The Greatest Books Challenge started in 2008, when I started reading fiction. Before then, I bet I hadn’t read more than five books of fiction outside of a classroom in my entire life. I just preferred non-fiction and that was that. But in 2008, I was trying to relax – my mind, my body, my use of time – and only fiction could do that for me.
So, in a truly un-relaxed way, I decided to do some searching and see if there were lists of the greatest books with which I should start. I found more than a few, and I’ve updated the links for your reference and use too:
- 100 Best Novels from Random House
- All-Time 100 Novels from Time Magazine
- The BBC’s Top 100
- Harvard Book Store’s Top 100
- The Greatest Books
- Boston Public Library’s “100 Most Influential Books of the Century”
- The National Review Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction
I combined several of these lists and, while my list may need to be updated, there are currently 218 books on it. I’ve read the 43 that are crossed off, making it clear that – with only 20% read – this is going to be a long, long project.
The Greatest Books Challenge:
- Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall ApartAgee, James A Death in the FamilyAllison Bastard Out of CarolinaAlvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents- Amis London Fields
Atkinson Emotionally WeirdAtwood The Handmaid’s Tale- Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
- Austen, Jane Persuasion
- Austen, Jane Emma
- Auster, Paul The New York Trilogy
- Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Bataille Visions of Excess
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot- Beckett, Samuel Molloy Malone Dies
- Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March
- Bellow, Saul Herzog
- Bellow Humboldt’s Gift
- Bely, Andrey Petersburg
- Bowles The Sheltering Sky
- Boyle Tortilla Curtain
- Bukowski Ham on Rye
- Bukowski Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
- Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre
- Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert The StrangerCandide, Voltaire- Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop
- Cather, Willa My Antonia
- Cervantes Don Quixote
- Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
- Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
- Chopin, Kate The Awakening
- Collins, Wilkie The Woman in White
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness- Conrad, Joseph Nostromo
- Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
- Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
- Dante Inferno
- Davis The Ecology of Fear
- De Balzac, Honore Le Pere Goriot
- de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote
- Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
- De Lafayette, Madame The Princess of Cleves
- Delany Babel 17
- Delillo White Noise
- Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
- Dickens, Charles Bleak House
- Dickens, Charles Great Expectations
- Dickens, Charles The Pickwick Papers
- Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi The Leopard
- Doblin, Alfred Berlin
- Dos Passos, John U.S.A. Trilogy
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov
- Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Doyle, Arthur Conan The Hound of Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy- Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers
- Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss
- Eliot, George Middlemarch
Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man- Emerson, Ralph Waldo Selected Essays
- Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying
- Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury
- Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom!
- Fielding, Henry Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby- Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
- Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier
- Forster, EM A Passage to India
- Freud Dora
- Fuentes, Carlos The Death of Artemio Cruz
- Gide, Andre The Counterfeiters
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von The Sorrows of Young Werther
- Gogol, Nikolai Dead Souls
- Golding, William Lord of the Flies
- Goncharov, Ivan Oblomov
- Grass, Gunter The Tin Drum
- Graves Goodbye to All That
- Hamsun, Knut Hunger
- Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Hasek, Jaroslav The Good Soldier
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter- Hedayat Blind Owl
Heller, Joseph Catch 22- Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms
- Hemingway, Ernest The Sun Also Rises
- Hemingway, Ernest For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Homer The Iliad
- Homer The Odyssey
- Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Hugo, Victor Les Miserables
Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching GodHuxley, Aldous Brave New World- Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House
- James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady
- James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
- James, Henry The Ambassadors
- Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Joyce, James Ulysses
- Joyce, James Finnegans Wake
Joyce, James DublinersKafka, Franz The MetamorphosisKafka, Franz The TrialKerouac, Jack On the RoadKingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior- Klein No Logo
- Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love
- Leblanc Random Family
Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird- L’Engle A Wrinkle In Time
- Le Guin The Earthsea Trilogy
- Lessing, Doris The Golden Notebook
- Letham Girl in Landscape
- Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt
- London, Jack The Call of the Wild
- Lowry, Malcolm Under the Volcano
- Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain
- Mann, Thomas Buddenbrooks
- Manzoni, Alessandro The Betrothed
- Marek The Eagles Die
Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude- Maugham Of Human Bondage
- Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener
- Melville, Herman Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur The Crucible- Milton Paradise Lost
- Mitchell, Margaret Gone with the Wind
Morrison, Toni BelovedMunif, Abd al-Rahman Cities of Salt- Murakami, Haruki The Wind Up Bird Chronicles
- Murakami, Haruki Wild Sheep Chase
- Musil, Robert The Man Without Qualities
Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita- Nin Delta of Venus
- O’Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find
- O’Connor, Flannery Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
- O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George Animal FarmOrwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four- Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
Paton Cry the Beloved CountryPlath, Sylvia The Bell Jar- Plath, Sylvia Ariel
- Plato The Republic
Poe, Edgar Allan Selected Tales- Powell Wicked Pavilion
- Pritchett Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett
- Proust, Marcel Swann’s Way
- Proust, Marcel In Search of Lost Time
- Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49
- Pynchon, Thomas Gravity’s Rainbow
- Rand Atlas Shrugged
- Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front
- Richardson, Samuel Clarissa
- Rosenbaum Movie Wars
- Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
- Roth, Henry Call It Sleep
- Rushdie The Satanic Verses
- Russo Empire Falls
- Salinger, J.D Franny and Zooey
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye- Scott, Sir Walter Waverley
- Sendak Where the Wild Things Are
- Shakespeare, William Hamlet
- Shakespeare, William Macbeth
- Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
- Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
- Shelley, Mary Frankenstein
- Shikiby, Murasaki The Tale of Genji
- Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sontag On Photography
- Sophocles Antigone
- Sophocles Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath- Stendhal The Red and the Black
- Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy
- Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island
- Stoker, Bram Dracula
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin- Suskind Perfume
- Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels
- Thackeray, William Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David Walden- Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War
- Tolkien, JRR Lord of the Rings
- Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
- Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina
- Trollope, Anthony The Last Chronicle of Barset
- Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- Virgil Aeneid
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-FiveVonnegut, Kurt The Breakfast of ChampionsWalker, Alice The Color Purple- Wallace Infinite Jest
- Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead Revisited
- Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth
- Wharton, Edith The Age of Innocence
- Welty, Eudora Collected Stories
- Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
- Williams Moise and the World of Reason
- Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse
- Wrede Dealing With Dragons
- Wright, Richard Native Son
- Xueqin, Cao Dream of the Red Chamber
- Yasunari, Kawabata Snow Country
- Yates Revolutionary Road
Yoshimoto Kitchen- Zinn, Howard A People’s History of the United States
- Zola, Emile Germinal
[UPDATE: I’ve since re-organized and updated the Greatest Books list and made it available for download here.]
2 Comments for “The 100 Greatest Books Challenge”
100 Greatest Books (and more): A 28 Year Project
says:[…] Curious as to how I built the list? To be honest, I forgot which sources I used for the original list. However, in a previous post, I linked to 7 sources from which anyone could draw. Check out the other 100 Greatest Books lists. […]
The 100 (or 300) Greatest Books
says:[…] I’m slowly but surely making my way through my list of “100” greatest books of all time. I put “100” in quotes because I merged several top 100 lists and recently added the Pulitzer Prize winners in the Novel (1917-1947) and Fiction (1948-present) categories. This leaves me with a list of the 300 greatest books from varied sources. […]