The Greatest Books Of All Time

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all. ~Henry David Thoreau



I compiled a list of my version of the greatest books of all time. Most of them are from various websites including Guardian Unlimited Books and Amazon. I have added my own ideas as well. I included books that were consistantly cited as great works, books that have become a part of culture and books that tend to show up in Cliff Notes! It is by no means complete so keep checking back for new additions and feel free to e-mail me with your ideas too. I admit that I have read less then half so I have decided to challenge myself! I am attempting to read at least half while I'm in school. I'll keep you posted! I hope that this list inspires others to do the same! The books are arranged alphabetically by author's name.

  • Achebe, Chinua
    Things Fall Apart
  • Adams, Douglas
    A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  • Adams, Richard
    Watership Down
  • Aeschylus
    Prometheus Bound
  • Alcott, Louisa May
    Little Women
  • Allison, Dorothy
    Bastard Out of Carolina
  • Alvarez, Julia
    In the Time of Butterflies
  • Alighieri, Dante
    The Divine Comedy
  • Amis, Martin
    The Rachel Papers
  • Amis, Kingsley
    Lucky Jim
  • Anderson, Hans Christian
    Fairy Tales and Stories
  • Maya Angelou
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  • Atwood, Margaret
    Cat's Eye
  • Austen, Jane
  • Beryl Bainbridge
    The Bottle Factory Outing
  • Baldwin, James
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
  • Balzac, Honre de
    Old Goriot
  • Toni Cade Bambara
    Gorilla, My Love
  • Banks, Iain
    The Wasp Factory
  • Djuna Barnes
    Nightwood
  • Pat Barker
    Regeneration
  • Baum, Frank L.
    The Wizard of Oz
  • Beardsley, Aubrey
    Salome
  • Beckett, Samuel
    Molloy
    Malone Dies
    The Unnamable
  • Bellow, Saul
    Henderson the Rain King
  • Bernieres, Louis de
    Captain Corelli's Mandolin
  • Bloom, Harold
    Transvaal Episode
  • Boccaccio, Giovanni
    Decameron
  • Borges, Jorge Luis
    Collected Fictions
  • Bradbury, Ray
    Fahrenheit 451
  • Brittain, Vera
    Testament of Youth
  • Bronte, Charlotte
    Jane Eyre
  • Bronte, Emily
    Wuthering Heights
  • Anita Brookner
    Hotel Du Lac
  • Rita Mae Brown
    Rubyfruit Jungle
  • Pearl S. Buck
    The Good Earth
  • Bulgakov, Mikhail
    The Master and Margarita
  • Bunyan, John
    The Pilgrim's Progress
  • Burgess, Anthony
    A Clockwork Orange
    Earthly Powers
  • Burroughs, William S.
    Naked Lunch
  • Butler, Octavia
    Parable of the Sower
  • Butler, Samuel
    The Way of All Flesh
  • A. S. Byatt
    Possession
  • Camus, Albert
    The Outsider
    The Stranger
  • Capote, Truman
    In Cold Blood
  • Angela Carter
    Nights At the Circus
  • Ana Castillo
    So Far From God
  • Cather, Willa
    O Pioneers!
    My Antonia
    Death Comes for the Archbishop
  • Celan, Paul
    Poems
  • Celine, Louis-Ferdinand
    Journey to the End of the Night
  • Cervantes, Miguel de
    Don Quixote
  • Chang, Jung
    Wild Swans
  • Chaucer, Geoffrey
    The Canterbury Tales
  • Chekhov, Anton P.
    The Cherry Orchard
    Selected Stories
  • Chevalier, Tracy
    The Girl with the Pearl Earring
  • Chopin, Kate
    The Awakening
  • Cisneros, Sandra
    The House on Mango Street
  • Clarke, Arthur C.
