Top 100 Books To Read

Posted on Monday, June 7, 2010 · 6 Comments 

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in bed snuggled up next to my mom or dad while they read me a story (probably Green Eggs and Ham for the umpteenth time). Naturally, being avid readers, my husband and I hope to carry on the tradition and instill the same love of books in our children. Truth be told, we’ve been reading to my growing belly for about a month now, purely to get into the habit and because it’s the first of many things to draw us together as a family. Some say that reading to your child in utero will breed a genius… I’m still not convinced, but if that happens to be one outcome of our nightly reads, I definitely won’t be complaining. So, in order to prepare my mind to deal with a child that could quite possibly outsmart me at a young age, I hope to get through this list over the coming months.

Using seven lists that I found online, including The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels and the BBC’s Big Read, I compiled my own list using those books that appeared three or more times. I added a few of my own favorites to fill in the holes. Later, I plan to create an alternate list that is less focused on classics and best books of the last few centuries, and more on my own personal favorites, so please feel free to comment if you have any suggestions. Enjoy!

  1. 1984, George Orwell
  2. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  3. A Farewell to Arms,  Ernest Hemingway
  4. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
  5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
  6. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
  7. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
  8. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  9. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
  10. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
  11. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
  12. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  13. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  14. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
  15. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  16. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  17. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  18. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
  19. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  20. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  21. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  22. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  23. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
  24. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  25. Dune, Frank Herbert
  26. East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
  27. Emma, Jane Austen
  28. Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin
  29. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  30. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
  31. Harry Potter (Series), J.K. Rowling
  32. Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  33. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
  34. Howards End, E.M. Forster
  35. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
  36. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  37. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
  38. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
  39. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
  40. Light in August, William Faulkner
  41. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
  42. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  43. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
  44. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
  45. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
  46. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
  47. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
  48. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  49. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  50. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  51. Native Son, Richard Wright
  52. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  53. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
  54. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
  55. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
  56. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  57. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
  58. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
  59. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  60. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
  61. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  62. Sons And Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
  63. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
  64. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  65. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  66. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  67. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  68. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
  69. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
  70. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  71. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  72. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
  73. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  74. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  75. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  76. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
  77. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
  78. The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy), JRR Tolkien
  79. The Magus, John Fowles
  80. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
  81. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
  82. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  83. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  84. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  85. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
  86. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  87. The Stand, Stephen King
  88. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  89. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
  90. The World According To Garp, John Irving
  91. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  92. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  93. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  94. Ulysses, James Joyce
  95. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
  96. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  97. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  98. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  99. Women In Love, D.H. Lawrence
  100. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

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  • Annette Girardin

    Well Zuri,
    I too LOVE to read.Happily I have read many of the books on your list and interestingly there are many on your list that have been on my "must read" list for some time(some since being a teenager). Perhaps i should go find a copy of one of those long ago wishes. I know I have Brideshead revisied in a box of books yet unpacked so It shall have to wait. I am going to copy your list for further reference……Hmm what to read what to read. I do have lots of time these days without my hunny home.
    Annette

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  • Emily

    Thanks for the list Zuri! I've always wanted to do this sort of thing, so appreciate the effort you put in…now for the reading part. I'm reading Birdsong at the moment. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it (and I see it is #18 on your list). It's beautiful (and the first part of the book is, um…quite risque…definitely attention grabbing!). xx

  • Brown Sugar

    Hey Em, I LOVED Birdsong. Surprisingly, it wasn’t on too many of the lists I found, so I added it as one of my own personal favorites. I hope you enjoy it to the end!

  • Brown Sugar

    I find that’s the hardest decision… what to read next!? So many choices! I think this way I’ll just go through them alphabetically. :-)

  • Casey Badger

    Good to see The Great Gatsby on your list. I read it a long time ago and re-read it recently for a paper. Amazing, isn’t it? The power of words – how they can take you to a place in the past where you can get a glimpse of the people of that era, with all their faults, ambitions, hopes and loves. The story of Jay Gatsby unfolds through the eyes of Nick Carraway. Jay lives high from money made through dubious means. But who cares? Everyone makes it a point to attend the lavish parties he throws, but sadly enough, no one bothers to attend his funeral at the end. It is through situations such as this that Fitzgerald throws light upon the nuances of human nature. Shmoop gave me some clear insights into the hypocrisy, the shallowness, of the characters. It also explains the novel as a historical fiction.