The 100 Book List

August 27, 2008

I got started on this list from a post at Books Worth Reading. Originally, I copied their list, and then I began to wonder at all the fabulous, must-read books that were missing.

I began surfing around, wondering what the literary-minded folks recommended. I checked out popular 100-best book lists at List of Bests. Here’s what I’ve compiled based on a few other lists (such as the BBC’s “Big Read” recommendations and the The Guardian’s 100-Best Books of All Time.) I also looked at the Modern Library’s 100-best novels.

Here are the freelindy recommendations. I may add more, and perhaps some reviews in time:

  1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  2. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
  3. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
  4. Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, Thomas Mann
  5. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  6. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  7. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
  8. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  9. 1984, George Orwell
  10. History: A Novel, Elsa Morante
  11. Metamorphoses, Ovid
  12. The Complete Stories, Edgar Allan Poe
  13. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
  14. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
  15. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  16. King Lear, William Shakespeare
  17. Othello, William Shakespeare
  18. The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, Sophocles
  19. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
  20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  21. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  22. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
  23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  24. The Son of Rama: Visions of the Ramayana, Devi Vanamali
  25. The Aeneid, Virgil
  26. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
  27. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
  28. The Iliad, Homer
  29. Don Quixote de La Mancha, Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
  30. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  31. The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
  32. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  33. The Stranger, Albert Camus
  34. Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
  35. Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
  36. Selected Stories, Anton Chekhov
  37. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  38. The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso; Dante Alighieri
  39. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
  40. Jacques the Fatalist, Denis Diderot
  41. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  42. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  43. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  44. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  45. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  46. Medea and Other Plays, Euripides
  47. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
  48. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  49. Light in August, William Faulkner
  50. Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  51. Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca, Federico Garcia Lorca
  52. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  53. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  54. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Maureen Gallery Kovacs
  55. Faust, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  56. Dead Souls: A Novel, Nikolai Gogol
  57. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
  58. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Joao Guimaraes Rosa
  59. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  60. The Odyssey, Homer
  61. Four Major Plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder; Henrik Ibsen
  62. Ulysses, James Joyce
  63. The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
  64. The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata
  65. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
  66. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  67. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  68. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  69. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  70. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  71. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  72. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  73. Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
  74. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  75. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  76. Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
  77. A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
  78. Heartbreak House, George Bernard Shaw
  79. A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
  80. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  81. The Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  82. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  83. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  84. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
  85. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  86. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  87. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
  88. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
  89. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  90. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  91. The Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
  92. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
  93. Dune, Frank Herbert
  94. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  95. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  96. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
  97. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
  98. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  99. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  100. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

There are so many classical novels that remain relevant because they examine the issues in the man-versus-man and the man-versus-self conflicts. Though I enjoy popular literature, it’s also necessary for the well-rounded thinker to explore novels that may examine a life outside of his or her comfort zone.

It’s especially important for American readers to choose novels that do not necessarily follow the American literary tradition. There is a broad range of ideas to be found in world literature. Expand your horizons by choosing one of the non-American novels as a starting point.

Posted by Linden
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