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

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Originally Posted by hypatia_

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Calidore

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.

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

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Originally Posted by Lykren

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

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Me too.

"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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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Originally Posted by Calidore

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

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by Corona

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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...

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Originally Posted by Drkshadow03

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Gladys

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by hypatia_

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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Originally Posted by haydenliu

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

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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 ...

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.

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.

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

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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.

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What is more literary than poetry?

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.

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

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

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Originally Posted by ennison

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

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Sure.

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Originally Posted by ennison

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

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

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.

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)

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".

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

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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. :-(

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 ?

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Originally Posted by ennison

Nearly two years? Time for a refresher?

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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!).

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! :)

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.

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)?

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.