The top 100 List

The greatest 100 works of classical literature is, of course, arbitrary. For the purposes of this challenge, I have used the list from “The Greatest Books” list complied as it is from 116 other lists from multiple sources. There is a good chance I will add some other classics along the way that catch my eye, but this is the master list of the top 100. It changes, so if you seek out the page the 100 that shows might differ from this list in terms of the books included, as well as their position. However, these 100 will probably be as good a place to begin as any! This list is the version from July 6th 2018.

Books in bold I have read and they will be reviewed here. I am a little behind on the individual reviews as I am starting this blog after I already began the reading challenge, but there still seems to be a long way to go!

I drive a lot and there is a lot of time when I am carrying out routine tasks that could otherwise be taken up with reading. Those times I fill with audiobooks as a way to get through more of these great works that way. This may be cheating but it is a good way appreciate these works and audiobooks are typically read by great actors so they also come alive that way.

Tally to date: 25/100

  1. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
  2. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cerventes (Audio book)
  3. Ulysses – James Joyce
  4. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (text)
  5. Moby Dick – Herman Melville (text)
  6. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (text)
  7. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
  8. The Odyssey – Homer
  9. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  10. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
  11. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  12. Madame Bovery – Gustave Flaubert (Audiobook)
  13. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
  14. Lolita – Vladimir Nabakov
  15. The Illiad – Homer
  16. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Audiobook)
  17. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
  18. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (Text)
  19. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (Text)
  20. The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
  21. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
  22. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
  23. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Text)
  24. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
  25. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (text)
  26. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (text)
  27. Middlemarch – George Eliot
  28. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
  29. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (text)
  30. One Thousand and One Nights – Various
  31. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
  32. The Stories of Anton Chekhov – Anton Chekhov
  33. Absolem, Absolem! – William Faulkner (text)
  34. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
  35. The Trial – Franz Kafka
  36. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
  37. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
  38. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
  39. The Aeneid – Virgil
  40. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (Audio book)
  41. Beloved – Toni Morrison
  42. The Stranger – Albert Camus
  43. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
  44. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  45. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
  46. The Sun also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (Text)
  47. Collected Fiction – Jorge Luis Borges
  48. Oedipus the King – Sophocles
  49. Candide – Voltaire (text)
  50. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer (Audiobook)
  51. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
  52. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka – Franz Kafka
  53. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Stern
  54. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
  55. The Complete Poems and Tales of Edgar Allen Poe – Edgar Allen Poe
  56. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
  57. A Passage to India – EM Forster (Text)
  58. Paradise Lost – John Milton
  59. Antigone – Sophocles
  60. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
  61. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
  62. Emma – Jane Austen
  63. Animal Farm – George Orwell
  64. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemmingway
  65. Faust – Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe
  66. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  67. Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkein
  68. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (text)
  69. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
  70. Things Fall Apart – China Achebe
  71. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
  72. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemmingway (text)
  73. Pale Fire -Vladimir Nabakoz
  74. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
  75. Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
  76. Oresteia – Aeschylus
  77. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemmingway
  78. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (text)
  79. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Francois Rabelais
  80. Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
  81. The Castle – Franz Kafka
  82. The Flowers of Evil – Charles Baudelaire
  83. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (text)
  84. Journey to the End of Night – Louis Ferdinand Celine
  85. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
  86. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
  87. Fairy tales and stories – Hans Christian Andersen
  88. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (audio book)
  89. Cousin Bette – Honore de Balzac
  90. A Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
  91. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
  92. Metamorphosis – Ovid
  93. Oedipus at Colonus – Sophocles
  94. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
  95. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
  96. The Possessed – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  97. Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
  98. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett (text)
  99. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
  100. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut (Audiobook)