Check out this "unified list" compiled by blogger Neil Bowers on his blog NeilB http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/a-unified-list-of-the-best-100-novels/
Read below to find out how Neil worked all this out. Pretty cool! Let's see what's on here that we should be reading next...or let's all get together soon to see the movie of #22 --Brideshead Revisited!! Some, but not all, of my faves are on his list. Where is A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN? Maybe I'm just not seeing it?! What do you think should have been included??
A Unified List of the Best 100 Novels
This list was generated by merging 10 different ‘top 100′ lists from the UK, US, Australia and Canada, to see if the cream floated to the top. The lists are a mixture of public popularity and literary merit. Interestingly, only one book appeared on every list: it’s in first place here.
Note that I merged lists from English-speaking countries, so there is undoubtedly a bias towards books originally written in English. I’ve written a separate post on generating a list of best 100 novels, which describes the method, and the specific lists I included.
Rank
Book
Author
1.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
2.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.
The Grapes Of Wrath
John Steinbeck
4.
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
5.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
6.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
7.
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
8.
Ulysses
James Joyce
9.
On The Road
Jack Kerouac
10.
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
11.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
12.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
13.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
14.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
15.
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
16.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
17.
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
18.
Animal Farm
George Orwell
19.
Crime And Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
21.
Lord Of The Flies
William Golding
22.
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
23.
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
24.
Love In The Time Of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
25.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
26.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
27.
The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien
28.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
29.
Middlemarch
George Eliot
30.
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
31.
Dune
Frank Herbert
32.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
33.
A Prayer For Owen Meany
John Irving
34.
Watership Down
Richard Adams
35.
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
36.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
37.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
38.
Anne Of Green Gables
LM Montgomery
39.
Emma
Jane Austen
40.
Memoirs Of A Geisha
Arthur Golden
41.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
42.
Of Mice And Men
John Steinbeck
43.
The Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
44.
Les Miserables
Victor Hugo
45.
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
46.
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
47.
Tess Of The D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
48.
Winnie the Pooh
A.A. Milne
49.
Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks
50.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernieres
51.
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
52.
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
53.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
54.
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
55.
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
56.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
57.
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
58.
The Stand
Stephen King
59.
Possession
A.S. Byatt
60.
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
61.
A Tale Of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
62.
The Trial
Franz Kafka
63.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
64.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
65.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
66.
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman
67.
The Harry Potter Series
J.K. Rowling
68.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
69.
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
70.
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
71.
The Pillars Of The Earth
Ken Follett
72.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
73.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
74.
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
75.
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
76.
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
77.
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
78.
The Time Traveller’s Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
79.
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
80.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemmingway
81.
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
82.
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
83.
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
84.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
85.
The Stranger
Albert Camus
86.
Native Son
Richard Wright
87.
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
88.
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
89.
Perfume
Patrick Süskind
90.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
91.
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
92.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl
93.
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
94.
Persuasion
Jane Austen
95.
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
96.
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass
97.
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
98.
Atonement
Ian McEwan
99.
Light in August
William Faulkner
100.
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Read below to find out how Neil worked all this out. Pretty cool! Let's see what's on here that we should be reading next...or let's all get together soon to see the movie of #22 --Brideshead Revisited!! Some, but not all, of my faves are on his list. Where is A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN? Maybe I'm just not seeing it?! What do you think should have been included??
A Unified List of the Best 100 Novels
This list was generated by merging 10 different ‘top 100′ lists from the UK, US, Australia and Canada, to see if the cream floated to the top. The lists are a mixture of public popularity and literary merit. Interestingly, only one book appeared on every list: it’s in first place here.
Note that I merged lists from English-speaking countries, so there is undoubtedly a bias towards books originally written in English. I’ve written a separate post on generating a list of best 100 novels, which describes the method, and the specific lists I included.
Rank
Book
Author
1.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
2.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.
The Grapes Of Wrath
John Steinbeck
4.
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
5.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
6.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
7.
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
8.
Ulysses
James Joyce
9.
On The Road
Jack Kerouac
10.
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
11.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
12.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
13.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
14.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
15.
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
16.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
17.
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
18.
Animal Farm
George Orwell
19.
Crime And Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
21.
Lord Of The Flies
William Golding
22.
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
23.
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
24.
Love In The Time Of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
25.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
26.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
27.
The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien
28.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
29.
Middlemarch
George Eliot
30.
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
31.
Dune
Frank Herbert
32.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
33.
A Prayer For Owen Meany
John Irving
34.
Watership Down
Richard Adams
35.
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
36.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
37.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
38.
Anne Of Green Gables
LM Montgomery
39.
Emma
Jane Austen
40.
Memoirs Of A Geisha
Arthur Golden
41.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
42.
Of Mice And Men
John Steinbeck
43.
The Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
44.
Les Miserables
Victor Hugo
45.
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
46.
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
47.
Tess Of The D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
48.
Winnie the Pooh
A.A. Milne
49.
Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks
50.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernieres
51.
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
52.
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
53.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
54.
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
55.
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
56.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
57.
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
58.
The Stand
Stephen King
59.
Possession
A.S. Byatt
60.
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
61.
A Tale Of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
62.
The Trial
Franz Kafka
63.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
64.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
65.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
66.
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman
67.
The Harry Potter Series
J.K. Rowling
68.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
69.
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
70.
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
71.
The Pillars Of The Earth
Ken Follett
72.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
73.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
74.
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
75.
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
76.
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
77.
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
78.
The Time Traveller’s Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
79.
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
80.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemmingway
81.
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
82.
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
83.
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
84.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
85.
The Stranger
Albert Camus
86.
Native Son
Richard Wright
87.
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
88.
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
89.
Perfume
Patrick Süskind
90.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
91.
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
92.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl
93.
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
94.
Persuasion
Jane Austen
95.
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
96.
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass
97.
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
98.
Atonement
Ian McEwan
99.
Light in August
William Faulkner
100.
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
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