ALL-TIME BEST 100 ENGLISH-LANGUAGE NOVELS
As Lacayo said in his article, "Lists like this one have two purposes. One is to instruct. The other of course is to enrage." Everyone can argue about books they think should have made this list and others that should have been left off.
Personally, I'd prefer seeing Mary McCarthy, Barbara Pym, and Penelope Lively on this list and jettison Pynchon, Kosinski, and DeLillo. I've read 88 of the 100 books on this list so far, but I may never finish all 100. I know I'm never going to read Infinite Jest, for example. And I will probably never read Gravity's Rainbow.
How about you? What are your thoughts?
Here is the complete list in alphabetical order, with notes if I've read it, it's on my TBR shelf, or if it is available as an audiobook from my library.
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (reviewed here) FINISHED
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (reviewed here) FINISHED
American Pastoral by Philip Roth FINISHED
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser FINISHED
Animal Farm by George Orwell FINISHED
Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara FINISHED
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume FINISHED
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here) FINISHED
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien TBR SHELF
Atonement by Ian McEwan FINISHED
Beloved by Toni Morrison FINISHED
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood TBR SHELF
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler FINISHED
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood FINISHED
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy FINISHED
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh FINISHED
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder FINISHED
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth FINISHED
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller FINISHED
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger FINISHED
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess FINISHED
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron FINISHED
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen FINISHED
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon FINISHED
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (discussed here) FINISHED
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West FINISHED
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather FINISHED
A Death in the Family by James Agee FINISHED
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen FINISHED
Deliverance by James Dickey FINISHED
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone FINISHED
Falconer by John Cheever TBR SHELF
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles FINISHED
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing FINISHED
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin FINISHED
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell FINISHED
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck FINISHED
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon ON OVERDRIVE
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald FINISHED
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh FINISHED
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers FINISHED
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene FINISHED
Herzog by Saul Bellow FINISHED
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson FINISHED
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul FINISHED
I, Claudius by Robert Graves FINISHED
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace ON OVERDRIVE (but 56 hours!)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison FINISHED
Light in August by William Faulkner FINISHED
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis FINISHED
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov FINISHED
Lord of the Flies by William Golding FINISHED
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien FINISHED
Loving by Henry Green FINISHED
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis FINISHED
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead ON OVERDRIVE
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (reviewed here) FINISHED
Money by Martin Amis (reviewed here) FINISHED
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy FINISHED
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf FINISHED
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs FINISHED
Native Son by Richard Wright FINISHED
Neuromancer by William Gibson ON OVERDRIVE
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro FINISHED
1984 by George Orwell FINISHED
On the Road by Jack Kerouac FINISHED
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey FINISHED
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (I finished as much as I could stand) FINISHED
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov FINISHED
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster FINISHED
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (reviewed here) FINISHED
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth FINISHED
Possession by A.S. Byatt FINISHED
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene FINISHED
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark FINISHED
Rabbit, Run by John Updike FINISHED
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow FINISHED
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett FINISHED
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates FINISHED
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles FINISHED
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (reviewed here) FINISHED
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson TBR SHELF
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth TBR SHELF
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here) FINISHED
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford FINISHED
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre FINISHED
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway FINISHED
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston FINISHED
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe FINISHED
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee FINISHED
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf FINISHED
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller FINISHED
Ubik by Philip K. Dick ON OVERDRIVE
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch FINISHED
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry FINISHED
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise by Don DeLillo ON OVERDRIVE
White Teeth by Zadie Smith FINISHED
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reviewed here) FINISHED
NOTES
Updated October 26, 2023. This is a repost of the list I first posted back in 2009. The links needed refreshing.
Updated October 26, 2023. This is a repost of the list I first posted back in 2009. The links needed refreshing.
