For those who like SPOILERS. 1. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 3. On The Road - Jack Kerouac 4. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee 5. The Lord of The Rings: volume 1 - J. R. R. Tolkein 6. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 7. The Catched In The Rye - J.D. Salinger 8. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie 9. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 10. Ulysses - James Joyce 11. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding 12. The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck 13. 1984 - George Orwell 14. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 15. Moby Dick - Herman Melville 16. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf 17. A Passage To India - E. M. Forster 18. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 19. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe 20. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark 21. One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 22. Prude And Prejudice - Jane Austen 23. Animal Farm - George Orwell 24. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky 25. Beloved - Toni Morrison 26. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison 27. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut 28. The Stranger - Albert Camus 29. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes 30. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe 31. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 32. The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas Pere 33. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 34. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 35. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott 36. The Call Of The Wild - Jack London 37. The Wind In The Willows - Kenneth Grahame 38. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh 39. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 40. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis 41. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler - Italo Calvino 42. A Bend In The River - V.S. Naipaul 43. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson 44. Atonement - Ian McEwan 45. His Dark Materials - Philip Pallman 46. The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams 47. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 48. Middlemarch - George Eliot 49. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 50. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 51. Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth 52. The Age Of Innocence - Edith Wharton 53. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 54. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway 55. To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf 56. White Noise - Don Delillo 57. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson Mccullers 58. The Sound And The Fury - William Faulkner 59. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov 60. I, Claudius - Robert Graves 61. Go Tell It On The Mountain - James Baldwin 62. A Dance To The Music Of Time - Anthony Powell 63. Tropic Of Cancer - Henry Miller 64. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys 65. Under The Net - Iris Murdoch 66. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift 67. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding 68. Clarissa: Or The History Of A Young Lady - Samuel Richardson 69. The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne 70. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne 71. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 72. The Portrait Of A Lady - Henry James 73. The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 74. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad 75. In Search Of Lost Time - Marcel Proust 76. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence 77. The Good Soldiers - Ford Madox Ford 78. The Trial - Franz Kafka 79. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner 80. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White 81. The Tin Drums - Gunter Grass 82. Herzog - Saul Bellow 83. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John Le Carré 84. Song Of Solomon - Toni Morrison 85. Money - Martin Amis 86. Oscar And Lucinda - Peter Carey 87. Haroun And The Sea Of Stories - Salman Rushdie 88. American Pastoral - Philip Roth 89. Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald 90. A Wrinkle In Time - Madeleine L'engle 91. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume 92. Of Human Bondage - William Somerset Maugham 93. The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon 94. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz 95. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen 96. The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster 97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami 98. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston 99. Watchmen - Alan Moore 100. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being - Milan Kundera
I’ve read about 22 or so. I’m 64 and I think I have read more, but I’m not counting them since I can’t remember. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland were books I read over and over as a child. They became as dear friends. Many others of this list I have heard of but have not read. Then, there are other books by some of these authors that I have read but not the one mentioned. Lastly, I probably would have added several by Mark Twain; The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair; and Anne of Green Gables. Any list like this is going to be inherently subjective. I thought it included some very good titles.
I’ve read 24 of them. Was looking for Brothers Karamazov (which I’ve read) and War and Peace (on my TBR). I’ve read other books by some of the listed authors like Marilyn Robinson and Steinbeck, but not the ones listed. Great list, gave me ideas for other books/authors to add to my wish list. Thanks!
I remember taking On the Road with me on my first trip to Europe back n 1971. English books were hard to find and expensive. We tended to choose them with attention to their trading value. I traded On the Road for Zorba the Greek, Last Temptation of Christ and the Bostonians, pretty good deal.
Thank you for including a Sebald novel! A few more for your consideration: Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness - Kenzaburo Oe The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse The Red and the Black - Stendahl Candide - Voltaire Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy My Antonia - Willa Cather
Yes C & P is #24 and I figured out that Brothers K nor Tolstoy's W & P are on there b/c each author only gets one Masterpiece on this list. Goodreads 100 Greatest Books of All Time also only alots one masterpiece per author to the Top 100 in this format that restricts authors from multiple sections I believe.
