carol getting in above a Tale of Two Cities? And when it comes to Patrick White, I'm team Vivisector all the way. Glad to see Heart of Darkness placing so high. According to Wikipedia (that tome of accurate knowledge), it's quite unfashionable to rate it nowadays. Sure, it's been on the curriculum since nineteen-canteen, but is it actually good? Apparently Conrad didn't think much of it either. Gutted, as it's one of my favourite books.

Still, Tchaikovsky hated The Nutcracker, so what does he know...

[ennison]

Heart of Darkness is a tremendous book. Too subtle for some readers. It isn't like Nostromo of course which is magnificent. But my favourite Conrad is still The Arrow of Gold - that could be down to the age I was when I read it. White, who is little known by many on this forum, is one of the great writers.

[Gutted]

I've read 33 of them.

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (not all of them, but enough that I felt like including it)
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

Maybe I missed them, but the lack of Ovid, Macbeth, Animal Farm, and Brave New World is surprising.

[RalphX3]

A little surprised to see Les Miserables but no Hunchback of Notre Dame.

[Eiseabhal]

The fellow who collated this list did the site a service but he seems to have left us some time ago? Did this list replace an earlier one? The Bible is an anthology and perhaps he should have said folk should identify a favorite book from within it. But that might have registered the first five or six books on the list as being Biblical. I think I've read about twenty books from this list. It seems a bit skewed towards the serious stuff. But that's to be expected. So how did Agatha sneak in there I wonder.
A Dance to the Music of Time is not one but many books.

[ennison]

It is an interesting and mixed bag. I wouldn't pay much attention to the order. There were probably young people voting who had read only a couple of handfuls of books. That would account for presence of Tolkien and Martin. There is poetry (Manfred / Wife of Bath and pals) philosophy and fiction. What it mainly suggests to me is at least at the time it was drawn up there were very varied readers on the site.

[kev67]

Twenty-five, not bad, but there is rather a gap between 4 and 15 in which I show my philistinism.

1. The Bible
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
96. Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

[PetSounds]

I've read:

1. The Bible (well, about half of it)
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (did not enjoy at all)
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams (I've exchanged letters with Richard Adams.)
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Lydia Davis's 2012 translation)
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

20/100. I suppose that's a decent start.

[El Entenado]

I've read:

1. The Bible (not the entire book)
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
42. Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
77. 1984 by George Orwell
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka

28/100.

[EmptySeraph]

I've read:

1. The Bible
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Don Quixote by Cervantes
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
12. The Odyssey by Homer
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
17. The Illiad by Homer
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
19. Essays by Montaigne
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
25. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
31. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
34. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
40. The Trial by Franz Kafka
43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
45. Fictions by J.L. Borges
46. El Aleph by J.L. Borges
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
48. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus by John Fowles
50. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
54. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
58. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
59. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
60. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
62. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
63. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
64. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey
68. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
71. Manfred by Lord Byron
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
75. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
76. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
77. 1984 by George Orwell
78. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
82. Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne
83. The Tree of Man by Patrick White
84. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
85. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
86. 2666 by Robert Bolano
87. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
88. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
90. The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
91. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
92. The Castle by Franz Kafka
93. I Canti by Giacomo Leopardi
94. Man’s Fate by André Malraux
95. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
98. Confessions by Rousseau
99. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

The list borders half on the preposterous, and the other half is just indecent.

[thekingrat]

When is there going to be a revote?

[Adolescent09]

Even though I am a Christian, the Bible at #1 seems a bit biased considering most people here haven't read it all let alone the other timeless religious texts (Torah, Quran, Book of the Dead, te Ching etc)... but if it is listed in accordance with sales and impact it makes sense.

I have read only 30 of the books but there is not enough non-fiction. Where is Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, Darwin, Euripides etc..?

The following is just my opinion:

Les Miserables is in my top 5, To Kill a Mockingbird should only be at 75+ and even that is being generous, if Slaughterhouse Five is on the list so should Elie Wiesel's 'Night'. Lolita is great but definitely overrated. Jane Eyre should be a little higher. Vanity Fair should be higher.

Crime and Punishment is definitely better than Moby-Dick. Melville's masterpiece although poetic, harrowing and visceral is absolutely no match for Dostoevsky's mental transplant of Raskolinikov's torture into the mind of the reader. The reader BECOMES Raskolinikov, in a very similar way that the reader BECOMES Prince Myshkin (why the heck isn't The Idiot on this list by the way? It's on a par with Crime and Punishment.)

If we are going by impact (as is clearly being done with the first book on the list) ironically the last book on the list along with Romeo & Juliet and King Lear should be higher up.

Oh, and The Grapes of Wrath was way better than Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is foisted on reluctant high school readers along the lines of The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atlas Shrugged etc..

...and Lord of the Rings? like seriously? That's middle-school reading.

[RetsixArp]

I have never actually read the Bible; I have listened to the unabridged 60+-CD set of the KJV 2+ dozen times. Narrator: American actor Alexander Scourby*, who made the recording for the American Foundation for the Blind during 4-yr period, ending in 1953. First full recording of the Bible issued on LP records. I recalled a h.s. English teacher playing parts of it for her class. Had the CD set for several years before I slipped disc 1 into the car CD player, listening on my until recently lengthy commutes.