    2001 - A Space Odyssey
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  • Colette
    The Complete Claudine
  • Ivy Compton-Burnett
    Elders and Betters
  • Conrad, Joseph
    Nostromo
    Lord Jim
    Heart of Darkness
    The Secret Agent
  • Cooper, James Fenimore
    The Last of the Mohicans
  • Crichton, Michael
    Jurassic Park
  • Dahl, Roald
    The BFG
    James and the Giant Peach
    Matilda
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • Darwin, Charles
    The Origin of Species
  • Dawkins, Richard
    The Selfish Gene
  • Defoe, Daniel
    Robinson Crusoe
    Moll Flanders
  • Delillo, Don
    White Noise
  • Anita Desal
    Clear Light of Day
  • Descartes, Rene
    Meditations
  • Dewey, John
    How We Think
  • Dickens, Charles
    David Copperfield
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Great Expectations
  • Diderot, Denis
    Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
  • Isak Dinesan
    Out of Africa
  • Doblin, Alfred
    Berlin Alexanderplatz
  • Doctorow, E.L.
    Ragtime
  • Harriet Doerr
    Stone for Ibarra
  • Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    The Idiot
    The Possessed
    Crime and Punishment
  • Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
    The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries
  • Doyle, Roddy
    Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
    The Van
  • Margaret Drabble
    The Radiant Way
  • Dreiser, Theodore
    An American Tragedy
    Sister Carrie
  • Dumas, Alexandre
    Queen Margot
  • Durrell, Lawrence
    The Alexandria Quartet
  • Eco, Umberto
    The Name of the Rose
  • Eliot, George
    Middlemarch
    Silas Marner
  • Ellis, Bret Easton
    American Psycho
  • Ellison, Ralph
    Invisible Man
  • Emecheta, Buchi
    Bride Price
    Second Class Citizen
  • Emerson, Ralph Waldo
    Nature
    Self-Reliance
  • Louise Erdrich
    Tracks
  • Esquivel, Laura
    Like Water For Chocolate
  • Euripides
    Medea
  • Evans, Nicholas
    The Horse Whisperer
  • Faulkner, William
    As I Lay Dying
    Light In August
    Absalom, Absalom!
    The Sound and the Fury
  • Faulks, Sebastian
    Birdsong
  • Fielding, Henry
    Tom Jones
  • Fils, Alexandre Dumas
    Camille
  • Fitzgerald, F. Scott
    The Great Gatsby
    The Beautiful and the Damned
    This Side of Paradise
    Tender is the Night
  • Penelope Fitzgerald
    At Freddie's
  • Fannie Flagg
    Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
  • Flaubert, Gustave
    A Sentimental Education
    Madame Bovary
  • Janet Frame
    Owls Do Cry
  • Marilyn French
    The Woman's Room
  • Ford, Madox
    The Good Soldier
  • Forster, E.M.
    A Room With A View
    A Passage to India
    Howard's End
    Where Angels Fear to Tread
  • Fowles, John
    The French Lieutenant's Woman
  • Fowles, John
    The Magus
  • Frank, Anne
    The Diary of Anne Frank
  • Frazier, Charles
    Cold Mountain
  • Gaarder, Jostein
    Sophie's World
  • Gardner, John
  • Rebecca Goldstein
    The Mind-Body Problem
  • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
    The Tragedy of Faust
  • Gogol, Nikolai
    Dead Souls
  • Golding, William
    The Lord of the Flies
  • Nadine Gordimer
    July's People
  • Mary Gordon
    The Rest of Life
  • Grahame, Kenneth
    The Wind in the Willows
  • Grass, Gunter
    The Tin Drum
  • Graves, Robert
    I, Claudius
  • Greene, Graham
    The Power and the Glory
    Brighton Rock
  • Haggard, H. Rider
    She: A History of Adventure
    King Solomon's Mines
  • Radclyffe Hall
    The Well of Loneliness
  • Hammett, Dashiell
    The Maltese Falcon
  • Hamsun, Kay
    Hunger
  • Hardy, Thomas
    The Return of the Native
    Far from the Maddening Crowd
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles
  • Hawking, Stephen
    A Brief History of Time
  • Hawthorne, Nathaniel
    The Scarlet Letter
  • Heller, Joseph
    Catch-22
  • Hemingway, Ernest
    A Farwell to Arms
    The Sun Also Rises
    The Old Man and the Sea
    For Whom the Bell Tolls
    In Our Time
  • Henry, James
    The Bostonians
  • Hesse, Hermann
    Siddhartha
  • Herbert, Frank
    Dune
  • Homer
    The Odyssey
    The Iliad
  • Hornby, Nick
    High Fidelity
  • Hugo, Victor
    Les Miserables
    The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  • Huxley, Aldous
