Classic Novels Book Club: The Top 200 Works of Fiction

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When I launched the Classic Novels Book Club read more here) in July 2018, it was based on a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all-time. You can see that original list here. In January 2026, however, the list was revised as the group neared completion of the top 100 books. Below is the revised list of the top 200 works of fiction of all time as of 1/31/2026. Those books which the group has already read or are scheduled to read have been highlighted. 2026 rank / 2018 rank / Author / Book Title / Year of Publication (4) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) (1) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) (2) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) (3) George Orwell 1984 (1949) (11) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) (9) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) (19) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) (7) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) (5) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) (6) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) (16) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) (8) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) (25) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) (20) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) (30) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) (12) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) (17) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) (14) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) (77) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) (10) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) (43) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) (28) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) (15) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) (21) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) (18) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) (56) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) (32) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) (31) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) (23) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) (38) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) (13) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) (27) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) (29) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) (52) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) (26) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) (24) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) (22) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) (44) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) (82) 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) (57) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) (39) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) (35) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) (54) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (53) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) (64) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) (40) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) (36) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) (34) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) (49) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) (37) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) (73) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) (47) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) (33) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) (78) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) (58) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) (61) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) (55) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (42) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) (46) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) (79) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) (85) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) (45) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (69) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) (50) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) (72) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) (71) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) (48) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) (41) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) (66) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) (--) Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (1995) (51) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) (60) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) (63) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) (84) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) (68) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) (67) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) (83) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) (65) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) (--) Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (2008) (86) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) (--) Makus Zusak The Book Thief (2005) (99) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) (74) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (59) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) (76) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (91) Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (O Alquimista) (1988) (96) Franz Kafka The Trial (1925) (--) Madeline L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time (1962) (--) Lois Lowry The Giver (1993) (62) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) (--) Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387) (--) Bram Stoker Dracula (1897) (81) John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) (70) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) (--) Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2003) (92) Stephen King The Stand (1978) (75) Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) (--) Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) (80) Jane Austen Emma (1816) (--) S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1967) (98) Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) (90) William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848) (--) Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) (87) Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide (1759) (--) Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner (2003) (93) John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) (--) Gabriel Garcia Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) (--) Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose (1980) (--) Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers (1844) (89) Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) (--) Orson Scott Card Ender’s Game (1968) (--) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) (--) George R.R. Martin A Game of Thrones (1996) (--) Cormac McCarthy The Road (2007) (--) John Green The Fault in Our Stars (2012) (100) Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1767) (--) Stephanie Meyer Twilight (2005) (--) Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) (--) John Milton Paradise Lost (1667) (--) Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden (1987) (--) anonymous Arabian Nights (aka “One Thousand and One Nights”) (800 A.D.) (--) Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) (--) Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915) (--) Agathie Christie And Then There Were None (1939) (--) Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) (94) Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (--) Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843) (--) Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939) (--) Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) (--) Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946) (--) Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (1967) (88) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) (--) Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012) (--) Jules Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) (--) John Irving The World According to Garp (1978) (--) Upton Sinclair The Jungle (1906) (--) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier (1915) (--) Stendhal The Red and the Black (1830) (--) Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon (1929) (--) Fyodor Dostoyevski The Idiot (1869) (--) Charles Dickens Bleak House (1853) (--) Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009) (95) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) (--) Henry Fielding Tom Jones (aka “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling”) (1749) (--) Ian McEwan Atonement (2001) (--) John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) (--) Willa Cather My Antonia (1918) (--) Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) (--) Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible (1998) (--) Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1962) (--) Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) (97) Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (--) Herman Hesse Siddhartha (1922) (--) Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) (--) Ayn Rand The Fountainhead (1943) (--) Jane Austen Persuasion (1818) (--) Charles Dickens Oliver Twist (1838) (--) Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain (1924) (--) William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! (1936) (--) E.M. Forster Howards End (1910) (--) Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano (1947) (--) D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913) (--) John Steinbeck East of Eden (1952) (--) Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962) (--) Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860) (--) Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934) (--) Rick Riordan The Lightning Thief (2005) (--) John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960) (--) Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977) (--) H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1898) (--) Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969) (--) Veronica Roth Divergent (2011) (--) Lewis Carroll Through the Looking Glass (1871) (--) Pearl Buck The Good Earth (1931) (--) William Styron Sophie’s Choice (1979) (--) Stephen Cane The Red Badge of Courage (1895) (--) H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) (--) Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex (2003) (--) Laurra Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie (1935) (--) Anna Sewell Black Beauty (1877) (--) Joseph Conrad Lord Jim (1900) (--) Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992) (--) W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage (1915) (--) L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) (--) Jonathan Franzen The Corrections (2001) (--) Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925) (--) Yann Martel Life of Pi (2001) (--) Wilkie Collins The Moonstone (1868) (--) Norton Juster The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) (--) Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) (--) Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (--) Robert A. Heinlein Stranger in a Stanger Land (1961) (--) Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932) (--) Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones (2002) (--) Walker Percy The Moviegoer (1961) (--) Kate Chopin The Awakening (1899) (--) D.H. Lawrence Women in Love (1920) (--) Edith Wharton The House of Mirth (1905) (--) Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934) (--) Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure (1895) 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 2/3/2026.

 

Children’s Novels: Top 50

First posted 2/19/2019.

This list has been moved. It has been consolidated with the list of top young adult novels to create a new list, "The Top 100 Novels for Children and Teens."

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Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: 150th anniversary!

Last updated 7/6/2020..

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll

First Publication: November 26, 1865 Category: fantasy/children’s novel Sales: 100 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: “During a boat trip up the Isis River with Reverend Robinson Duckworth and the three young daughters of Henry Liddell, one of whom is named Alice, Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, invents a story about a bored little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure. Several years later this tale would be forever immortalized as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.” AZ Alice follows a White Rabbit “down the rabbit hole and ends up in the fantasy world of Wonderland,” AZ a place “filled with a plethora of interesting and fantastical creatures.” AZ The reader can watch Alice “take tea with the Mad Hatter and March Hare [and] follow a game of croquet between Alice and the Queen of Hearts.” BN Alice also “encounters a blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah, the mischievously grinning Cheshire Cat, …a sleepy little Dormouse whom she attends a tea party with, …[and] many other curious characters.” AZ “Beloved by millions of children and adults ever since its first publication, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a classic tale of fantasy that has been cherished by readers ever since its first publication and will surely delight for many years to come.” AZ Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon BN Barnes & Noble