Ditto Joyce's Ulysses. Coincidently, there's a cite early in the novel where Joyce wrote about leaving one's (grandpa's) audio legacy.
_________________
*If you want to see actor Scourby in action, he appeared as Gen. Harper in a Twilight Zone episode called The Last Flight.

[thialfi]

[QUOTE=Adolescent09;1333015]
I have read only 30 of the books but there is not enough non-fiction. Where is Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, Darwin, Euripides etc..?

I've read 32, but I have the same problem, including the "etc."

"Crime and Punishment" and "Moby Dick" both belong on the list. "Atlas Shrugged" is much too long for high school readers.

[svejorange]

I've read:

1. The Bible (well, about half of it)
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (did not enjoy at all)
26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
32. Watership Down by Richard Adams (I've exchanged letters with Richard Adams.)
35. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Lydia Davis's 2012 translation)
47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
74. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
80. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie


17/100.

[ennison]

I think it was as good a list as any. Nobody would be ashamed of reading most of these and being able to think and speak about them. But it has been here a few years. Maybe it needs refreshed.

[#wordsworth]

Not sure if the Bible can be ranked as one? It very rarely influences modern Christian society, is not practiced and has not had the cultural, societal and legal impact of other religious texts, in particular something like the Quran, which has a far greater historical and current impact.

I have looked down the rest of the list and found some really good choices and some that I personally disagree with...then again that is the problem with being subjective.

I do like the inclusion of "The murder of Roger Akroyd", as Christie is such an underrated writer.

So this has been my first contribution to the site :)

Hi everyone haha

[hera-on-earth]

There is "Emma" by Jane Austen here but not "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens.

It is a lovely list though :)

[blanderen]

The list looks quite reasonable, except some of the american writers. It would never have occurred to me to put them there. I just wonder has anyone who's not american voted for Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurty?

[ennison]

Well I voted for one of these anyway - but what would being American have to do with it. I doubt if many Americans read after leaving school.

[spikepipsqueak]

This is a really interesting list. I don't agree with some of it and have recently developed an actual hatred for F. Scott Fitzgerald and don't understand what got him into 4th place.

I would have had Solzhenitsyn there somewhere and agree with someone earlier who would have included A fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Perhaps The Fountainhead rather than Atlas Shrugged.

I'm keeping a copy of this list for future reading. My thanks to the person who compiled it.

How did Watership Down get that many votes? I really want to know.

2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

11. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

20. The Stranger by Albert Camus

23. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

26. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

28. Emma by Jane Austen
29. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
30. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

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

43. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
44. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

53. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

55. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
56. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
57. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

61. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

65. Othello by William Shakespeare
66. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
67. Vanity Fair by William Thackerey

69. Voss by Patrick White
70. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

72. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
73. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

77. 1984 by George Orwell

89. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

97. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

100. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

[bounty]

spike---I love watership down! one of the few fiction books ive read twice, and id be willing to read a third time.

moby dick is one of the all-time worst books and i'll fight anyone who says otherwise! laughs...

or at least be willing to listen to someone who can convince me its the "great American novel."

war and peace was torturous and i don't think that belongs on any lists of top 100 books.

same with vanity fair, one of an unfortunately increasing amount of books i tried to read but just couldn't get through. im going along saying to myself, what the heck am i reading here?

i sometimes wonder how much pretension goes into such lists.

[spikepipsqueak]

Hah! Don't worry that I'm stalking you. Just looking at the threads I looked at last time was here. :)

I don't hate Moby Dick but you don't have to fight me. I'm not American but have read quite a few books that probably capture the American soul better than that one.

I would probably come to fisticuffs over Vanity Fair, though. Look at it from the viewpoint of wry humour and it might appeal more. Thackeray is downright sarcastic and his people are real with human foibles that he probes almost surgically and then we forgive them because we understand, to some extent.

In a related issue (and I'm pleased to see it wasn't on the list) A Confederacy Of Dunces seems to divide the world. I have friends who rave about it, but I want returned the time I spent persevering with it.

Can you, or anyone, explain the attraction?

[bounty]

I remember being in 10th grade spike, and that probably being our first exposure to Shakespeare, almost totally lost and heavily dependent on the teacher being able to tell us what the heck it was we were reading.

in one particular class in grad school we had to read a pretty heady work by kant. I was at least a little out of my element so I cant speak for my peers here, but the writing was very difficult, and I was amazed at the prof's ability to say in plainer English what the heck we were reading.

if Thackeray's writing was indeed full of wry humor and sarcasm, id have to be reading it under the auspices of someone lots more insightful than me to tell me and show me what the heck it is I am reading!

I have dunces but I haven't read it yet. I just last night started a big fat elvis Presley biography but I don't like to just read non-fiction. i'm going to be finished soon with gone with the wind and will be looking for something else to read.

[spikepipsqueak]

I'm in 2 minds.

I would like the opinion of someone I respect on that book, but pure friendship and just human consideration says I should advise you to Run! and burn the book. :)

[bounty]

laughs...okay, I'll go, at least temporarily, with your latter position.