Top 100 Best Novels Ever Written

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mcmasterdonia

mcmasterdonia

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McMasterdonia
I was surprised too, but then I thought that perhaps this isn't in any particular order - just the top 100 all together. It doesn't clearly say either way in the article.
 
Hiskjriaana:
I'm pretty sure it was in chronological order. But anyways, I find their lack of Tolkien disturbing.
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Certainly incredibly popular, but any list like this is going to have a certain degree of subjectivity. Tolkien was great at telling a tale, but there's not much remarkable about his writing, it's more the depth of detail he created that makes him so special. :)

Looking through the list there are quite a few choices I don't agree with.
 
I personally would have added And Then There Were None and The Book Thief. Granted I've only read five on the list. Which is sad because I own about a fourth of the list.
 
Democratic Donkeys:
Hiskjriaana:
I'm pretty sure it was in chronological order. But anyways, I find their lack of Tolkien disturbing.
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Certainly incredibly popular, but any list like this is going to have a certain degree of subjectivity. Tolkien was great at telling a tale, but there's not much remarkable about his writing, it's more the depth of detail he created that makes him so special. :)
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Tolkein pretty much redifined the entire fantasy genre, and influenced others. He also worked on the Oxford dictionary :P
 
I think most of us, Tolkien and fantasy readers, know that. It's not about serious quality writing, it never was. And I never cared. But yeah, as DD says Tolkien is not technically remarkable, yet he got us dreaming of fantasy worlds for decades.
 
Definitely more of the older ones than the newer. I also disagree with a number of the selections. It seems like they took popular/influential authors and just selected one of their primary publications at random.

1. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
3. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
4. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
5. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7. Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
8. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
9. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
10. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)
11. Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
13. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847)
14. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
15. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
16. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
17. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
18. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
19. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
20. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
21. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
22. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
24. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
25. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
26. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
28. New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
29. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
31. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
32. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
35. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
36. The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
37. Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
38. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
39. The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
40. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)
41. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
42. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
43. The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
44. Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915)
45. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
46. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
47. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
48. A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
49. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
50. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
51. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
52. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
54. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
55. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
56. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
57. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
58. Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
59. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
60. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
62. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
63. Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
64. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
65. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
66. Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
67. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
68. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
69. The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
70. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
71. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
72. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
73. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
74. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
75. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
76. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
77. Voss by Patrick White (1957)
78. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
79. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)
80. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
81. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
82. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
83. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
84. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
85. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
86. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
87. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)
88. Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
89. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
90. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
91. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
92. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)
93. Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)
94. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)
95. The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
96. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)
97. Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)
98. Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
99. Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
100. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)
 
I've read about half the books on the list, mainly he same ones as GM. I would have liked to have seen Willa Cather on the list
 
Malvad:
I personally would have added And Then There Were None and The Book Thief. Granted I've only read five on the list. Which is sad because I own about a fourth of the list.
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I absolutely agree with you on The Book Theif. I must be living a sheltered life, becouse I have read maybe four books on this list.
 
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Hogfather are both quite insightful works exploring philosophy, LOTR has already been mentioned, Fluke by James Herbert (another philosophical work, just DO NOT watch the film version... Its an absolute insult.) The Canterbury Tales definitely should be on this list. Farenheit 451, Wagner the Wherwulf, Journey to the West and, if you fancy a bit of a ripping yarn there's Doctor Syn.
 
Democratic Donkeys:
It's in chronological order. :P

And I urge people to read more if they think Tolkien was an amazing writer. There is far better out there sorry to say.
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Tolkein was a words-y overly complex writer. He was an amazing worldbuilder, to be fair.

But if he should be on the list for how influential he is or whatever then Rowling should be on the list.

Read (or had read to me) about two to three dozen on the list. Some odd choices. Emma isn't even Austen's best work (and I'll argue that Mansfield Park is until someone knocks me out with a copy of War & Peace), nor is Sign of Four the best Holmes novel/story.
 
Nierr:
Democratic Donkeys:
It's in chronological order. :P

And I urge people to read more if they think Tolkien was an amazing writer. There is far better out there sorry to say.
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Tolkein was a words-y overly complex writer. He was an amazing worldbuilder, to be fair.

But if he should be on the list for how influential he is or whatever then Rowling should be on the list.

Read (or had read to me) about two to three dozen on the list. Some odd choices. Emma isn't even Austen's best work (and I'll argue that Mansfield Park is until someone knocks me out with a copy of War & Peace), nor is Sign of Four the best Holmes novel/story.
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I agree in regards to Emma and Sign of Four.

I am not so sure I would consider Rowling. In a few decades I doubt the Harry Potter book series will still be very popular overall.

Also, Wolfsea, I am willing to bet DD has read HGttG and Hogfather. I quite enjoy all of Douglas Adams and Pratchett (even post-Alzheimers) but I would not put any of them on the list. Also, I found The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul to be much better writing overall than HGttG.
 
I'd consider Rowling only in the context of 'are we including people because of how popular or influential their books have been', which is probably the only way Tolkein gets on the list.

