1 |
Don Quixote |
1605, 1630 |
Miguel de Cervantes |
Catholic |
2 |
War and Peace |
1869 |
Leo Tolstoy |
Russian Orthodox |
3 |
Ulysses |
1922 |
James Joyce |
Catholic (lapsed) |
4 |
In Search of Lost Time |
1913-27 |
Marcel Proust |
Jewish Catholic |
5 |
The Brothers Karamazov |
1880 |
Feodor Dostoevsky |
Russian Orthodox |
6 |
Moby-Dick |
1851 |
Herman Melville |
Transcendentalist |
7 |
Madame Bovary |
1857 |
Gustave Flaubert |
Catholic |
8 |
Middlemarch |
1871-72 |
George Eliot |
Anglican; agnostic |
9 |
The Magic Mountain |
1924 |
Thomas Mann |
Lutheran |
10 |
The Tale of Genji |
11th Century |
Murasaki Shikibu |
Buddhist/Shinto culture |
11 |
Emma |
1816 |
Jane Austen |
Anglican |
12 |
Bleak House |
1852-53 |
Charles Dickens |
Anglican |
13 |
Anna Karenina |
1877 |
Leo Tolstoy |
Russian Orthodox |
14 |
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
1884 |
Mark Twain |
Presbyterian |
15 |
Tom Jones |
1749 |
Henry Fielding |
|
16 |
Great Expectations |
1860-61 |
Charles Dickens |
Anglican |
17 |
Absalom, Absalom! |
1936 |
William Faulkner |
Presbyterian |
18 |
The Ambassadors |
1903 |
Henry James |
Anglican |
19 |
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
1967 |
Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Catholic |
20 |
The Great Gatsby |
1925 |
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Catholic |
21 |
To The Lighthouse |
1927 |
Virginia Woolf |
Neo-pagan |
22 |
Crime and Punishment |
1866 |
Feodor Dostoevsky |
Russian Orthodox |
23 |
The Sound and the Fury |
1929 |
William Faulkner |
Presbyterian |
24 |
Vanity Fair |
1847-48 |
William Makepeace Thackeray |
|
25 |
Invisible Man |
1952 |
Ralph Ellison |
|
26 |
Finnegans Wake |
1939 |
James Joyce |
Catholic (lapsed) |
27 |
The Man Without Qualities |
1930-43 |
Robert Musil |
Catholic |
28 |
Gravity’s Rainbow |
1973 |
Thomas Pynchon |
Catholic; agnostic |
29 |
The Portrait of a Lady |
1881 |
Henry James |
Anglican |
30 |
Women in Love |
1920 |
D. H. Lawrence |
|
31 |
The Red and the Black |
1830 |
Stendhal |
Catholic |
32 |
Tristram Shandy |
1760-67 |
Laurence Sterne |
Anglican (Church of Ireland clergyman) |
33 |
Dead Souls |
1842 |
Nikolai Gogol |
Russian Orthodox |
34 |
Tess of the D’Urbervilles |
1891 |
Thomas Hardy |
|
35 |
Buddenbrooks |
1901 |
Thomas Mann |
Lutheran |
36 |
Le Pere Goriot |
1835 |
Honore de Balzac |
Catholic |
37 |
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
1916 |
James Joyce |
Catholic (lapsed) |
38 |
Wuthering Heights |
1847 |
Emily Bronte |
Anglican |
39 |
The Tin Drum |
1959 |
Gunter Grass |
Catholic |
40 |
Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable |
1951-53 |
Samuel Beckett |
Church of Ireland (Anglican) |
41 |
Pride and Prejudice |
1813 |
Jane Austen |
Anglican |
42 |
The Scarlet Letter |
1850 |
Nathaniel Hawthorne |
Transcendentalist |
43 |
Fathers and Sons |
1862 |
Ivan Turgenev |
Russian Orthodox; agnostic |
44 |
Nostromo |
1904 |
Joseph Conrad |
Catholic; atheist |
45 |
Beloved |
1987 |
Toni Morrison |
|
46 |
An American Tragedy |
1925 |
Theodore Dreiser |
Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science |
47 |
Lolita |
1955 |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Russian Orthodox |
48 |
The Golden Notebook |
1962 |
Doris Lessing |
|
49 |
Clarissa |
1747-48 |
Samuel Richardson |
|
50 |
Dream of the Red Chamber |
1791 |
Cao Xueqin |
|
51 |
The Trial |
1925 |
Franz Kafka |
Jewish |
52 |
Jane Eyre |
1847 |
Charlotte Bronte |
Anglican |
53 |
The Red Badge of Courage |
1895 |
Stephen Crane |
Methodist |
54 |
The Grapes of Wrath |