    Brave New World
  • Ibsen, Henrik
    Peer Gynt
    A Doll's House
  • Irvine, John
    A Prayer for Owen Meany
  • Irving, John
    The World According to Garp
  • Ishiguro, Kazuo
    The Remains of the Day
  • James, Henry
    The Turn of the Screw
    The Portrait of a Lady
    The Wings of the Dove
    The Golden Bowl
    The Ambassadors
  • Joyce, James
    Ulysses
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    Finnegans Wake
  • Kafka, Franz
    The Complete Stories
    The Trial
    The Castle Bohemia
  • Kalidasa
    The Recognition of Sakuntala
  • Kant, Immanuel
    Critique of Pure Reason
  • Kawabata, Yasunari
    The Sound of the Mountain
  • Kazantzakis, Nikos
    Zorba the Greek
  • Keenan, Brian
    An Evil Cradling
  • Keneally, Thomas
    Schindler's List
  • Kerouac, Jack
    On the Road
  • Kesey, Ken
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • King, Stephen
    It
    The Stand
  • Kipling, Rudyard
    Kim
  • Knowles, John
    A Separate Peace
  • Kundera, Milan
    The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • King, Laurie
    The Beekeeper's Apprentice
  • Kosinski, Jerzy
    Painted Bird
  • Lawrence, D.H.
    Lady Chatterley's Lover
    Women in Love
    Sons and Lovers
  • Laxness, Halldor K.
    Independent People
  • Lee, Harper
    To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Lee, Laurie
    Cider with Rosie
  • LeGuin, Ursula
    The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Leopardi, Giacomo
    Complete Poems
  • Lessing, Doris
    The Golden Notebook
  • Levi, Primo
    If This Is a Man
  • Lewis, C. S.
  • Lewis, Sinclair
    Main Street
  • Lindgren, Astrid
    Pippi Longstocking
  • London, Jack
    The Call of the Wild
  • Lorca, Federico Garcia
    Gypsy Ballads
  • Louis, Sinclair
    Babbitt
  • Macauley, Rose
    The Towers of Trebicond
  • Machiavelli
    The Prince
  • Mahfouz, Naguib
    Children of Gebelawi
  • Mailer, Norman
    The Naked and the Dead
  • Mandela, Nelson
    A Long Walk to Freedom
  • Mann, Thomas
    Buddenbrook
    The Magic Mountain
  • Markandaya, Kamala
    Nectar In A Sieve
  • Marquez, Gabrial Garcia
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Marx, Karl
    Das Kapital
  • Maupin, Armistead
    Tales from the City
  • Maurier, Daphne du
    Jamaica Inn
  • McCullers, Carson
    The Member of the Wedding
    The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
  • McKinley, Robin
    Beauty
  • Mori, Kyoko
    Shizuko's Daughter
  • Merimee, Prosper
    Carmen
  • Miller, Arthur
    Death of a Salesman
  • Miller, Henry
    Tropic of Cancer
  • Milne, Alan Alexander
    Winnie-the-Pooh
  • Milton, John
    Paradise Lost
  • Mitchell, Margaret
    Gone with the Wind
  • Moliere
    Tartuffe
  • Montaigne, Michel de
    Essays
  • Morante, Elsa
    History
  • Morrison, Toni
    Song of Solomon
    Jazz
  • Murasaki, Shikibu
    The Tale of Genji
  • Musil, Robert
    The Man without Qualities
  • Nabokov, Vladimir
    Lolita
  • O'Connor, Flannery
    A Good Man is Hard to Find
  • O'Hara, John
    Appointment in Samarra
  • Orczy, Baroness
  • Orwell, George
    Down and Out in Paris and London
    1984
    Animal Farm
  • Ovid
    Metamorphoses
  • Pasternak, Boris
    Doctor Zhivago
  • Paton, Alan
    Cry the Beloved Country
  • Peake, Mervyn
    Gormenghast
  • Pessca, Fernando
    The Book of Disquiet
  • Pirs, Robert
    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • Plath, Sylvia
    The Bell Jar
  • Poe, Edgar Allan
    The Complete Tales
  • Polo, Marco
    The Travels of Marco Polo
  • Power, Susan
    The Grass Dancer
  • Proust, Marcel
    Sodom and Gomorrah
    Remebrance of Things Past
  • Rabelais, Francois
    Gargantua and Pantagruel
  • Rand, Ayn
    Atlas Shrugged
    The Fountainhead
  • Remarque, Erich Maria
    All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Reyes, Alina
    The Butcher
  • Rhys, Jean
    The Wide Sargasso Sea
  • Rosa, Joao Guimaraes
    The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
  • Rostand, Edmond
    Cyrano de Bergerac
  • Rousseau, Jean Jacques
    The Social Contract
  • Rulfo, Juan
    Pedro Paramo
  • Rumi, Jalal Ad-din
    Mathnawi
  • Rushdie, Salman
    Midnight's Children
    Satanic Verses
  • Salih, Tayeb
    Season of Migration to the North
  • Salinger, J. D.
