100 Best Books

Cafe Society
1

Okay, so it’s been done before, but not my me.

Deciding that since I am retired, and now have the time, I should improve myself by reading, “The Better Books” I embarked on a search through the world wide web for the best 100 books ever written.

Not suprisingly there were some differences of opinion. So I located 16 different lists and copied them to a file, did a quick sort and came up with the list below as the concensus top 100. The order is a little rough because of the numerous ties, but the top 12-15 were hands down above the rest.

So, in your many and varied opinions, who have I left out?
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Catcher In The Rye J. D. Salinger
Catch 22 Joseph Heller
Ulysses James Joyce
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
1984 George Orwell
The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck
On The Road Jack Kerouac
To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Brave New World Aldous Huxley
The Sound And The Fury William Faulkner
Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
Lord Of The Flies William Golding
Heart Of Darkness Joseph Conrad
A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess
The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
Beloved Toni Morrison
Animal Farm George Orwell
A Passage To India E. M. Forster
USA John Dos Passos
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man And The Sea Ernest Hemingway
The Naked And The Dead Norman Mailer
Slaughter House Five Kurt Vonnegut
Native Son Richard Wright
Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
Women In Love D. H. Lawrence
The Wind In The Willows Kenneth Grahame
The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe C. S. Lewis
The Golden Notebook Doris M. Lessing
The Color Purple Alice Walker
The Call Of The Wild Jack London
The Age Of Innocense Edith Wharton
Sons And Lovers D. H. Lawrence
Portnoy’s Complaint Philip Roth
Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov
Of Mice And Men John Steinbeck
Finnigan’s Wake James Joyce
All The King’s Men Robert Penn Warren
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man James Joyce
A Farewell To Arms Ernest Hemingway
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor
Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson
Wide Saragasso Sea Jean Rhys
Waiting For Godot Samuel Beckett
Under The Volcano Malcom Lowry
Tropic Of Cancer Henry Miller
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett
The Day Of The Locust Nathanael West
The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Sophia’s Choice William Styron
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey
Moby Dick Herman Melville
Metamorphoses Franz Kafka
I, Claudius Robert Graves
Dune Frank Herbert
Don Quixote Miquel de Cervantes
Death Comes For The Archbishop Willa Cather
Darkness At Noon Arthur Koestler
As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
A Room With A View E. M. Forster
Winnie The Pooh A. A. Milne
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz L. Frank Baum
The Stranger Albert Camus
The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles
The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
The Movie Goer Walker Percy
The Heart Of The Matter Joseph Conrad
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
The Golden Bowl Henry James
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Molloy Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
Madame Bovary Gustaye Flaubert
Lord Jim Joseph Conrad
Howard’s End E. M. Forster
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
Go Tell It On The Mountain James Baldwin
From Here To Eternity James Jones
Charoltte’s Web E. B. White
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
Absalom, Absalom William Faulkner
A House For Mr. Biswas V. S. Naipaul
A Bend In The River V. S. Naipaul
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Diary Of Ann Frank Ann Frank
All Quiet On The Western Front Erich Maria Remarque
And now off to Lions Club.

2

PISS, SHIT, FUCK, RAPE IN THE BUTT!!! I spent 10 minutes putting nice even spaces between the titles and authors and what happens.

3

Sorry to do this but HA HA HA HA HA!!! ROFL.

Another victim of the removal of multiple spaces.
I’d add “His Dark Materials” to your list.

4

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

5

well, i like
High Society By Ben Elton
Gossip Girl By Cecily Von Ziegesar
Go Ask Alice By Anonymous
i find them pretty interesting, but i guess you’d have to find out for yourself…

6

Foundation Series by Issac Asimov
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Little Prince by Antoine Saint de Exupery

7

I second ice1000’s nomination of The Jungle, half novel, half socialist political tract, all excellent.

It’s not quite clear to me whether you really just want novels, but i would also add an autobiography:

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.

And, as someone raised in Australia, i’ll also put in a plug for a few of my compatriots.

Xavier Herbert, especially Capricornia and Poor Fellow, My Country.

Authors Patrick White and Peter Carey have both done great stuff.

And, continuing with a couple more autobiographies:

Jill Kerr Conway, The Road from Coorain.
Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus.

8

Moving This Thread To Cafe Society, by Czarcasm

9

The Guns of Krupp by Wm. Manchester (and also his WWII autobiography)

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Modern Times by Paul Johnson

When the Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away by Eric Newby

Gaaahhh! There’s too many, and it’s late (I’m not retired).

