Favorite 100 Novels

I've been meaning to post this for a while. Years ago I got together with a group of friends to argue over a top 50 novels. It was a great exercise, full of impassioned defenses of various books, authors, and even approaches to literature. I got a lot of recommendations out of it and it started me thinking about which works gave me a thoroughly enjoyable read, changed me as a person, taught me something new, provided a fresh perspective, challenged my intellect, taxed my emotions, tickled my odd sense of humor, confronted or confirmed my opinions, and served as fuel for further discussions.

Years have passed. I've read a lot more books. I've had a lot more discussions about them. Some of my tastes have changed, others remain the same. Many I still haven't had the time to reread and reevaluate. But more than ever, I still love literature and value it.

I finally sat down and created this list alone and without overthinking it (I failed). I didn't try to do "best," "most influential," "most representative" or anything like that. I don't make any claim beyond that these are my favorites at this point in my life.

A lot of my biases are on display, based on what I've been exposed to (more white male English-language writers than a truly well-read person would have) and what I like (science-fiction and 20th century international classics). A few favorite authors didn't make the cut: William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen, Christopher Priest, Franz Kafka. Other big names are absent on purpose: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur C Clarke, D.H. Lawrence. There will always be more worthwhile books than can fit on a top 100 list.

Anyway, enjoy! And share a few of your favorites back at me if you get a chance.

And now, in chronological order with a limit of one book per author:

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1767, UK) Comedy
• Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1782, France) Romance
• Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac (1835, France) 
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (1846, France) Adventure
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851, US) Adventure
• Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens (1853, UK) 
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862, France) 
• Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (1865, UK) Fantasy
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872, UK) Romance
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877, Russia) Romance
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880, Russia) Crime
• Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881, UK) Romance
• Germinal by Emile Zola (1885, France) 
• Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902, UK) Crime
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (1904, UK) Adventure
• Howards End by E.M. Forster (1910, UK) 
• The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915, UK) 
• The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (1918, US) War
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920, US) Romance
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920, US) 
• The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (1921, UK) 
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, UK)  
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B Traven (1927, Germany) Adventure
• Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin (1929, Germany) Crime
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929, US) Crime
• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929, UK) Adventure
• Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald (1934, US) Romance
• The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (1934, Poland) Magical Realism
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936, US) Romance
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940, Australia) 
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (1940, Ireland) Fantasy
• Embers by Sandor Marai (1942, Hungary) 
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945, UK) 
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946, US) 
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947, Canada) 
• 1984 by George Orwell (1949, UK) SF
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951, US) 
• The Hive by Camilo Jose Cela (1951, Spain) 
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951, Belgium) 
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952, US) Southern Gothic
• I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch (1954, Switzerland) Crime
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955, UK) Crime
• Voss by Patrick White (1957, Australia) Adventure
• Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet (1957, France)  
• Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Boll (1959, Germany) 
• The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (1959, Germany) Magical Realism
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961, US) War
• The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes (1961, Mexico) 
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962, US)  
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1962, US) 
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962, UK)  
• Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (1962, Japan) 
• Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (1963, Argentina)  
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre (1963, UK) Crime
• Dune by Frank Herbert (1965, US) SF
• The Magus by John Fowles (1965, UK) Adventure
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967, Colombia) Magical Realism
• Ubik by Philip K Dick (1969, US) SF
• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1971, US) Romance
• Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro (1971, Canada) 
• The Summer Book by Tove Jannson (1972, Finland)
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973, US) War
• Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai (1977, Israel) 
• If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler… by Italo Calvino (1979, Italy) Magical Realism
• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979, UK) 
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1980, US) SF
• Housekeeping by Marlynne Robinson (1980, US) 
• So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (1980, US) 
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981, UK) Magical Realism
• Startide Rising by David Brin (1984, US) SF
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1984, Czech Republic) Romance
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985, US) Adventure
• White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985, US) Comedy
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987, US) Magical Realism
• The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987, US) SF
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988, Australia) Romance
• The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (1989, Hungary) 
• Wise Children by Angela Carter (1991, UK) 
• The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie by Agota Kristof (1991, Hungary) War
• A Heart So White by Javier Marias (1992, Spain) Romance
• Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993, US) SF
• Permutation City by Greg Egan (1994, Australia) SF
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995, UK) Fantasy
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996, US) SF
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1996, US) SF
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997, US) 
• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999, South Africa) 
• Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla (2000, Mexico) War
• A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2000, US) SF
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000, Canada) Romance
• Under the Skin by Michel Faber (2000, UK) SF
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000, US)
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001, US) 
• Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001, Germany)
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001, US) Fantasy
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001, UK) War
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004, UK) SF
• Fun Home and Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel (2006, US)
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009, UK)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010, US)