The 100 Greatest Books Challenge

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:

1. Beowulf
2. Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
3. Agee, James A Death in the Family
4. Allison Bastard Out of Carolina
5. Alvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
6. Amis London Fields
7. Atkinson Emotionally Weird
8. Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale
9. Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
10. Austen, Jane Persuasion
11. Austen, Jane Emma
12. Auster, Paul The New York Trilogy
13. Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
14. Bataille Visions of Excess
15. Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
16. Beckett, Samuel Molloy Malone Dies
17. Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March
18. Bellow, Saul Herzog
19. Bellow Humboldt’s Gift
20. Bely, Andrey Petersburg
21. Bowles The Sheltering Sky
22. Boyle Tortilla Curtain
23. Bukowski Ham on Rye
24. Bukowski Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
25. Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre
26. Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights
27. Camus, Albert The Stranger
28. Candide, Voltaire
29. Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop
30. Cather, Willa My Antonia
31. Cervantes Don Quixote
32. Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
33. Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
34. Chopin, Kate The Awakening
35. Collins, Wilkie The Woman in White
36. Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness
37. Conrad, Joseph Nostromo
38. Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
39. Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
40. Dante Inferno
41. Davis The Ecology of Fear
42. De Balzac, Honore Le Pere Goriot
43. de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote
44. Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
45. De Lafayette, Madame The Princess of Cleves
46. Delany Babel 17
47. Delillo White Noise
48. Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
49. Dickens, Charles Bleak House
50. Dickens, Charles Great Expectations
51. Dickens, Charles The Pickwick Papers
52. Di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi The Leopard
53. Doblin, Alfred Berlin
54. Dos Passos, John U.S.A. Trilogy
55. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment
56. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov
57. Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
58. Doyle, Arthur Conan The Hound of Baskervilles
59. Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy
60. Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers
61. Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss
62. Eliot, George Middlemarch
63. Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man
64. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Selected Essays
65. Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying
66. Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury
67. Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom!
68. Fielding, Henry Tom Jones
69. Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby
70. Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
71. Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier
72. Forster, EM A Passage to India
73. Freud Dora
74. Fuentes, Carlos The Death of Artemio Cruz
75. Gide, Andre The Counterfeiters
76. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
77. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von The Sorrows of Young Werther
78. Gogol, Nikolai Dead Souls
79. Golding, William Lord of the Flies
80. Goncharov, Ivan Oblomov
81. Grass, Gunter The Tin Drum
82. Graves Goodbye to All That
83. Hamsun, Knut Hunger
84. Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d’Urbervilles
85. Hasek, Jaroslav The Good Soldier
86. Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter
87. Hedayat Blind Owl
88. Heller, Joseph Catch 22
89. Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms
90. Hemingway, Ernest The Sun Also Rises
91. Hemingway, Ernest For Whom the Bell Tolls
92. Homer The Iliad
93. Homer The Odyssey
94. Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame
95. Hugo, Victor Les Miserables
96. Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God
97. Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
98. Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House
99. James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady
100. James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
101. James, Henry The Ambassadors
102. Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
103. Joyce, James Ulysses
104. Joyce, James Finnegans Wake
105. Joyce, James Dubliners
106. Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis
107. Kafka, Franz The Trial
108. Kerouac, Jack On the Road
109. Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior
110. Klein No Logo
111. Lawrence, D. H.  Women in Love
112. Leblanc Random Family
113. Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird
114. L’Engle A Wrinkle In Time
115. Le Guin The Earthsea Trilogy
116. Lessing, Doris The Golden Notebook
117. Letham Girl in Landscape
118. Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt
119. London, Jack The Call of the Wild
120. Lowry, Malcolm Under the Volcano
121. Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain
122. Mann, Thomas Buddenbrooks
123. Manzoni, Alessandro The Betrothed
124. Marek The Eagles Die
125. Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude
126. Maugham Of Human Bondage
127. Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener
128. Melville, Herman Moby Dick
129. Miller, Arthur The Crucible
130. Milton Paradise Lost
131. Mitchell, Margaret Gone with the Wind
132. Morrison, Toni Beloved
133. Munif, Abd al-Rahman Cities of Salt
134. Murakami, Haruki The Wind Up Bird Chronicles
135. Murakami, Haruki Wild Sheep Chase
136. Musil, Robert The Man Without Qualities
137. Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita
138. Nin Delta of Venus
139. O’Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find
140. O’Connor, Flannery Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
141. O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night
142. Orwell, George Animal Farm
143. Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four
144. Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
145. Paton Cry the Beloved Country
146. Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar
147. Plath, Sylvia Ariel
148. Plato The Republic
149. Poe, Edgar Allan Selected Tales
150. Powell Wicked Pavilion
151. Pritchett Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett
152. Proust, Marcel Swann’s Way
153. Proust, Marcel In Search of Lost Time
154. Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49
155. Pynchon, Thomas Gravity’s Rainbow
156. Rand Atlas Shrugged
157. Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front
158. Richardson, Samuel Clarissa
159. Rosenbaum Movie Wars
160. Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
161. Roth, Henry Call It Sleep
162. Rushdie The Satanic Verses
163. Russo Empire Falls
164. Salinger, J.D Franny and Zooey
165. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
166. Scott, Sir Walter Waverley
167. Sendak Where the Wild Things Are
168. Shakespeare, William Hamlet
169. Shakespeare, William Macbeth
170. Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream
171. Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
172. Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
173. Shelley, Mary Frankenstein
174. Shikiby, Murasaki  The Tale of Genji
175. Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
176. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
177. Sontag On Photography
178. Sophocles Antigone
179. Sophocles Oedipus Rex
180. Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
181. Stendhal The Red and the Black
182. Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy
183. Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island
184. Stoker, Bram Dracula
185. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin
186. Suskind Perfume
187. Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels
188. Thackeray, William Vanity Fair
189. Thoreau, Henry David Walden
190. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War
191. Tolkien, JRR Lord of the Rings
192. Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
193. Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina
194. Trollope, Anthony The Last Chronicle of Barset
195. Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
196. Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
197. Virgil Aeneid
198. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five
199. Vonnegut, Kurt The Breakfast of Champions
200. Walker, Alice The Color Purple
201. Wallace Infinite Jest
202. Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead Revisited
203. Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth
204. Wharton, Edith The Age of Innocence
205. Welty, Eudora Collected Stories
206. Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass
207. Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray
208. Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
209. Williams Moise and the World of Reason
210. Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse
211. Wrede Dealing With Dragons
212. Wright, Richard Native Son
213. Xueqin, Cao Dream of the Red Chamber
214. Yasunari, Kawabata Snow Country
215. Yates Revolutionary Road
216. Yoshimoto Kitchen
217. Zinn, Howard A People’s History of the United States
218. Zola, Emile Germinal

 

[UPDATE: I’ve since re-organized and updated the Greatest Books list and made it available for download here.]