| First posted 5/26/2018; updated 11/11/2025. |
 | All-Time Books:Top 100 |
Inspired by the 2018 PBS special The Great American Read, I assembled more than 170 best-of-books lists (see sources here) and aggregated them to create one master list of the all-time books. While these are mostly novels, there are some non-fiction books and even a few children’s picture books. Here are the results:
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 The coffee table in our family living room is littered with reading material, both on top and underneath. Technically, only two of the vast pile meet the criteria of "coffee table book;" that is, books whose primary purpose is to give guests something to thumb through without paying a lot of attention to it. One is a collection of Doonesbury cartoons and the other is a homemade book collecting photos of my wife and 10YO's trip to London to see the 2012 Olympics. There are plenty of "throwaways," meaning those materials that will only have a temporary home on our table before heading to the recycling bin. There's a USA Today newspaper as well as magazines ranging from The Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, Ranger Rick, KC Studio, and Q (a British music magazine). Mostly, however, the table serves as a cluttered catch-all for the family's collective readings. |
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My 10YO and I are chugging through J.R.R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring together while Mom has tackled Lois Lowry's The Giver with him and our 7YO. My oldest son is also reading Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero and Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret. My younger son has been reading Kate DiCamillo's Mercy Watson Fights Crime aloud to me while I have read Shel Silverstein's Runny Babbit to him.
My heavy interest in music is showcased by a couple of autobiographies. I've nearly finished Pete Townshend's Who I Am and Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace is on deck. When I'm just killing a few minutes, I dive into one of the collections of Chuck Klosterman, a music journalist noted for work with Rolling Stone and Spin. |
| First posted 12/30/2012; updated 7/5/2020. |
 
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The HobbitJ.R.R. Tolkien
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First Publication: September 21, 1937 Category: fantasy novel Sales: 140.6 million |
Accolades:
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About the Book: The New York Times Book Review called The Hobbit “a glorious account of a magnificent adventure, filled with suspense and seasoned with a quiet humor that is irresistible.” AZ “Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life…but his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep…to whisk him away on an adventure.” WK They want to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo encounters the creature Gollum and finds a magic ring. “The story reaches its climax in the Battle of the Five Armies, where many of the characters and creatures from earlier chapters re-emerge to engage in conflict.” WK The journey brings out Bilbo’s more adventurous nature as he “gains a new level of maturity, competence, and wisdom.” WK “Personal growth and…heroism are central themes of the story, along with motifs of warfare.” WK “Tolkien’s own experiences during World War I…[were] instrumental in shaping the story. The author’s scholarly knowledge of Germanic philology and interest in mythology and fairy tales are often noted as influences.” WK The Hobbit was “nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction.” WK “The publisher was encouraged by the book’s critical and financial success and, therefore, requested a sequel.” WK Tolkien responded with a trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, also in this book. The four books were turned into a series of six movies. December 30, 2012: Personal Reflection: I took my 10-year-old son to see The Hobbit. I'm not sure which of us was more excited, although I will confess only one of us went in costume.  my son dressed as a hobbit I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy repeatedly through my adolescent years. While I didn't generally read fantasy and was never a particular fan of D&D, the world Tolkien created absolutely enraptured me. I was as ecstatic as the rest of the throngs when Peter Jackson waved his magic wand over his movie treatments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and proved they could be made into masterful movies. While my son had not seen any of those movies, he was interested. I decided we might as well start with The Hobbit and work our way through the series logically. We read the book together and I delighted at seeing the story come to life for him. However, I was also troubled. Now that I am regularly writing myself, I nitpicked at certain aspects of Tolkien's writing style - mostly his wordiness. I have certainly been known to commit that horrid writing sin of serving up too much detail. I'm a believer in coloring a scene and giving some background that might not be integral to the story, but gives it flavor. Tolkien believes in this philosophy ten-fold. He can spend pages giving background story on a setting or character which is completely unnecessary to the overall tale. While some of this can enrich, it can also infuriate. Readers can reach a point of screaming, well, "Get to the point!" Jackson was praised by many Tolkien fans (including myself) for his talent at carefully editing some of this detail out the Lord of the Rings. For example, in the original Fellowship of the Rings book, a whole chapter is dedicated to a totally superfluous tale about a character named Tom Bombadil who never figures into the overall plot. Jackson justifiably excised the character from the story. At the same time, though, Jackson now finds himself criticized for doing exactly the opposite with The Hobbit. He has stretched one book into three movies. While his aim is to obviously link the two trilogies by fleshing out elements of Lord of the Rings which are only hinted at or left untouched in The Hobbit. He has also sought to infuse his movie version of The Hobbit with a darker tone than the book, again to seemingly match it up better with his movie versions of Lord of the Rings. Now, exactly what point I’m making here, I’m not sure. Oh, right. I’m making the point that even the most celebrated of writers can find themselves distracted, drifting off on a tangent that may not benefit the overall story. Sometimes these diversions can become the essence of why a story becomes beloved, but they can also be the reason a story is despised. With that, I feel I should stop before I babble any longer. Some of you may wish I’d shut up already.  my son in front of the movie poster
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| First posted 6/10/2020. |
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From LincolnLibraries.org: “In 2005, Time® magazine’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing). As usual, with any “top 100” list, these were their subjective choices, and obviously do not reflect the views of any other reader. However, their list inarguably includes numerous works of influential English-languge literature.” Note: the original list was unranked, presented alphabetically by book titles. The rankings here are based on GoodReads.com.
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| Last updated 7/5/2020. |
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The Lord of the RingsJ.R.R. Tolkien
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First Publication: 7/29/1954 (Fellowship of the Ring) First Publication: 11/11/1954 (The Two Towers) First Publication: 10/20/1955 (The Return of the King) Category: fantasy fiction Sales: 150 million (trilogy) |
Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):
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About the Book: The Lord of the Rings was written in stages between 1937 and 1949 as a sequel to The Hobbit (1937). For economic reasons, it was published over the course of a year in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. WK The trilogy “has since been reprinted numerous times and translated into 38 languages.” WK “Lord of the Rings” is a reference “to the story's main antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron, who had in an earlier age created the One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power as the ultimate weapon in his campaign to conquer and rule all of Middle-earth.” WK “After it was taken from him, he gathered the rest of the rings, but continued to search for the One Ring to complete his dominion.” AZ “After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins,” AZ who, on his eleventy-first birthday, bequeathed it to his nephew Frodo. A party is assembled to “journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.” AZ Accompanying Frodo are Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.” AZ Tolkien, who “was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford,” AZ crafted his works out of his interest in classic language as well as “philology, mythology, religion and the author’s distaste for the effects of industrialization, as well as earlier fantasy works and Tolkien's experiences in World War I.” WK “Frodo and friends journey to Mordor to destroy the ring, making the young Hobbit one of the greatest fictional heroes of all time. More than 100 million copies have been sold of the trilogy that brought fantasy to a mainstream literary audience.” TG Resources and Related Links: |