1939 |
John Steinbeck |
Episcopalian |
55 |
Petersburg |
1916/1922 |
Andrey Bely |
Russian Orthodox; Theosophy; Spiritualism |
56 |
Things Fall Apart |
1958 |
Chinue Achebe |
|
57 |
The Princess of Cleves |
1678 |
Madame de Lafayette |
|
58 |
The Stranger |
1942 |
Albert Camus |
Catholic; Existentialism |
59 |
My Antonia |
1918 |
Willa Cather |
Episcopalian |
60 |
The Counterfeiters |
1926 |
Andre Gide |
|
61 |
The Age of Innocence |
1920 |
Edith Wharton |
|
62 |
The Good Soldier |
1915 |
Ford Madox Ford |
Catholic; agnostic |
63 |
The Awakening |
1899 |
Kate Chopin |
Catholic |
64 |
A Passage to India |
1924 |
E. M. Forster |
|
65 |
Herzog |
1964 |
Saul Bellow |
Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist |
66 |
Germinal |
1855 |
Emile Zola |
Catholic |
67 |
Call It Sleep |
1934 |
Henry Roth |
Jewish |
68 |
U.S.A. Trilogy |
1930-38 |
John Dos Passos |
Catholic |
69 |
Hunger |
1890 |
Knut Hamsun |
|
70 |
Berlin Alexanderplatz |
1929 |
Alfred Doblin |
Catholic |
71 |
Cities of Salt |
1984-89 |
‘Abd al-Rahman Munif |
|
72 |
The Death of Artemio Cruz |
1962 |
Carlos Fuentes |
Catholic |
73 |
A Farewell to Arms |
1929 |
Ernest Hemingway |
Catholic |
74 |
Brideshead Revisited |
1945 |
Evelyn Waugh |
Catholic |
75 |
The Last Chronicle of Barset |
1866-67 |
Anthony Trollope |
Anglican |
76 |
The Pickwick Papers |
1836-67 |
Charles Dickens |
Anglican |
77 |
Robinson Crusoe |
1719 |
Daniel Defoe |
Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian) |
78 |
The Sorrows of Young Werther |
1774 |
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
Deist |
79 |
Candide |
1759 |
Voltaire |
raised in Jansenism; later Deist |
80 |
Native Son |
1940 |
Richard Wright |
Seventh-day Adventist; Communist |
81 |
Under the Volcano |
1947 |
Malcolm Lowry |
Methodist; Anglican; agnostic |
82 |
Oblomov |
1859 |
Ivan Goncharov |
|
83 |
Their Eyes Were Watching God |
1937 |
Zora Neale Hurston |
|
84 |
Waverley |
1814 |
Sir Walter Scott |
Anglican |
85 |
Snow Country |
1937, 1948 |
Kawabata Yasunari |
|
86 |
Nineteen Eighty-Four |
1949 |
George Orwell |
Anglican |
87 |
The Betrothed |
1827, 1840 |
Alessandro Manzoni |
Catholic |
88 |
The Last of the Mohicans |
1826 |
James Fenimore Cooper |
Episcopalian |
89 |
Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
1852 |
Harriet Beecher Stowe |
Episcopalian; Congregationalist |
90 |
Les Miserables |
1862 |
Victor Hugo |
Catholic |
91 |
On the Road |
1957 |
Jack Kerouac |
Catholic; Buddhism |
92 |
Frankenstein |
1818 |
Mary Shelley |
|
93 |
The Leopard |
1958 |
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa |
Catholic |
94 |
The Catcher in the Rye |
1951 |
J.D. Salinger |
Jewish Catholic; Scientologist |
95 |
The Woman in White |
1860 |
Wilkie Collins |
|
96 |
The Good Soldier Svejk |
1921-23 |
Jaroslav Hasek |
Catholic |
97 |
Dracula |
1897 |
Bram Stoker |
Church of Ireland (Anglican) |
98 |
The Three Musketeers |
1844 |
Alexandre Dumas |
agnostic; Catholic |
99 |
The Hound of Baskervilles |
1902 |
Arthur Conan Doyle |
Catholic; Spiritualist |
100 |
Gone with the Wind |
1936 |
Margaret Mitchell |
Catholic |
Published by Remy
Married to the Flowerpetal-eater
Father to five rolling and rambunctious boys.
I spend my time teaching the runes.
View all posts by Remy
oh yeah? says who?
I am a bit confused. Did you read all these books this year?
The list is from Daniel S. Burt’s “Novel 100”. He made the list as a starting point to discuss the best literature ever written.
No, I haven’t read all of these books. I’ve read a little over a quarter of this list.