This one from a 2004 book called 'The Novel 100' A rankling of the 100 best novels of all time...


1. Don Quixote - Cervantes
2. War and Peace - Tolstoy
3. Ulysses - Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
6. Moby Dick - Melville
7. Madame Bovay - Flaubert
8 Middlemarch - George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain - Mann
10. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki
11. Emma - Austen
12. Bleak house - Dickens
13. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
15. Tom Jones - Fielding
16. Great Expectations - Dickens
17. Absolom, Absolom - Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors - HenryJames
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
20. The GReat Gatsby- Fitzgerald
21. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair - Thackeray
25. Invisble Man - Ellison
26. Finnegan's Wake - Joyce
27. The Man Without Qulaities - Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
30. Women in Love - Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black - Stendahl
32. Tristram Shandy - Sterne
33. Dead Souls - Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Hardy
35. Buddenbrooks - Hardy
36. Le Pere Goirot - Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artitst as a Young Man - Joyce
38. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum - Grass
40. Molloy Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
43. Fathers and Sons - Turgenev
44. Nostromo - Conrad
45. Beloved - Morrison
46. An American TRagedy - Dreiser
47. Lolita - Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook - Lessing
49. Clarrissa - Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin
51. The Trial - Kafka
52. Jane Erye - Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
54. The GRapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
55. Petersburg - Bely
56. Things Fall apart - Achebe
57. The Princess of cleves - Lafayette
58. The Stranger - camus
59. My Antonia - Cather
60. The coutnerfeiters - Gide
61. The Age of Innocence - wharton
62. The Good Soldier - Ford
63. The Awakening - Chopin
64. A Passage to India - Forster
65. Herzog - Bellow
66. Germinal - Zola
67. Call it Sleep - Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy - Dos Passos
69. Hunger - Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz- Doblin
71. Cities of Salt - Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Fuentes
73. A Farwell to Arms - Hemmingway
74. Brideshead Revisited - Waugh
75. The LAst chronicle of Barset - Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers - Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
78. The sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
79. Candide - Voltaire
80. Native Son - Wright
81. Under the Volcano - Lowry
82. Oblomov - Goncharov
83. Their eyes Were Watching god - Hurston
84. Waverly - Scott
85. Snow country - Kawabata
86. 1984 - Orwell
87. The Betrothed - Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Stowe
90. Les Miserables - Hugo
91. On the Road - Kerouac
92. Frankenstien - Shelley
93. The Leopard - Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
95. The Woman in the White - Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk - Hasek
97. Dracula - Stoker
98. The Three Musketeers - Dumas
99. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle
100.Gone with the Wind - Mitchell

I'm in for 18.

Only 16 here (plus Cliff's Notes of a few others.)

This is a little... college, isn't it? Y'know, stuff you find in literary survey classes and stuff like that. Is there a list of "The 100 Greatest Books You May Have Not Read"?

Only a dozen-yikes, I've got some reading to do!!

34 here.

Number of which I've not read but seen the film adaptations of :31

7. 6 of which i read in high school, and 2 of which i thought sucked.
guess i'm not up on the "classics"

Read 13, but a handful of those I was forced to read in school. Dracula really doesn't belong up there, except to mark as a milestone in horror fiction (and who reads Finnegans Wake besides insane people--like me? )

I'm embarassed to say 31, mostly because of a UM English major. Of those 31, I really enjoyed about half a dozen. Lists like this are bullshit. Apparently the only good novelists from the second half of the century are the three Afro-Americans on the list. When will lists like this stop over-emphasizing Victorian romance and start recognizing contemporary literature that deals with something other than the plight of the black American? 5

16 for me. I've always wanted to read more Dickens though.

Only 10, and nothing on that list excites me too much as a must read.

What would you consider a must read?

I'm reading Don Quixote now. I read almost 60 I think. I have two copies of the Great Gatsby. Absolutely love that one.

I wonder about the validity of Clarissa and Gone For The Wind there, too. I haven't read either, and I don't knock them, but I hear tell that neither of them are towering achievements in the world of literature.

Historical value was taken into account. Hence the presence of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimoore Cooper.

For one, where's Confederacy of Dunces on that list?
Where's Hunter S. Thompson?
Where's Henry Miller? Vonnegut? T.C. Boyle?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?


Obviously there are books on that list that I haven't read that I would probably enjoy, but like somebody alluded to earlier, the list seems to be dipped in acedamia.

