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.
The list is below. The titles in bold are the ones I’ve read. With 65 out of 300 read, I’m at 21.67%. I’ve been working on this list since 2008, so if I continue at this pace, the list will provide me with good reading for the next 20 years.
That seems both daunting and delicious.
The 300 Greatest Books
Beowulf- Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
- Agee, James A Death in the Family
- Allison Bastard Out of Carolina
- Alvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
- Amis London Fields
- Atkinson Emotionally Weird
- Atwood 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 Stranger
- Candide, 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 God
- Huxley, 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 Dubliners
- Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis
- Kafka, Franz The Trial
- Kerouac, Jack On the Road
Kingston, 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 Beloved
- Munif, 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 Farm
- Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
- Paton Cry the Beloved Country
- Plath, 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-Five
- Vonnegut, Kurt The Breakfast of Champions
- Walker, 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
Pulitzer Prize Winners
2013 The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson (Random House)
2011 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Alfred A.. Knopf)
2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)
2009 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
2008 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books)
2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)
2006 March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar)
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones (Amistad/ HarperCollins)
2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar)
2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Alfred A. Knopf)
2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (Random House)
2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin)
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (Crown)
1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford (Alfred A. Knopf)
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (Viking)
1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (Charles Scribner’s Sons)
1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (Henry Holt)
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf)
1991 Rabbit At Rest by John Updike (Alfred A. Knopf)
1990 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (Farrar)
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf)
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf)
1987 A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (Alfred A. Knopf)
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster)
1985 Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (Random House)
1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy (Viking)
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker (Harcourt Brace)
1982 Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (Knopf)
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Louisiana State U. Press)
1980 The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (Little)
1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (Knopf)
1978 Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (Atlantic Monthly Press)
1976 Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow (Viking)
1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (McKay)
1973 The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (Random)
1972 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (Doubleday)
1970 Collected Stories by Jean Stafford (Farrar)
1969 House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (Harper)
1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (Random)
1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (Farrar)
1966 Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter (Harcourt)
1965 The Keepers Of The House by Shirley Ann Grau (Random)
1963 The Reivers by William Faulkner (Random)
1962 The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor (Little)
1961 To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Lippincott)
1960 Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (Doubleday)
1959 The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (Doubleday)
1958 A Death In The Family by late James Agee (McDowell, Obolensky)
1956 Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (World)
1955 A Fable by William Faulkner (Random)
1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner)
1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (Doubleday)
1951 The Town by Conrad Richter (Knopf)
1950 The Way West by A. B. Guthrie (Sloane)
1949 Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (Harcourt)
1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (Macmillan)
1947 All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (Harcourt)
1945 A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (Knopf)
1944 Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (Harper)
1943 Dragon’s Teeth by Upton Sinclair (Viking)
1942 In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (Harcourt)
1940 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Viking)
1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Scribner)
1938 The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (Little)
1937 Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Macmillan)
1936 Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (Harper)
1935 Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (Simon & Schuster)
1934 Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller (Harper)
1933 The Store by T. S. Stribling (Doubleday)
1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (John Day)
1931 Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (Houghton)
1930 Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge (Houghton)
1929 Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (Bobbs)
1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (Boni)
1927 Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (Stokes)
1926 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (Harcourt)
1925 So Big by Edna Ferber (Doubleday)
1924 The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (Harper)
1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather (Knopf)
1922 Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (Doubleday)
1921 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Appleton)
1919 The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (Doubleday)
1918 His Family by Ernest Poole (Macmillan)
Of these 300, which do you recommend I read next?
Is there a book that belongs on this list?
[UPDATE: I’ve since re-organized the Greatest Books list, updated it and made it available for download here.]
Photo credit: AP/Craig Ruttle
