The Uber-List of the “Top 200 Books of All Time”
As a huge book nerd, there’s something uniquely embarrassing about having to admit that I haven’t read some of the most famous books in classic literature.
For years, whenever friends found out that I read over 70 books per year, they’d immediately assume that I had read their favorite book, only for me to respond with chagrin: “No, I haven’t read [insert amazing book here].”
The Hobbit? Nope, sorry Bilbo.
War and Peace? Hmmm…do people actually read books that long?
Les Miserables? Miserably, no.
Just like you, I was forced to read a lot of classic literature like Animal Farm and The Scarlet Letter in high school. College introduced me to other classics like And Then There Were None and Oliver Twist.
But then, after college, I stopped reading classic lit. Without professors to spoon-feed servings of literary greatness, I turned to popular bestsellers.
As a lover of nonfiction, I consumed books by Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and Jim Collins. I discovered a lot of amazing books, including many that continue to guide my life and work.
But something was missing, and that gap has grown even larger as I’ve begun writing.
“If you are interested in writing and having a large toolkit of stories, [I suggest you read old classics] because those stories have been building blocks for a great many writers before you.” -Margaret Atwood
Atwood says plotlines from ancient stories are woven throughout modern-day literature: “In order to get the joke, you have to know the original.”
And I was missing out on a lot of jokes.
About five years ago, I decided to begin closing my literary gap. I compiled an uber-list of the “best books of all time” that could serve as my proverbial Everest to climb in the years ahead.
I pored over lists from websites that cataloged their “top 100 books.” Books that were mentioned by the most sources made it onto my list. Although many sites focused on novels, a couple included nonfiction as well. (You can find my full source list at the bottom of this story.)
As I compiled my list, I realized that for someone who reads as much as I do, I was remarkably ignorant about literature. I didn’t even know the names of many authors on the list.
These past five years, I’ve been slowly scaling this literary mountain of 200 books. The ones I've read are denoted with the “⊗” symbol below. As you can see, I have a LOT of work to do.
Progress When Article Was Posted (as of 1/21/18): 38 / 200
My Current Progress (as of 5/1/24): 83 / 200
How many of these books have you read?
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe ⊗
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ⊗
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
- Money by Martin Amis
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood ⊗
- Emma by Jane Austen ⊗
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen ⊗
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- The Black Sheep by Honoré de Balzac
- Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
- Herzog by Saul Bellow
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume ⊗
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ⊗
- The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov ⊗
- The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan ⊗
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess ⊗
- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino ⊗
- The Plague by Albert Camus ⊗
- The Stranger by Albert Camus ⊗
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ⊗
- Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ⊗
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler ⊗
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie ⊗
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho ⊗
- The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad ⊗
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl ⊗
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens ⊗
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens ⊗
- The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Deliverance by James Dickey
- Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ⊗
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ⊗
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas ⊗
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas ⊗
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot ⊗
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison ⊗
- L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ⊗
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
- The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank ⊗
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Neuromancer by William Gibson ⊗
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding ⊗
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame ⊗
- The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
- The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne ⊗
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller ⊗
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway ⊗
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway ⊗
- Dune by Frank Herbert ⊗
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo ⊗
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ⊗
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ⊗
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro ⊗
- The Ambassadors by Henry James
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Trial by Franz Kafka ⊗
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac ⊗
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey ⊗
- It by Stephen King ⊗
- The Stand by Stephen King ⊗
- The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee ⊗
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle ⊗
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis ⊗
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli ⊗
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCallers
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
- Atonement by Ian McEwan ⊗
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
- Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ⊗
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
- 1984 by George Orwell ⊗
- Animal Farm by George Orwell ⊗
- U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
- Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy ⊗
- Republic by Plato ⊗
- The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allen Poe
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman ⊗
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
- Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling ⊗
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ⊗
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger ⊗
- Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ⊗
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck ⊗
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck ⊗
- The Red and the Black by Stendhal
- Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson ⊗
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson ⊗
- Dracula by Bram Stoker ⊗
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau ⊗
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien ⊗
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien ⊗
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ⊗
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu ⊗
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne ⊗
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- Candide by Voltaire ⊗
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut ⊗
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker ⊗
- All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren ⊗
- A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh ⊗
- Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells ⊗
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells ⊗
- The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
- Charlotte's Web by EB White ⊗
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ⊗
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ⊗
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- One Thousand and One Nights by (Anon)
Sources: Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Novels" (2005), The Guardian's "100 Best Novels Written in English" (2015), TheGreatestBooks.org, The Guardian's "100 Greatest Novels of All Time" (2003), The Telegraph's "100 Novels Everyone Should Read", GreatBooksGuide.com, Book Depository's "Best Books Ever", Ranker's "Best Novels Ever Written", Joel Patrick's "100 Books to Read Before You Die", Modern Library's "100 Best Novels"
How many have you read? Leave a comment!
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Nice list of real classics. A bit Anglo-Saxon-biased for me! Have an array of favorite Dutch, German, Spanish and French authors that I cherish as well as more 21st century ones! Read many of these classics early on in life! It’s good to have a reading goals and focus, especially now that I may only have 30-years left in life! (and only read about 50 business books and 50 other books a year).
Great point. What are your 3-5 favorite books you’d recommend from your list of Dutch/German/Spanish/French authors? I want to check those out too!
Good list! I’ve read 47, which doesn’t include all of the books on the list that I started but didn’t finish… which is more than I care to admit.
You should also try Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, if you haven’t already read it.
I’ll check it out!
Yes, some of the ones on the list are quite dense. For instance, I’m about halfway through Les Miserables right now, but that means I still have another 600 pages to go! Victor Hugo goes on several super-long tangents about peripheral subjects that don’t really advance the storyline. Books like that have always been hard for me.
59. Many are still on my Classics list.
Nice! What have been your 2-3 favorites from this list that you’ve read so far?
Ok – just went through your list and I’ve read 104; some of the others I have started and tossed aside. Go figure.
Sorry for my delayed reply. Wow, I think that’s the highest number I’ve heard so far from anyone about this list! That’s amazing.
Which one or two were your favorites?
109. I love to read.
Wow, that’s an impressive number!!