But I only read 10 or so of the books on that list so I really have no base to be speaking from.

It's good to see On The Road made it though.

i read these and enjoyed these:

14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
16. Great Expectations - Dickens
17. Absolom, Absolom - Faulkner
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
20. The GReat Gatsby- Fitzgerald
23. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
41. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
45. Beloved - Morrison
47. Lolita - Nabokov
52. Jane Erye - Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
54. The GRapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
56. Things Fall apart - Achebe
58. The Stranger - camus
63. The Awakening - Chopin
73. A Farwell to Arms - Hemmingway
77. Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
78. The sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
79. Candide - Voltaire
80. Native Son - Wright
86. 1984 - Orwell
88. The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper
90. Les Miserables - Hugo
91. On the Road - Kerouac
92. Frankenstien - Shelley
94. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
100.Gone with the Wind - Mitchell

Only read maybe five of those outside of school, though.

You're a liar.

I've read 15 and actually like 9. I'm sure I'll end up reading a bunch of these because I'm an English major, but I'm already expecting not to enjoy many of them.

I've read:

1. Don Quixote - Cervantes
4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust
21. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
38. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum - Grass
42. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
45. Beloved - Morrison
51. The Trial - Kafka
54. The GRapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
56. Things Fall apart - Achebe
58. The Stranger - camus
80. Native Son - Wright
86. 1984 - Orwell
94. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger


And quite a few others from the list are on my "to check out from the library" list.

bold = ones I read for a class.

How can you not like these dude?

yeah, i was going to say that Huck Finn is quite possibly the most fun read there is. Plus the line of "Fine then, I'll go to Hell," might be the greatest line in Am. Lit.

I've read about 15 from the top 50, but nothing in the lower 50.
i feel sort of bad about that, seeing as i am an English major but whatever.
after next quarter i will have read 2 more on that list (Ulysses, and War and Peace)

There was a revised edition of that book published with a longer and revised list of the best novels of all time...


1. Don Quixote - Cervantes
2. War and Peace - Tolstoy
3. Ulysses - Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
6. Moby Dick - Melville
7. Madame Bovay - Flaubert
8. Middlemarch - George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain - Mann
10. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki
11. Emma - Austen
12. Bleak House - Dickens
13. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
15. Tom Jones - Fielding
16. Great Expectations - Dickens
17. Absalom, Absalom - Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors - HenryJames
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
20. The GReat Gatsby- Fitzgerald
21. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair - Thackeray
25. Dead Souls - Gogol
26. La Pere Goirot - Balzac
27. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
28. Women in Love - Lawrence
29. The Red and the Black - Stendahl
30. Tristram Shandy - Sterne
31. Finnegan's Wake - Joyce
32. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Hardy
33. Buddenbrooks - Mann
34. Invisble Man - Ellison
35. The Man Without Qualities - Musil
36. A Portrait of the Artitst as a Young Man - Joyce
37. Molloy Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Beckett
38. The Tin Drum - Grass
39. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
40. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
41. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
42. Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
43. Beloved - Morrison
44. Nostromo - Conrad
45. Fathers and Sons - Turgenev
46. The Trial - Kafka
47. Lolita - Nabokov
48. Mrs. Dalloway
49. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin
50. Clarissa - Richardson
51. Persuasion - Austen
52. Jane Erye - Charlotte Bronte
53 David Copperfield - Dickens
54. Petersburg - Bely
55. Things Fall Apart - Achebe
56. The Princess of Cleves - Madame De Lafayette
57. The Stranger- Camus
58. The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
59. The Counterfeiters - Gide
60. The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
61. The Golden Notebook - Lessing
62. Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
63. The Good Soldier - Ford
64. A Passage to India - Forster
65. Daniel Deronda - Eliot
66. Germinal - Zola
67. My Antonia
68. An American Tragedy
69. Hunger
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz
71. Midnight's Children - Rushdie
72. U.S.A. Trilogy - Dos Passos
73. Dangerous Liasons - Choderlos De Laclos
74. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
75. The Sorrows of Young Wether - Goethe
76. Cities of Salt - Abd al-Rahman Munif
77. A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
78. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
79. Herzog - Bellow
80. Candide - Voltaire
81. The Sleepwalkers - Broch
82. The Last Chronicles of Barset - Trollope
83. The Awakening - Chopin
84. Robsinon Crusoe - Defoe
85. Call it Sleep - Henry Roth
86. Waverly - Sir Walter Scott
87. Oblomov - Goncharov
88. Their Eyes were Watching God - Hurston
89. Under the Volcano - Lowry
90. Snow Country - Kawabata
91. 1984 - Orwell
92. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
93. The Pickwick Papers
94. The Betrothed - Manzoni
95. Pale Fire - Nabokov
96. The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper
97. Les Miserables - Hugo
98. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Stowe
99. Doctor Zhivago - Pasternak
100. Native Son - Wright
101. On the Road - Kerouac
102. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
103. The Leopard - Lampedusa
104. The Age of Innocence - Wharton
105. Don Casmurro - Machado De Assis
106. A Hero of Our Time - Lermontov
107. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
108. Moll Flanders - Defoe
109. The Good Soldier Svejk - Hasek
110. The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov
111. Brideshead Revisted - Waugh
112. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Kundera
113. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
114. The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
115. Manon Lescaut - Previst
116. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
117. Some Prefer Bettles - Tanizaki Jun 'ichiro
118. A Bend in the River - Naipaul
119. Cold Nights - Ba Jin
120. Dracula - Stoker
121. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobe Abe
122. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
123. The Three Musketeers - Dumas
124. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
125. Treasure Island - Stevenson

