Inspired by the 2018 PBS special The Great American Read, I assembled more than 170 best-of-books lists (see sources here) and aggregated them to create one master list of the all-time books. While these are mostly novels, there are some non-fiction books and even a few children’s picture books. Here are the results:
- Various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1610)
- Mao Tse-Tung Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (aka “Little Red Book”) (1964)
- Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
- George Orwell 1984 (1949)
- Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
- Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
- John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
- Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
- Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
- Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
- Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
- Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
- Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
- William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
- Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)
- J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
- Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
- Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
- Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) (1947)
- C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
- E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
- Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.)
- Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
- Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
- Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
- Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
- William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
- Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- George Orwell Animal Farm (1945)
- Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
- Muhammad Qu’ran (632 CE)
- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927)
- Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
- Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
- Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
- Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
- Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943)
- Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
- Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.)
- Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
- Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988)
- Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872)
- Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
- Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
- Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
- Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
- Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320)
- Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
- Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- Richard Adams Watership Down (1972)
- Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862)
- James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
- John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937)
- Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
- Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942)
- Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
- Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859)
- Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)
- Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) (1995), first book of His Dark Materials series (1995-2000)
- Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
- Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (1964)
- Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532)
- Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
- Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
- Henry David Thoreau Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
- Plato The Republic (380 B.C.)
- Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
- Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
- Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy: 2008-2010)
- A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
- Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)
- Alex Haley and Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- Georges Simenon Maigret (series, 1931-1972)
- Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
- Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887)
- Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
- E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
- Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603)
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I assume that the KJV & Quotations have more points than anything else in all 3 of the databases.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you mean by "all 3 of the databases." As mentioned above, more than 170 lists were aggregated to create this list. However, the Bible and Quotations are hugely aided by sales figures of more than 6 billion each, compared to the Quran in third place with 800 million sales. If based only on list appearances, the Bible ranks 43rd with 34 list appearances and Quotations ranks only 370th with just eight list appearances.
DeleteWell, in the movie & music database you said you assigned points to each item. Since The Bible & Quotations have such a huge number of sales, I'd imagine they'd have a huge number of points.
DeletePerhaps we could see a Top 1000 Books?
ReplyDeleteGreat update
ReplyDelete