Native Son by Richard Wright, The Autobiography of Malcom X, 12 Years a Slave, East of Eden, Of Mice & Men, Portrait of The Artist, The Master & Margarita has to be on there
I have read 15 of these. Of those I didn't like were Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Catcher in the Rye. The other books are all top shelf stuff, with the exception of Animal Farm which was okay. 4. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee 5. The Lord of The Rings: volume 1 - J. R. R. Tolkein 7. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger 11. Lord Of The Flies - William Golding 13. 1984 - George Orwell 14. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 18. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 22. Prude And Prejudice - Jane Austen 23. Animal Farm - George Orwell 30. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe 37. The Wind In The Willows - Kenneth Grahame 46. The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams 53. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 73. The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami Books to recommend: The Wicked Trilogy Chronicles of Narnia Picture of Dorian Grey Dracula by Bran Stoker Harry Potter Dark Tower Series Game of Thrones Dune
Same here! I have read 30 of them, but some of them I have never heard of. And like you, I consider myself well-read at 65 years old and decades of reading behind me.
@@snowysnowyriver Similar for me. 33 in my case, plus a couple I think I might have read but cant' quite remember (depressing thought). There's probably about 20 on here I've either not heard of or have no intention of reading (Moby Dick, Little Women and the two Rushsdies top of the list here), so a fair few still to aim at..
I would say it's almost impossible to create a list like that without sacrificing a few remarkable (or many) books. I would pick up more of the Russian and literature, and also Machado de Assis, which is, by far, the best Latin American writer of all times. He would be easily be ranked alongside with Balzac if he had written in French instead of Portuguese.
I've read 59 of these books. I'm in the middle of David Copperfield right now. After I'm done, it will be 60. Note: I'm counting Pullman's His Dark Materials even though I've only read The Golden Compass (Amber Spyglass). And I'm counting Proust's In Search of Lost Time even though I've only read Swann's Way.
IMO- In Cold Blood should be on this list. The Plague is better than The Stranger (Camus.) The Castle is better than The Trial (Kafka.) And Dracula is better than Frankenstein.
Thank you for the haunting Aakash Ghandi's "Spirit of the Dead." It's a distinctive and appropriate accompaniment for the topic. If it's not customary to credit the composer for use of work, imo it should be.
The amount of illiteracy, ignorance, and cultural correctness required to leave Twain off this list is stagerring. I don't expect an appreciation for genre writing to be evidenced but Twain ?? There is no American Literature that matters more than his. This list is a joke.
No writer has had a greater impact on modern popular culture than H.G. Wells, yet you can find no room for even one of his 100 books. I find that both sad and silly.
I dnf-ed The Great Gatsby, have read To Kill a Mocking Bird, Lolita, The Count of Monte Cristo, Little Women, and Charlotte's Web. Guess I should read more...
I appreciate that composing such a list is a very personal and an almost inherently impossible undertaking. That said this list clearly lost its way about half way through by trying to be all encompassing and far too populist. Putting the likes of Dougas Adams with Kafka and Nabukov is clearly an error, albeit in a list that spans 100 books..
There aren't that many great German writers. There is a lot of great literature in German but not much of it is from Germany. Austria is a great country for literature. The list did include Sebald and Kafka. That is: an Austrian and somebody who was born an Austrian and died a Czechoslovakian.
What makes this person an authority on this list of 100 books to read before we die? Is she a scholarly academic, an acclaimed author, a literature professor? We need to know. We also need an explanation of why each book has been included in the list.
Only about 40 of these books should be on a top 100 books list. Hemingway not even in the top 50 is appalling. No Dune by Frank Herbert, Odyssey by Homer, No Ursula LeGuin, No Ayn Rand, No H. G. Wells, No Asimov…No Edgar Rice Burroughs…No Arthur C Clarke, No Bradbury, No Agatha Christie, …not to mention all time best sellers such as Jk Rowling or Stephen King which have outsold half of the unworthy books on this list by a substantial margin. I therefore declare this list RUBBISH.
Why would anyone read the works of Jane Austen or - even worse - Virginia Woolf? Whenever I see them in some "must read"-list I feel like they are just included because they are women (and therefore pc/diverse).
Without using the google thingie, how many authors who wrote novels from 1742 besides Jane Austen who are still read today? Also have you read Mrs Dalloway or especially To the Lighhouse?
I'd say it was one of those books you read to be able to say you have (my case), but an utterly tedious experience with no desire whatsoever to repeat.