I'm waiting for the day when people stop acting like "Things Fall Apart" is some masterpiece.

it's a really good book. and that's as high as i'll go.


EDIT:
For an English major, I've read very few on the updated list:
12 including Finn's Wake, which I pick and choose sections on still.

26.

Also, Moby Dick should be higher IMO

I would like to once again propose a SOMB Favorite Books of All Time poll, which is something that I in no possible way could pull together successfully.

It's pretty high. Hard to compare works at that exalted level. Oh and 51.

I'd be all for the poll, but wouldn't or couldn't pull it together either.

What's odd to me is how the top fifteen are mostly these epic, srawling masterpieces. You can't mess with most of those books (although I haven't touched, and most likely never will deal with Proust or Fielding) but I just wonder about how literature seems to embrace these messy, often imperfect novels - whereas music often puts more focus on being "perfect."

The novel is a unique case where there is no set definition. Nabokov said that the more you study the novel the more you realize that the novel does not exist. So who's to say that the leisurely sprawl of 'War and Peace' or the fact/fiction salmagundi of 'Moby Dick' isn't the norm as opposed to the more tightly controlled texts.

P.S. Fielding is a delight to read.

I agree with the no set defintion idea, but I think the major thing I was getting at was not so much the size of the novels, but how with most of those masterpieces there are plenty of moments where it is an absolute slog. And how we as readers are far more forgiving of this than we are as music listeners. Maybe it is because we go into reading with a far greater acceptance of being "patient" as opposed to listening to music where we are far more in need of immediacy. In fact, I'd say that some of those rough moments make us love those books even more.

I'm just thinking about when I read Moby Dick this summer - there were plenty of moments where I was just bored by some of the specifics of whaling or the whale anatomy, but every so often Melville would drop a brilliant descriptive paragraph in the midst of a dry section and it would somehow make the preceding pages feel worth it.

In novels everything is part of the whole. But in music people are focusing more and more on single songs than albums. The only time to be selective in fiction is with story collections.
FIXED:" 'the Dead' was great, I give it a 10, but the rest of Dubliners is subpar, I give the collection a 6.5." No one breaks novels down like that.

Gravity's Rainbow should be required reading in all high schools.

how come? (i've never read it)

When the average high school student has trouble with The Great Gatsby, I don't think we should go this far.

The Cetology chapters in MD are part of its structure. And they are also metaphors and filled with jokes. I honestly wouldn't lose any of Moby Dick. The Historical Philosophy chapters in W&P are another story. As are the awful poems in Don Quixote.

Fuck em then.

Children are our future.

Singularity is our future.

She believes it.

Dubliners is sub-par? I love every one of those stories. If that's subpar what was great short story writing in English at the time? (1904-1907).

I'm a Joycean. I love the book. I really should put that statement in quotes.

I assume that all bibliophiles love the Everyman's Library. Well they finally setup their own Facebook page.

I was so close to making this the first page/thing I ever "liked" on Facebook.

I've been hounding the Webmaster at Knopf to create it for a long time. He/she sent me a shout out when he finally did.