My Top 100 Novels

I remember around the year 2000 everyone was making best 100 novel lists. It took me a bit longer to round out my reading and catch up on a few more obscure classics, but I can now say I have read 100 "great" novels. I would only call the top 25 or so masterpieces - then again I am a bally tough critic!

  1. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  2. Tess of the d'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
  3. Kristen Lavransdatter - Sigrid Undset
  4. World Light - Halldór Laxness
  5. Waverly - Sir Walter Scott
  6. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
  7. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
  8. The Life Before Her Eyes - Laura Kasischke
  9. Journey to the End of Night - Louis Ferdinand Céline
  10. A Time to Love and a Time to Die - Erich Maria Remarque
  11. Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
  12. Nana - Emile Zola
  13. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
  14. The Van - Roddy Doyle
  15. Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
  16. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
  17. A Soldier of the Great War - Mark Helprin
  18. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
  19. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
  20. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  21. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  22. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
  23. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
  24. Emma - Jane Austen
  25. Middlemarch - George Elliot
  26. The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse - Vincente Blasco Ibńez
  27. I'll Never Be Young Again - Daphne du Maurier
  28. Death on the Installment Plan - Louis Ferdinand Céline
  29. Giants in the Earth - O.E. Rolvaag
  30. My Ántonia - Willa Cather
  31. Pale Horse, Pale Rider - Katherine Anne Porter
  32. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  33. The Brothers Karamazov - Fydor Dostoyevsky
  34. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
  35. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
  36. The Scarlet Letter - Nathanial Hawthorne
  37. Columba - Prosper Mérimée
  38. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
  39. The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley
  40. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
  41. Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa
  42. House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
  43. The Chouans - Honoré de Balzac
  44. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
  45. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
  46. Kim - Rudyard Kipling
  47. Pan - Knut Hamsun
  48. A Man of Property - John Gallsworthy
  49. Independent People - Halldór Laxness
  50. The Autobiography of Henry VIII - Margaret George
  51. The Storyteller - Mario Vargas Llosa
  52. Pamela - Samuel Richardson
  53. Catch-22 - Joesph Heller
  54. Three Men in a Boat - Jeromke K. Jerome
  55. Crime and Punishment - Fydor Dostoyevsky
  56. Three Soldiers - John Dos Passos
  57. The Stranger - Albert Camus
  58. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  59. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  60. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
  61. In a Dark Wood Wandering - Hella Haase
  62. The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
  63. Early Candlelight - Maude Hart Lovelace
  64. Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreisser
  65. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  66. O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
  67. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  68. Couples - John Updike
  69. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
  70. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
  71. The Mayor of Castebridge - Thomas Hardy
  72. Absalom! Absalom! - William Faulkner
  73. Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
  74. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
  75. The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
  76. Under the Greenwood Tree - Thomas Hardy
  77. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
  78. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
  79. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
  80. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
  81. The Ring of the Löwenskölds - Selma Lagerlöf
  82. The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kozantzakis
  83. Pet Sematary - Stephen King
  84. The Snapper - Roddy Doyle
  85. The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  86. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  87. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salanger
  88. With Fire and Sword - Henryk Sienkiewicz
  89. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
  90. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
  91. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
  92. A Passage to India - E. M. Forester
  93. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  94. The Windup Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami
  95. Heritage of the Kurts - Björnstjerne Björnson
  96. The Crystal Cave - Mary Stewart
  97. Madame Therese - Emile Erckmann and Louis Alexander Chatrain
  98. Jack's Boys - Michael Ramberg
  99. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
  100. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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