If it's a quality of writing, story, etc etc thing, then neither make it.
 
I have read 46 of the books on the list. But I am ashamed how few I have read in the last 10 years. Many of them I had read by the time I was 25.

Some surprising omissions for me would include: Jamaica Inn, Moonfleet, The Mayor of Caterbridge, The colour Purple (was it only British novels?), The Handmaid's tale, Dune, One flew over the cuckoo's nest, Game of Thrones, The English Patient, The Kite Runner .... and that is just off the top of my head. Oh, and Trainspotting.
 
flemingovia:
I have read 46 of the books on the list. But I am ashamed how few I have read in the last 10 years. Many of them I had read by the time I was 25.

Some surprising omissions for me would include: Jamaica Inn, Moonfleet, The Mayor of Caterbridge, The colour Purple (was it only British novels?), The Handmaid's tale, Dune, One flew over the cuckoo's nest, Game of Thrones, The English Patient, The Kite Runner .... and that is just off the top of my head. Oh, and Trainspotting.
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...what? No Dune??? D:
 
Dune is visionary in it's scope and when it was published took Sci-Fi to a whole new, epic level.

But it is not well-executed enough to be one of the top 100 novels of all time. The dialogue, in particular, lacks subtlety. Sorry.
 
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks the English Patient and the Book thief should have been included. I'm going to go to a second hand book store tomorrow and see what ones I can find.
 
Nebula:
flemingovia:
I have read 46 of the books on the list. But I am ashamed how few I have read in the last 10 years. Many of them I had read by the time I was 25.

Some surprising omissions for me would include: Jamaica Inn, Moonfleet, The Mayor of Caterbridge, The colour Purple (was it only British novels?), The Handmaid's tale, Dune, One flew over the cuckoo's nest, Game of Thrones, The English Patient, The Kite Runner .... and that is just off the top of my head. Oh, and Trainspotting.
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...what? No Dune??? D:
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I was actually more surprised by Game of Thrones.

While I enjoy the storyline, have read all the presently available books, and tolerate the TV show, I would categorize this with Rowling. In a few decades, it will not be as influential as The Accursed Kings, from which Martin took much of his inspiration. Best read in the original French though as the English translations can be somewhat cumbersome.
 
I have read roughly 35 books out of the list so there is still a long way to go! The only author that doesn't fit into the list according to me is D.H. Lawrence...I totally hate him! I have previously worked on two of his novels as major topics of research and analysis during my final term in Literature Major and it was absolutely horrible, especially Women in Love. It still gives me nightmares, that book!

And what about Wide Sargasso Sea. That would've been a wonderful addition to the list
 
I wouldn't categorize The Prince as a novel.

Agatha Christie created intricate scenarios, but I don't particularly rate the quality of her writing. Try Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey.

Game of Thrones? No. I enjoyed reading them, but it's not his best work. Try Windhaven (with Lista Tuttle) or A Song for Lya.

On the fantasy side, I would suggest Phantastes by George MacDonald, or The Greater Trumps by Charles WIlliams.

SF? I would rate A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge way ahead of Dune. His Witling is also great (and a lot shorter!). How about The Dispossessed by UK LeGuin, or A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle?
 
I've read four of them, and only because they were assigned in English class. Huh.

Any particular suggestions for a young'n like me?
 
I've read fifteen of the books on the list. What's interesting to me is that of those fifteen, I've read eight at least twice.

This is for sure a rather idiosyncratic list. Overall it seems to favour literary fiction. That's why neither Tolkein nor Heinlein, for example, are on it, because whatever one thinks of their novels, they're generally considered genre fiction. On the other hand, I've never seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on any sort of "literary canon" list before. It was originally serialized in the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, so make of that what you will.

Sometimes I wonder whether there's more to the definition of "literary fiction" or "literature" than "popular fiction which is still widely read after x number of years." Cases in point: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one of the only children's novels typically included in general "best of literature in English" lists. (The Wind and the Willows, though definitely still popular, appears less often on such lists.) A century from now, will the Harry Potter series be considered literature? What about A Series of Unfortunate Events?

Another case in point: Dracula is on this list (and at least a few others I've seen) despite being, within the context of its own time, a work of "popular" fiction, and even now arguably a work belonging firmly in "genre" fiction (gothic or horror). A century from now, will The Stand (often considered the best work of self-admitted popular/genre fic writer Stephen King) appear on any such lists?

What makes for "essential reading" literature, if not "bestsellers plus time?" Is it high-minded subject matter and erudite writing style? That wouldn't explain the (deserved, in my opinion) wide acceptance of Portnoy's Complaint into the canon, given its descriptions of teenage masturbation and kinky grownup sex, its breezy, lowbrow humour and its generous use of naughty words.

Is it summing up the mentality, values or culture of "the West," or a country or region within it, at a given point in history? Portnoy's Complaint addresses at most (in a satirical, deliberately exaggerated way) what it meant to be a secular, liberal American Jewish man in the sixties, but anything broader than that...?

What constitutes "classic literary fiction?" What do you think?
 
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