Classic Novels Book Club: The Top 100

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When I launched the Classic Novels Book Club read more here) in July 2018, it was based on a a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all-time. That list has been revised (posted here), but the original has been left in tact here. Highlighted titles are those which the book club has read or is scheduled to read as of 11/11/2025. You can click on book titles to link to more detailed pages about those books. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) George Orwell 1984 (1949) Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) James Joyce Ulysses (1922) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615) Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869) Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932) Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) George Orwell Animal Farm (1945) Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877) Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.) E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.) George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872) Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861) Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937) Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869) James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850) Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953) John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903) Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320) William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930) Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943) Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957) Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920) Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942) Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908) Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929) Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) (1997) Frank Herbert Dune (1965) Richard Adams Watership Down (1972) Jane Austen Emma (1816) John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) 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) A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908) Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862) Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide (1759) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848) Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (O Alquimista) (1988) Stephen King The Stand (1978) John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Franz Kafka The Trial (1925) Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887) Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1767) 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 11/12/2025.

The Great American Read

Updated 10/24/2018.

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From PBS.org: “The Great American Read was an eight-part series with viewer participation to select America’s favorite novel, told through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels. It investigated writers’ fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what the 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience.”

The results of the vote are posted here. You can read more about individual books by clicking on titles below or going to the original page at PBS.org.

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1. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
2. Diana Gabaldon Outlander (series, 1991-2014)
3. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007)
4. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
5. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) (1955)
6. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
7. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
8. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
9. C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956)
10. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)

11. L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
12. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
13. Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
14. Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
15. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
16. Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009)
17. Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
18. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
19. Agatha Christie And Then There Were None (1939)
20. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

21. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
22. Larry McMurty Lonesome Dove (1985)
23. Ken Follett The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
24. Stephen King The Stand (1978)
25. Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
26. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
27. Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
28. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
29. Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
30. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

31. Wilson Rawls Where the Red Fern Grows (1974)
32. S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1968)
33. Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004)
34. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
35. Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
36. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (1943)
37. Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
38. Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)
39. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
40. Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy, 2008-2010)

41. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
42. Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club (1989)
43. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
44. Lois Lowry The Giver (1994)
45. Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
46. Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
47. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
48. George R.R. Martin The Game of Thrones (series, 1996-2011)
49. Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy (series, 1951-1953)
50. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)

51. Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
52. Michael Crichton Jurassic Park (1990)
53. Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969)
54. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
55. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
56. Nicholas Sparks The Notebook (1996)
57. William P. Young The Shack (2007)
58. John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
59. Tom Clancy The Hunt for Red October (1984)
60. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)

61. Andy Weir The Martian (2011)
62. Robert Jordan Wheel of Time (series, 1990-2013)>
63. Herman Hesse Siddhartha (1922)
64. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
65. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
66. Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
67. John Knowles A Separate Peace (1959)
68. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
69. Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones (2002)
70. Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)

71. Gary Paulsen Hatchet (1987)
72. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
73. Stephenie Meyer The Twilight Saga (series, 2005-2008)
74. Armistead Maupin Tales of the City (series, 1978-2014)
75. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
76. Ernest Cline Ready Player One (2011)
77. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Left Behind (1995-2007)
78. Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012)
79. Dean Koontz The Watchers (1987)
80. John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

81. James Patterson Alex Cross Mysteries (series, 1993-2018)
82. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
83. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
84. Marilynne Robinson Gilead (2005)
85. V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic (1979)
86. E.L. James Fifty Shades (series, 2011-2012)
87. Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan (1959)
88. Frank E. Peretti This Present Darkness (1986)
89. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013)
90. James Baldwin Another Country (1962)

91. Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima (1972)
92. John Green Looking for Alaska (2005)
93. Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)
94. Robert R. McCammon Swan Song (1987)
95. Dave Hunt The Mind Invaders (1989)
96. Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)
97. Jason Reynolds Ghost (2016)
98. Sister Soujah The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
99. Colson Whitehead The Intuitionist (1999)
100. Romulo Gallegos Doña Bárbara (1929)

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50 Years Ago Today: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published

First posted 6/8/2020; updated 7/6/2020.

The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

First Publication: January 14, 1963 Category: semi-autobiographical novel Sales: ?

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: The Bell Jar was the only novel written by American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. It wasn’t published under her own name until 1967. It was originally published under the pseudonym ‘Victoria Lucas’ in 1963. WK It didn’t see publication in the United States until 1971, “in accordance with the wishes of both Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother.” WK It has since “been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The novel, though dark, is often read in high school English classes.” WK “The novel is semi-autobiographical, with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef because the protagonist’s descent into mental illness parallels Plath’s own experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder.” WK She committed suicide a month after the book’s first publication in the UK. The book is a “shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity.” BN The story “chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under – maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.” AZ Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon BN Barnes & Noble WK Wikipedia

In July 2018, I became the organizer of the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the Book Club tab here or Meetup for more information. This is our July 2020 book.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road published 50 years ago today

First posted 6/11/2020; updated 7/5/2020.

On the Road Jack Kerouac

First Publication: September 5, 1957 Category: Beat Generation semi-autobiographical novel Sales: 3 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: This is “the defining novel” LC “of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use.” WK It features “many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.” WK “On the Road has achieved a mythic status in part because it portrays the restless energy and desire for freedom that makes people take off to see the world.” LCThis “is a semiautobiographical tale of a bohemian cross-country adventure” LC between two friends on “a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.” AZ It “has influenced artists such as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Hunter S. Thompson and films such as Easy Rider.” LC “The idea for On the Road…was formed during the late 1940s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951.” WK “When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as ‘the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.” WK Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America” WK Wikipedia

In July 2018, I became the organizer of the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the Book Club tab here or Meetup for more information. This is our April 2020 book.

E.B. White Charlotte’s Web: Published 20 Years Ago Today

Last updated 7/5/2020.

Charlotte’s Web E.B. White

First Publication: October 15, 1952 Category: children’s literature Sales: 50 million

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book: In 2000, Publishers Weekly listed Charlotte’s Web “as the best-selling children’s paperback of all time.” WK “One reason may be that, although it was written for children, reading it is just as enjoyable for adults.” LC The story is “just about perfect,” AZ “a tender novel of friendship, love, life, and death that will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come.” AZ The story focuses the friendship between Wilbur, a pig, and Charlotte, “a clever and compassionate spider.” LC “When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages praising Wilbur (such as ‘Some Pig’) in her web in order to persuade the farmer to let him live.” WK The story “is especially notable for the way it treats death as a natural and inevitable part of life in a way that is palatable for young people.” LC Readers will also be entranced with “Fern, the little girl who understood their language,” BN and “saved Wilbur’s life when he was born the runt of his litter.” AZ “Templeton, the rat who never did anything for anybody unless there was something in it for him,” BN is also instrumental in Charlotte’s plan to save Wilbur. The book also “contains illustrations by Garth Williams, the acclaimed illustrator of E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series.” AZ “The forty-seven black-and-white drawings…have all the wonderful detail and warmhearted appeal that children love in his work [and are] incomparably matched to E.B. White’s marvelous story.” BN The book was made into an animated feature in 1973 and a live action film in 2006. Resources and Related Links: AZ Amazon BN Barnes & Noble LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America” WK Wikipedia