As a huge book nerd, there’s something uniquely embarrassing about admitting I haven’t read some of the most famous books in classic literature.
For years, whenever friends found out that I read over 70 books per year, they’d immediately assume that I had read their favorite book, only for me to respond with chagrin: “No, I haven’t read [insert amazing book here].”
The Hobbit? Nope, sorry Bilbo.
War and Peace? Hmmm…do people actually read books that long?
Les Miserables? Miserably, no.
Just like you, I was forced to read a lot of classic literature like Animal Farm and The Scarlet Letter in high school. College introduced me to other classics like And Then There Were None and Oliver Twist.
But then, after college, I stopped reading classic lit. Without professors to spoon-feed servings of literary greatness, I turned to popular bestsellers.
As a lover of nonfiction, I consumed books by Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and Jim Collins. I discovered many amazing books, including many that continue to guide my life and work.
But something was missing, and that gap has grown even larger as I’ve begun writing.
“If you are interested in writing and having a large toolkit of stories, [I suggest you read old classics] because those stories have been building blocks for a great many writers before you.” -Margaret Atwood
Atwood says plotlines from ancient stories are woven throughout modern-day literature: “In order to get the joke, you have to know the original.”
And I was missing out on a lot of jokes.
Back in 2018, I decided to begin closing my literary gap. I compiled an uber-list of the “best books of all time” that could serve as my proverbial Everest to climb in the years ahead.
I pored over lists from websites that cataloged their “Top 100 books.” Books that were mentioned by the most sources made it onto my list. Although many sites focused on novels, a couple included nonfiction as well. (You can find my full source list at the bottom of this story.)
As I compiled my list, I realized that for someone who reads as much as I do, I was remarkably ignorant about literature. I didn’t even know the names of many authors on the list.
Since then, I’ve been slowly scaling this literary mountain of 200 books. The ones I've read are denoted with the “⊗” symbol below. As you can see, I have a LOT of work to do.
Progress When I First Began Tracking (1/21/18): 38 / 200
My Current Progress (as of 10/21/25): 89 / 200
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe ⊗
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ⊗
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Money by Martin Amis
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood ⊗
Emma by Jane Austen ⊗
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen ⊗
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Black Sheep by Honoré de Balzac
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume ⊗
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ⊗
The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov ⊗
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan ⊗
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess ⊗
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino ⊗
The Plague by Albert Camus ⊗
The Stranger by Albert Camus ⊗
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ⊗
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré ⊗
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ⊗
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler ⊗
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie ⊗
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho ⊗
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad ⊗
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl ⊗
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Underworld by Don DeLillo
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz ⊗
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens ⊗
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens ⊗
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Deliverance by James Dickey
Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ⊗
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ⊗
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas ⊗
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas ⊗
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot ⊗
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison ⊗
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner ⊗
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ⊗
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank ⊗
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Neuromancer by William Gibson ⊗
Lord of the Flies by William Golding ⊗
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame ⊗
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne ⊗
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller ⊗
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway ⊗
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway ⊗
Dune by Frank Herbert ⊗
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo ⊗
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ⊗
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ⊗
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro ⊗
The Ambassadors by Henry James
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Dubliners by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Trial by Franz Kafka ⊗
On the Road by Jack Kerouac ⊗
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey ⊗
It by Stephen King ⊗
The Stand by Stephen King ⊗
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee ⊗
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle ⊗
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis ⊗
The Call of the Wild by Jack London ⊗
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli ⊗
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Atonement by Ian McEwan ⊗
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ⊗
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
1984 by George Orwell ⊗
Animal Farm by George Orwell ⊗
U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy ⊗
Republic by Plato ⊗
The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allen Poe
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman ⊗
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling ⊗
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ⊗
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger ⊗
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley ⊗
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
East of Eden by John Steinbeck ⊗
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck ⊗
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson ⊗
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson ⊗
Dracula by Bram Stoker ⊗
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Walden by Henry David Thoreau ⊗
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien ⊗
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien ⊗
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole ⊗
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ⊗
The Art of War by Sun Tzu ⊗
Rabbit, Run by John Updike ⊗
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne ⊗
The Aeneid by Virgil
Candide by Voltaire ⊗
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut ⊗
The Color Purple by Alice Walker ⊗
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren ⊗
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh ⊗
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells ⊗
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells ⊗
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Charlotte's Web by EB White ⊗
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ⊗
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ⊗
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Native Son by Richard Wright
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
One Thousand and One Nights by (Anon)
Sources: Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Novels" (2005), The Guardian's "100 Best Novels Written in English" (2015), TheGreatestBooks.org, The Guardian's "100 Greatest Novels of All Time" (2003), The Telegraph's "100 Novels Everyone Should Read", GreatBooksGuide.com, Book Depository's "Best Books Ever", Ranker's "Best Novels Ever Written", Joel Patrick's "100 Books to Read Before You Die", Modern Library's "100 Best Novels"
Interesting list. May I make one suggestion? If you are going to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain read the translation by John Woods not the older one by Harriet Lowe-Porter. You might also want to try Mann’s Death in Venice. I would be curious to know what you think of The Magic Mountain.
Nice list.
A lot of these I've never heard of, like Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. A few I haven't read, but I'm done with the writer (looking at you, Henry James), so I (probably) won't read. Others I have no desire to read, like Harry Potter. The rest I've either read or (more likely) want to read.
No Epic of Gilgamesh? It's one of man's oldest stories, it's short, and it's a good read. At least one of Aristotle's works should be on the list, in my opinion.