Monday, August 17, 2015

The Guardian: The Top 100 Novels

First posted 6/17/2020.

The Guardian:

Top 100 Novels

In 2003, The Guardian’s Robert McCrum assembled a list of the greatest novels of all time. The list was presented in chronological order with no rankings. It was also published in The Observer. In 2015, McCrum revisited the list, this time focusing specifically on novels written in English. Once again, it was presented chronologically with no rankings.

This list is an aggregate of the two lists. It is presented as a ranked list, based on the books’ overall ratings in Dave’s Book Database. The 50 titles which appeared on both lists are ranked first.

  1. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  2. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
  3. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
  4. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
  5. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
  6. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
  7. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
  8. James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
  9. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)
  10. William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)

  11. Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
  12. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
  13. Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
  14. Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
  15. Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
  16. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
  17. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)
  18. William Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
  19. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
  20. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

  21. Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
  22. Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
  23. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
  24. Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719)
  25. William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930)
  26. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  27. E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
  28. John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
  29. Jane Austen Emma (1816)
  30. William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848)

  31. Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759)
  32. Henry Fielding Tom Jones (aka “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”) (1749)
  33. Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier (1915)
  34. Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977)
  35. Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939)
  36. Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1960)
  37. Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure (1895)
  38. D.H. Lawrence The Rainbow (1915)
  39. Anthony Trollope The Way We Live Now (1875)
  40. Martin Amis Money: A Suicide Note (1984)

  41. Marilynn Robinson Housekeeping (1981)
  42. V.S. Naipaul A Bend in the River (1979)
  43. Evelyn Waugh Scoop (1938)
  44. Samuel Richardson Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748)
  45. Jerome K. Jerome Three Men in a Boat (1889)
  46. John Buchan The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
  47. Kazuo Ishiguro An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
  48. Thomas Love Peacock Nightmare Abbey (1818)
  49. Benjamin Disraeli Sybil (1845)
  50. Elizabeth Taylor Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

  51. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
  52. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
  53. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
  54. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
  55. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
  56. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
  57. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  58. Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
  59. Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
  60. George Eliot Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life (1872)

  61. Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
  62. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
  63. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
  64. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
  65. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
  66. Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1966)
  67. Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
  68. Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1913)
  69. Franz Kafka The Trial (1925)
  70. Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963)

  71. Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka “Northern Lights”) (1995)
  72. Henry James Portrait of a Lady (1881)
  73. Bram Stoker Dracula (1897)
  74. Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
  75. Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946)
  76. Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)
  77. Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)
  78. Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
  79. Sinclair Lewis Babbitt (1922)
  80. Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano (1947)

  81. Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
  82. Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
  83. Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of Night (1932)
  84. W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage (1915)
  85. Albert Camus The Plague (1947)
  86. Ian McEwan Atonement (2001)
  87. Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929)
  88. Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)
  89. Gunter Grass The Tin Drum (1959)
  90. Rudyard Kipling Kim (1901)

  91. Saul Bellow Herzog (1964)
  92. Philip Roth American Pastoral (1998)
  93. John Dos Passos U.S.A. (trilogy: 1930-36)
  94. John Updike Rabbit Redux (1971)
  95. Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904)
  96. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954)
  97. John le Carre Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)
  98. Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
  99. Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped (1886)
  100. Pierre Choderos de Laclos Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) (1782)

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