Amazon: Top 100 Books

First posted 6/25/2020.

Amazon: Top 100 Books

This list was created by aggregating six different Amazon lists (see details at bottom of page). F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) George Orwell 1984 (1949) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy: 2008-2010) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) John Green The Fault in Our Stars (2012) George R.R. Martin A Game of Thrones (1996) Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012) Laura Hillenbrand Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival (2010) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible (1998) Cormac McCarthy The Road (2007) Veronica Roth Divergent (2011) R.J. Palacio Wonder (2012) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train (2015) E.L. James Fifty Shades of Grey (trilogy: 2011-2012) Liane Moriarty The Husband’s Secret (2013) Kathyrn Stockett The Help (2009) Todd Burpo & Lynn Vincent Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back (2010) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) Rick Riordan The Lightning Thief (2005) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Lois Lowry The Giver (1994) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Chris McDougall Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009) Abraham Verghese Cutting for Stone (2009) Brené Brown Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (2012) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Kate Atkinson Life After Life (2013) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) Doris Kearns Goodwin Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) Erik Larson The Devil in the White City (2003) Rebecca Skloot The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) Stephen King The Shining (1977) Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) Neil Gaiman American Gods (2001) Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) (1947) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (1988) Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992) Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series: 1950-1956) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Stephenie Meyer Twilight (2005) John Steinbeck The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) Andy Weir The Martian (2011) Edwin A. Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) Rick Yancey The First Book of the 5th Wave (2013) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Stephen Chbosky The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters (1942) Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Sarah J. Maas Throne of Glass (2013) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) John Green Looking for Alaska (2005) Spencer Johnson Who Moved My Cheese? (1998) Tom Rath Strengths Finder 2.0 (2007) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Kristin Hannah The Nightingale (2015) Albert Camus The Stranger (L’Etranger) (1942) James Dashner The Maze Runner (2009) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See (2015) Ayn Rand The Fountainhead (1943) Resources and Related Links: Amazon Books editors’ 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime The link above goes directly to Amazon, but can also be found at thegreatestbooks.org. Amazon UK (1/15/2018). “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime” Amazon UK editors picked 100 essential books – mostly fiction, but some non-fiction. Includes children’s books. A slightly different version of the list was posted at thegreatestbooks.org. Amazon.com “Classic Literature and Fiction” Amazon “Most Reviewed” This is a top 100 ranked list on GoodReads of books on Amazon with at least 3000 reviews. Amazon “Must Read Books of All Time” A Kindle edition on Amazon of 11 classics. Amazon “Top 20 Best-selling Books of All Time”

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice published 200 years ago today

First posted 6/12/2020; updated 7/6/2020.

Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen

First Publication: January 28, 1813 Category: romantic novel Sales: 20 million

Accolades:

About the Book: “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s witty comedy of manners – one of the most popular novels of all time.” AZ The basic plot? “Heroine meets hero and hates him. Is charmed by a cad. A family crisis – caused by the cad – is resolved by the hero. The heroine sees him for what he really is and realises (after visiting his enormous house) that she loves him. The plot has been endlessly borrowed, but few authors have written anything as witty or profound as Pride and Prejudice.” TG In 1894, “renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury…declared it the ‘most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author’s works.’” LN In the 20th century, Eudora Welty “described it as ‘irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.’” LN Its “blend of humor, romance, and social satire have delighted readers of all ages.” AZ “In telling the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bennett and their five daughters, Jane Austen creates a miniature of her world, where social grace and the nuances of behavior predominate in the making of a great love story.” BN The story “features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues.” AZ Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon BN Barnes & Noble LN The Literature Network TG Telegraph: The Perfect Library

Newsweek: Top 100 Books

First posted 6/9/2020.

