Mark Tiedemann's List of 100 Novels

Bold the ones you have read, and italicize the ones you started and didn't finish.

Mark's 100 Novels Everyone Should Read


.by Mark W. Tiedemann on Monday, 29 November 2010 at 09:51.Given the proliferation of the BBC meme about 100 "classic" novels everyone should read, someone challenged me to back up my claim that I could do an equally good, possibly more valid, list. So...same rules apply. And if there are any duplications from the BBC list, forgive me, but some books really do belong on any such list. A couple of these are collections, not novels, but some things ought not be missed anyway. Some folks may be surprised at how little science fiction is on this list, but we're talking about classics. I could do a separate list of 100 classic SF novels with hardly any more effort than this. Finally, this is not exhaustive. The idea that a compendium of books "everyone should read" can be summed up by a mere 100 is absurd, but these kinds of things serve best by getting people talking about what's left off, what should be there, and why what's there is there. So with such caveats in mind, here you are.

1: The Commedia by Dante
2: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
3: Sketchbook by Washington Irving
4: Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
5: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
6: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
7: The Crisis by Winston Churchill
8: Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
9: Bleak House by Charles Dickens
10: Tristam Shandy by Laurence Stern
11: Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
12: Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
13: Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
14: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
16: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
17: Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
18: The Awakening by Kate Chopin
19: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
20: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
21: The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
22: Evelina by Fanny Burney
23: Candide by Voltaire
24: Emile by Rousseau
25: The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
26: Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
27: Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
28: Middlemarch by George Eliot
29: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
30: The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper
31: Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
32: The Octopus by Frank Norris
33: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
34: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
35: The War of the worlds by H. G. Wells36: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
37: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
38: Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini
39: The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
40: The Castle by Franz Kafka
41: The Trial by Franz Kafka
42: The Thieve's Journal by Jean Genet
43: Turn of the Screw by Henry James
44: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
45: U.S.A. by John Dos Passos
46: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
47: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
48: The Stranger by Albert Camus
49: Lord Jim by Jospeph Conrad
50: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
51: The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham
52: I, Claudius by Robert Graves
53: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
54: Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
55: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
56: 1984 by George Orwell
57: Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
58: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
60: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
61: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
62: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
63: One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
64: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
65: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
66: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
67: A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
68: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
69: The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
70: Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
71: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
72: O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather
73: Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
74: From Here To Eternity by James Jones
75: V. by Thomas Pynchon
76: The Recognitions by William Gaddis
77: A Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
78: Woman At The Edge of Time Marge Peircy
79: The Female Man by Joanna Russ
80: Possession by A.S. Byatt
81: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
82: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
83: An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
84: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
85: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
86: Nova by Samuel R. Delany
87: No Enemy But Time by Michael Bishop
88: Aegypt by John Crowley
89: The Translator by John Crowley
90: Floating Worlds by Cecilia Holland
91: Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
92: Neuromancer by William Gibson
93: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
94: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
95: Underworld by Don DeLillo
96: Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
97: Perfume by Patrick Susskind
98: Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner
99: A Case of Conscience by James Blish
100: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

...And yes, I know, as does the author of the list, that there is no 59.