    Catcher in the Rye
    Franny and Zooey
  • Saramago, Jose
    Blindness
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur
    The World as Will and Idea
  • Scott, Sir Walter
    The Lady of the Lake
    Ivanhoe
  • Seth, Vikram
    A Suitable Boy
  • Shakespeare, William
    The Complete Works
  • Shelley, Mary
    Frankenstein
  • Sinclair, Upton
    The Jungle
  • Smith, Adam
    The Wealth of Nations
  • Smith, Delia
    Complete Cookery Course
  • Suskind, Patrick
  • Solzh, Alexander
    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  • Sophocles
    Oedipus Rex
  • Spengler, Oswald
    The Decline of the West
  • Stein, Gertrude
    The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
  • Steinbeck, John
    Of Mice and Men
    The Grapes of Wrath
  • Stendhal
    The Red and the Black
  • Sterne, Laurence
    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
  • Stevenson, Robert Louis
    Treasure Island
  • Stoker, Bram
  • Stowe, Harriet Beecher
    Uncle Tom's Cabin
  • Styron, William
    Sophie's Choice
  • Svevo, Italo
    Confessions of Zeno
  • Swift, Jonathan
    Gulliver's Travels
  • Tan, Amy
    The Joy Luck Club
  • Tennyson, Lord Alfred
    Idylls of the King
  • Thackeray, William Makepeace
    Vanity Fair
  • Thompson, Hunter S.
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
  • Thoreau, Henry David
    Walden
  • Tolkein, J. R. R.
  • Tolstoy, Leo
    War and Peace
  • Tolstoy, Leo
    Anna Karenina
    The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
  • Tressell, Robert
    The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
  • Trollope, Anthony
    Ayala's Angel
  • Turgenev, Ivan
    Fathers and Sons
  • Twain, Mark
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    The Prince and the Pauper
  • Uchida, Yoshiko
    Picture Bride
  • Unknown
    Thousand and One Nights
  • Unknown
    The Book of Job
    Gilgamesh
    Beowulf
    Mahabharata
  • Updike, John
    Rabbit, Run
  • Valmiki
    Ramayana
  • Virgil
    The Aeneid
  • Voltaire
    Candide
  • Vonnegut, Kurt
    Cat's Cradle
    Slaughterhouse 5
  • Walker, Alice
    The Color Purple
  • Warren, Robert Penn
    All the King's Men
  • Watson, Larry
    Montana 1948
  • Waugh, Evelyn
    A Handful of Dust
    Brideshead Revisited
  • Wells, H. G.
    The Time Machine
  • Wells, H. G.
    The War of the Worlds
  • Welsh, Irvine
    Trainspotting
  • Wharton, Edith
    The Age of Innocence
    House of Mirth
    Ethan Frome
  • White, E. B.
    Charlotte's Web
  • Whitman, Walt
    Leaves of Grass
  • Wiesel, Elie
    Night
  • Wilde, Oscar
    The Importance of Being Earnest
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Wilder, Thornton
    Our Town
  • Wolfe, Tom
    The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Look Homeward, Angel
  • Woolf, Virginia
    Mrs. Dalloway
    To the Lighthouse
    A Room of One's Own
  • Wright, Richard
    Native Son
  • Xun, Lu
    Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
  • Yolen, Jane
    Briar Rose
  • Yourcenar, Marguerite
    Memoirs of Hadrian
  • Zola, Emile
    Nana


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