Classic Novels Book Club: The Top 100

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When I launched the Classic Novels Book Club read more here) in July 2018, it was based on a a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all-time. That list has been revised (posted here), but the original has been left in tact here. Highlighted titles are those which the book club has read or is scheduled to read as of 4/5/2024. You can click on book titles to link to more detailed pages about those books. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) George Orwell 1984 (1949) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Jane Austen Emma (1816) John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) Marcel Proust Swann’s Way (1913), part one of In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide (1759) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848) Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987) Stephen King The Stand (1978) John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) Henry James Portrait of a Lady (1881) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Franz Kafka The Trial (1925) Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759) Resources and Related Links: Classic Novels Book Club: Writ by Whit Page Classic Novels Book Club: Meetup Site The Top 100 Works of Fiction (revised) Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: Fiction” Writ by Whit “Best Book Lists: General” First posted 6/26/2018; last updated 4/5/2024.