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Thursday, May 7, 2009

Favorite American Novels

Yesterday, I gave you the top 100 favorite novels in the U.K. It's not so easy to find a list of favorites (as opposed to bests) for the U.S., as I found out. I could find lists by the editors and by the readers of the Modern Library (Modern Library books only) by two Time Magazine critics, by librarians (which I like because I've read a ton--64--of them), but a general list of favorites by actual American readers took some searching.


This list comes from Best 100 Novels of All Time, but it's not really clear who compiled the list and who voted. If you can find a better list, please let me know. I've read 52 of these, at one time or another.


How is your reading coming along?


  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
  • Ulysses by James Joyce
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  • East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  • Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  • The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  • The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  • The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  • Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
  • Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  • Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams
  • The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  • The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  • His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
  • Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
  • A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  • Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
  • On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  • Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  • The Stand by Stephen King
  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
  • The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • Dracula by Bram Stoker
  • Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  • The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  • Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  • The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
  • To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  • Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  • The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  • Persuasion by Jane Austen
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  • Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  • Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  • Emma by Jane Austen
  • I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  • The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  • As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  • The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Atonement by Ian McEwan
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
  • Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  • Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
  • Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Light in August by William Faulkner

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    3 comments:

    1. the7msnMay 7, 2009 at 7:28 AM

      Ugh. These lists are reminders of how much of my life I've wasted reading crap instead of the classics. But I'm well into Edgar Sawtelle now and just loving it!

      ReplyDelete
    2. JCMay 7, 2009 at 7:38 AM

      I've actually read some of them !!! Been a while though and some I will need to look into. Thanks.

      ReplyDelete
    3. BZMay 10, 2009 at 9:05 AM

      I count 55 that I've read---some were required in high school and college of course and were not read for the sheer pleasure of reading them........

      ReplyDelete