I did read l’Étranger several times. But that must have been somebody else, I guess, as I only remember it.

10

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

11

Seriously, though, your list is weighted something awful to modern writers. What about Shakespeare? Or are you considering his works to be plays, and therefore not on your list? On second glance, you’ve listed Waiting for Godot, so drama must be okay with you. Then you’d have to add about seven of Shakespeare’s plays, two of Marlowe’s, and at least one of Ben Jonson’s. Even if you were excluding plays, I think you’re overlooking what may be the best poem ever written, in Paradise Lost. Or are you only looking for prose novels? If so, you should probably take Pale Fire off of your list and add some of the great books you’ve missed, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Tolstoy and The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot by Dostoevsky. I know you can’t be limited to things written originally in English, because you have Kafka and Camus on there.

Really, the more I think about it, the more I think you need to refine your search. Is anyone really going to stand up and say that Beloved is a better or more important work than The Divine Comedy? And that’s not even including such seminal works as The Canterbury Tales or The Oresteia. I didn’t even see any Dickens on there, which, considering the time frame from which most of your works were taken, should be an indispensible part of your reading. Your list is definitely American-heavy and biased toward modern writers.

12

Doh! Just saw Anna Karenina and Great Expectations. Sorry.
Though I would say that Bleak House should be there before Pip and that whore Estella…

13

Naked Lunch** ** ** ** ** ** by William S. Burroughs
crime and punishment

couldn’t the WORLD wide web contribute to a more worldly list?
isn’t it a bit eurocentric (or at least western)? and overrepresented by the modern? just a thought.

ergo:

The Tale of Genji ** ** ** ** ** ** by Murasaki Shikibu
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Yukio Mishima
No longer human by Osamu Dazai

14

I’ve read several of your suggestions. I guess I am surprised that “The Jungle” didn’t make the list. A great book, but on all the lists I found (with no effort to make it truly a WORLD wide search) it got only one mention.

“Johnny Got His Gun” also another favorite of mine likewise got only one vote.

Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” was a shocker to me. I’ll be reading it in the next couple or three weeks.

You know A wizard song for thee (GREAT name by the way) I just don’t like Shakespeare, thusly don’t miss him a bit. Various plays of his got mentions but none got more than 2.

Yeah Ringo it’s great. The only downside is being significantly closer to death.

15

No Pratchett? Throw in Good Omens or Small Gods.

16

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

and for Vonnegut, I would suggest that Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions are every bit as good as Slaughterhouse Five.

All my other favourite books are on there already.

Oh, and start with Metamorphosis by Kafka - it’s only fifty pages long.

Thanks for the list !

17

Am I just not seeing where you’ve put your choice of Jane Austen novel? That omission seems incredible.

Something by Sir Walter Scott? “Ivanhoe” perhaps?

“The Three Musketeers” by Alexandre Dumas was an excellent book, and might provide some light relief from some of your more downbeat choices (“As I Lay Dying” for instance).

Possibly it might be an idea to include a Martin Amis novel - I think “Money” is his best.

18

Yeah, way too much modern crap and not enough 18th- and 19th-century writers.

I haaaaate these “best books,” “best movies,” “best music” lists. It is all completely subjective. Your “best book” may be my doorstop, and vice versa.

19

Eve

Of course it’s subjective Eve. That’s why we have things like judgement and do strange things like make choices based on personal preferences. Personally I think a bunch of the books on the list are real yawners. A good example being “Nostromo” by Conrad which I am currently wading through. Another reader will soon be along to inform me that I’m a total Neanderthal, at best a limpingly functioning semi-literate (insert your personal favorites here) for not seeing the moving beauty in Conrads vision of the human soul.

Yawners or not my plan is to get through them. I may have to hie on down to Barnes & Nobles and drink coffee and read their “Cliff’s Notes” to find out what I just read, 'cause in the case of Conrad it ain’t coming through loud and clear - so far.
** Duncan **

Just checked the master list and Jane Austen’s “Emma” got two mentions. “Pride and Prejudice” had 3. Two others had one each.

20

And just why should you get through them? Seriously. For every book on that list I’ve read, there was another one I started and couldn’t finish. Instead I found another book that I liked more and finished that one. You read for yourself rather than for a Canon that no one else in the world cares about.