Image by ups2006 via FlickrThis is a list of (arguably, of course) the 100 greatest novels in Western Literature. Quite arguable, because HELLO, where is the Roald Dahl? Actually, Dahl's a little creepy... Where is Chopin's The Awakening? Yams, I mean, Things Fall Apart didn't even make this list (thought it made several others, including Collegeboard.com). I had an excellent literary education up to age 19. I received a 4 on the AP Composition and a 5 on the AP Literature tests in high school. Yes, I'm bragging, but you know what? Those are NOT pieces of literary cake, IMHO! These scores granted me college English credits and gave me a "pass" on all college English classes. So I never took Lit classes in college. At all. :-( This is when, for a while, I stopped reading for pleasure and started reading for survival in the LVC Music program. By the end of Sophomore year I got my head above water and picked up a book that wasn't from the college store once again. This non-coincidentally transpired just as Aural Theory classes were done for Music Ed. majors. Nothing, ever again, by The Evil Ottman. So then there's adult literary life: I won't go into what children do to your free time - I don't want to discourage nieces and nephews and friends' babies to keep a-comin'. But really, I'm just making excuses for the pitiful few books on this list that I've had the pleasure of visiting. Except Tess of the D'Ubervilles. That was just painful. And Hey! Speaking of painful, where the heck is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? I'm blushing over here, as I reveal to the world that I'm actually a Rand, Tolstoy, and yes, Dickens virgin. *hangs head* Of course, I've read other stuff, including just about everything Philippa Gregory ever wrote, and several Star Trek/Wars "novels". But this list? 22. That's all I've got. Saaaaad. Put the other 88 on my To-Do list.
- How about you? How many could you embolden on this list? Titles I've read are in bold.
- Anything missing, in your opinion?
1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
12. Animal Farm by George Orwell
13. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
14. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
15. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
16. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
18. Ulysses by James Joyce
19. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
20. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
21. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
22. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
23. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
25. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
26. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
27. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
28. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
29. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
30. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
31. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
32. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
33. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
34. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
35. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
36. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
37. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
38. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
39. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
40. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
41. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
43. The Stranger by Albert Camus
44. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
45. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
46. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
47. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
50. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
51. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
52. Watership Down by Richard Adams
53. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
54. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
55. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
56. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
57. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
58. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
59. Middlemarch by George Eliot
60. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
62. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
63. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
64. The Stand by Stephen King
65. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
66. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
67. Dracula by Bram Stoker
68. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
69. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
70. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
71. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
72. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
73. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
74. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
75. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
76. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
77. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
78. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
79. Dune by Frank Herbert
80. The Trial by Franz Kafka
81. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
82. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
83. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
84. The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas
85. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
86. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
87. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
88. Persuasion by Jane Austen
89. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
90. Atonement by Ian McEwan
91. Emma by Jane Austen
92. Beloved by Toni Morrison
93. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
94. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
95. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
96. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
97. Light in August by William Faulkner
98. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
99. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
100. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9 comments:
Don't fret, Meg. If you're a good, involved parent, as I know you will be, when your daughters are in high school, they will be forced, I mean made, I mean strongly encouraged to read a lot of these books and you will read them too. I "got to" catch up on a lot of the books I had missed when my kids were in high school. Sadly, I hated more of them then I liked, or even loved.
And where is the Little House series on this list? It was my life as a child, followed by Nancy Drew as a tween....
Where'd you get this list? It's seriously suspect if it has Ayn Rand on there not once, but twice. I would agree that she has been influential (too influential on the neocon side) but that does not make her books great works of literature.
I highly recommend Dickens' Hard Times. I think it's much better than his others and it's an engrossing read.
I think you'll love all the books in the Hitchhiker's series and the LOTR series.
And Jane Eyre is fantastic, one of my faves.
But there are so many things on this list that are questionable. The Stand? Great book, yes. Great literature? Probably not.
Anyway, read what you want to read. There's no way everyone is going to read every book ever written. So, enjoy yourself!
hrm
Oh, and, where's Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Edith Wharton, just to name a few more?
Sorry for the rant. These kind of "definitive" bug me!!
h.
*lists
sorry. ;)
29 books. But some of these books I've never HEARD of, much less read. And some, I'll never read. And SO MANY great books/authors not on here! L.I. Wilder? Jack London? Madeleine L'Engle? "Their Eyes Were Watching God", by Zora Hurston? And son and so on! Stupid list!
Love, Mom :-)
Let's make our OWN list! Who's in? (Though I totally agree with Heidi. If I only read 'great literature' I would have totally missed out on the "Karen" series by her mother, Marie Killilea. Funny, moving books that rocked my safe little world and gave me great appreciation for people who are different.)
Hey, maybe it's just a matter of time--and the desire to read some things everyone says are brilliant and you are bored to pieces in the first 50 pages and quit. Anyway--being quite a bit older, I've read 45 of these; and you are correct: some of these on the list do not even come close to the top 500. Mom
I know what you mean about Les Mis. He spent several pages describing a door. The whole back story about Thenardier went on for 50 pages.
Then there are the graphic novels that deserve notice as well. Watchmen,Dark Knight Returns, etc.
I've heard David Foster Wallace should be there.
Confederacy of Dunces was a delight.
I read some of those classics in high school but you know I never truly understood the deeper meaning of many of them. I'd sit there and envy others who "got it" and then after class I'd go back and read the chapters again and wonder what the heck they were seeing that I wasn't.
So now I stick to easy stuff like James Patterson thrillers and Jodi Picoult page-turners.
Your kids will develop your passion for reading even if you're just reading Dr Suess to them!! Don't feel guilty...they'll have to read all the classics in school at some point!
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