(Another) Top 100 Novels of All Time List
Here is my own (Another) Top 100 Novels of All Time. In fact it’s actually much more because I couldn’t trim it far enough, plus there are entire series listed. The Wheel of Time Series is 13 books by itself.
1 – The Odyssey by Homer
2 – Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
3 – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
4 – American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
5 – A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
6 – The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
7 – The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
8 – Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
9 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
10 – Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
11 – The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
12 – On Basilisk Station, by David Weber
13 – Horatio Hornblower Series by C. S. Forester
14 – Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
15 – The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
16 – The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
17 – Ulysses, by James Joyce
18 – The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
19 – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
20 – Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
21 – Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
22 – The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
23 – Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
24 – Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
25 – The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
26 – Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
27 – The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler
28 – Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
29 – I, Claudius, by Robert Graves
30 – To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
31 – An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
32 – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
33 – Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
34 – Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
35 – Native Son, by Richard Wright
36 – Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
37 – U.S.A. (trilogy), by John Dos Passos
38 – Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
39 – A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster
40 – The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James
41 – The Ambassadors, by Henry James
42 – Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
43 – Studs Lonigan (trilogy), by James T. Farrell
44 – The Good Soldierby Ford Madox Ford
45 – Animal Farm, by George Orwell
46 – The Golden Bowl, by Henry James
47 – A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
48 – As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
49 – All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
50 – The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
51 – Howards End, by E. M. Forster
52 – Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
53 – The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene
54 – Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
55 – Deliverance, by James Dickey
56 – A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell
57 – Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley
58 – The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
59 – The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
60 – Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad
61 – The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence
62 – Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence
63 – Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
64 – Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
65 – Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
66 – Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
67 – Light in August, by William Faulkner
68 – On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
69 – The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
70 – Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford
71 – The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
72 – Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm
73 – The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
74 – Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
75 – From Here to Eternity, by James Jones
76 – The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever
77 – The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
78 – Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham
79 – Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
80 – Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
81 – The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
82 – The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell
83 – Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
84 – A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
85 – A House for Mr Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul
86 – The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West
87 – A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
88 – Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
89 – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
90 – Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
91 – A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster
92 – Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
93 – The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
94 – Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
95 – A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul
96 – The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen
97 – Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
98 – Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow
99 – The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
100 – The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
101 – Loving, by Henry Green
102 – Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
103 – Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell
104 – Ironweed, by William Kennedy
105 – The Magus, by John Fowles
106 – Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch
107 – Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
108 – The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
109 – The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
110 – The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy
111 – The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington
112 – 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
113 = 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
A good book is one that makes you think, makes you discover new worlds, and one that changes your life. All of these changed mine.
I must admit that there are plenty of the books on your list that I haven’t read. Though right now I am reading #9 to my son as his bedtime book and #10 to my daughter. I would have to add the Little Women Series by Louisa May Alcott and the All Creatures Great and Small Series by James Herriot. Great list though, hoping to get some more pleasure reading done now that I have finished school.
I need to go back and re-read about half of these. I remember I’ve read them and enjoyed them, but would be hard pressed to tell you detailed plots for many of them.