Newsweek: Top 100 Books

Newsweek’s list was assembled by aggregating ten other lists. Unfortunately, the ten are not all referenced, but the article does say it included Modern Library, Oprah Winfrey’s book club selections, a reading list for St. John’s College, and Britain’s Daily Telegraph list of “the perfect library.” Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) George Orwell 1984 (1949) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) / The Iliad (800 B.C.) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Dante Alighieri Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1304) Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) George Eliot Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life (1872) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son (1955) Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1840) Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (1859) Herodotus The Histories of Herodotus (5th century) Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract (1762) Karl Marx Das Kapital (1867) Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince (1532) St. Augustine of Hippo The Confessions (400 A.D.) Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651) Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War (5th century) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) various writers The Holy Bible: King James Version (1451) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) William Faulkner Light in August (1932) W.E. Burghardt Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) Jean Rhys Wide Saragosso Sea (1966) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) John Milton Paradise Lost (1667) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603) William Shakespeare King Lear (1608) William Shakespeare Othello (1609) William Shakespeare The Sonnets (1609) Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Rudyard Kipling Kim (1901) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) George Orwell Animal Farm (1954) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966) Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962) Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1913) Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934) Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913) Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Elie Wiesel Night (Un di Velt Hot Geshvign) (1958) John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925) Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939) Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934) Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929) Philip Pullman His Dark Materials (trilogy: 1995-2000) Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Sigmund Freud The Interpreation of Dreams (1900) Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1907) Mao Zedong Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Little Red Book) (1966) William James The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962) John Maynard Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) Joseph Conrad Lord Jim (1900) Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929) John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society (1958) William Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) Alex Haley & Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) Winston Churchill The Second World War (6 volumes, 1953) Resources and Related Links: A List of Books: “Newsweek: Top 100 Books” Newsweek (6/28/2009). “Inside Newsweek’s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List”

BBC’s “The Big Read”: Top 100

Posted April 2003; updated 2/16/2019.

image from readandsurvive.com

In April 2003 the BBC asked for nominations for the nation’s best-loved novels. The results of “The Big Read” were originally posted here, but are also listed here.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-1955)
2. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. Philip Pullman His Dark Materials (trilogy: 1995-2000)
4. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
5. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
6. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
7. A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
8. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
9. C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1970)
10. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)

11. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
12. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
13. Sebastian Faulk Birdsong (1993)
14. Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
15. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
16. William Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
17. Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
18. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
19. Louis DeBernieres Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994)
20. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)

21. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
22. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1999)
23. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)
24. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
25. J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)
26. Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
27. George Eliot Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life (1872)
28. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
29. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
30. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

31. Jacqueline Wilson The Story of Tracy Beaker (1991)
32. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
33. Ken Follet The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
34. Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
35. Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
36. Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
37. Nevil Shute A Town Like Alice (1950)
38. Jane Austen Persuasion (1818)
39. Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
40. Jane Austen Emma (1816)

41. L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
42. Richard Adams Watership Down (1972)
43. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
44. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
45. Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945)
46. George Orwell Animal Farm (1954)
47. Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843)
48. Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
49. Michelle Magorian Goodnight Mister Tom (1981)
50. Rosamunde Pitcher The Shell Seekers (1987)

51. Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden (1987)
52. John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937)
53. Stephen King The Stand (1978)
54. Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
55. Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy (1993)
56. Roald Dahl The BFG (1982)
57. Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons (1930)
58. Anna Sewell Black Beauty (1877)
59. Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl (series: 2001-2012)
60. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)

61. Malorie Blackman Naughts and Crosses (2001)
62. Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
63. Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
64. Colleen McCullough The Thorn Birds (1977)
65. Terry Pratchett Mort (1987)
66. Enid Blyton The Magic Faraway Tree (1943)
67. John Fowles The Magus (1965)
68. Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman Good Omens (1990)
69. Terry Pratchett Guards! Guards! (1989)
70. William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)

71. Patrick Süskind Perfume (1985)
72. Robert Tressell The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914)
73. Terry Pratchett Night Watch (2002)
74. Roald Dahl Matilda (1988)
75. Helen Fielding Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)
76. Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992)
77. Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)
78. James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
79. Charles Dickens Bleak House (1853)
80. Jacqueline Wilson Double Act (1995)

81. Roald Dahl The Twits (1980)
82. Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle (1948)
83. Louis Sachar Holes (1999)
84. Mervyn Peake Gormenghast (series: 1946-1956)
85. Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things (1997)
86. Jacqueline Wilson Vicky Angel (200)
87. Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
88. Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
89. Raymond E. Feist Magician (1982)
90. Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)

91. Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969)
92. Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)
93. Terry Pratchett The Colour of Magic (1983)
94. Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)
95. Anya Seton Katherine (1954)
96. Jeffrey Archer Kane and Abel (1979)
97. Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
98. Jacqueline Wilson Girls in Love (1997)
99. Meg Cabot The Princess Diaries (2000)
100. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)

---