Sunday, July 5, 2020

The All-Time Top 100 Works of Fiction

First posted 6/26/2018; updated 7/5/2020.

Fiction:

Top 100 Novels

These are the best fiction books of all-time, according to an aggregate of more than 20 lists focused specifically on fiction books and another 50+ general book lists.

Note: this list was originally posted in June 2018 and that version was used as the springboard for the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the original list here.

  1. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
  2. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
  3. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  4. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
  5. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
  6. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
  7. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
  8. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
  9. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
  10. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

  11. James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
  12. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
  13. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  14. Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
  15. William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
  16. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
  17. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
  18. Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
  19. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series: 1997-2007)
  20. J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)

  21. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
  22. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
  23. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)
  24. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
  25. Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
  26. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
  27. Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.)
  28. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
  29. C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series: 1950-1956)
  30. Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)

  31. Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
  32. Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
  33. Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
  34. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  35. George Orwell Animal Farm (1945)
  36. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
  37. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  38. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
  39. Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927)
  40. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)

  41. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
  42. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943)
  43. Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
  44. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
  45. Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
  46. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
  47. Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
  48. Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.)
  49. Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
  50. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)

  51. Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320)
  52. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
  53. George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872)
  54. Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
  55. Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
  56. Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
  57. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
  58. Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
  59. Richard Adams Watership Down (1972)
  60. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

  61. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
  62. James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
  63. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
  64. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
  65. Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
  66. Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942)
  67. Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
  68. John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937)
  69. Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
  70. Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862)

  71. Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) (1995)
  72. A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
  73. Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
  74. Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
  75. Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (2008)
  76. L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
  77. Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
  78. Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)
  79. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
  80. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

  81. Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719)
  82. Lois Lowry The Giver (1993)
  83. Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
  84. Madeleine L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
  85. Richard Wright Native Son (1940)
  86. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887)
  87. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  88. E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
  89. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387)
  90. Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)

  91. William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930)
  92. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
  93. Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929)
  94. Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
  95. S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1967)
  96. Franz Kafka The Trial (1925)
  97. Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004)
  98. William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603)
  99. Stephen King The Stand (1978)
  100. Bram Stoker Dracula (1897)

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Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Muhammad - the Qur’an

First posted 7/1/2020.

Qur’an

Muhammad

Written: year 609 to 632 CE


Category: religion


Sales: 800 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book:

The Qur’an is the religious text of Islam described within as a book of guidance for mankind. Muslims view it as the culmination of divine messages and the liteal word of God (Allah) as orally revealed to the prophet Mohammad through the angel Gabriel.

Islamic tradition says the first revelation happened in 609 CE in the Cave or Hira during one of Muhammad’s isolated retreats to the mountains. He continued to receive revelations until his death in 632 CE. The Qur’an is considered of proof of Muhammad’s prophethood and his most important miracle.

Muhammad himself didn’t know how to write, but his companions served as scribes and memorized large chunks of Muhammad’s revelations. After his death, his companions compiled it and a standard version was established by Uthman. It assumes some familiarity with events already recounted in other scriptures, such as the Bible, and presents some alternative accounts and interpretations of some events.

During prayer, the Qur’an is recited only in Arabic and in the month of Ramadan, Muslims typically recite the Qur’an in its entirety. It has been a tradition that children memorize the more than 6200 verses. Those who succeed are given the title of Hafiz.


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