The 100 Greatest Books of All Time - The Top Ten!

[zmaxwell]

1. The Iliad by Homer
2. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
5. The Odyssey by Homer
6. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
7. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
8. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
9. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence
10. The Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
11. The Ramayana by Valmiki
12. Hiroshima by John Hersey
13. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
14. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
15. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
16. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
17. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
18. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
19. Our Town by Thornton Wilder
20. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
21. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
22. Middlemarch by George Eliot
23. The Dirty Dust by Máirtin Ó Cadhain
24. Chronicles of Jean Froissart
25. Poems of Wang Wei
26. Satires of Juvenal
27. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
28. The Golden Ass by Apuleius
29. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
30. The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White
31. The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon
32. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
33. One Thousand and One Nights
34. Njal’s Saga
35. The Outermost House by Henry Beston
36. The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre
37. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Bashō
38. The Conference of the Birds by Attar
39. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
40. The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours
41. Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
42. Krieg by Ludwig Renn
43. The Tale of the Heike
44. Antigone by Sophocles
45. Poems of Du Fu
46. The Scholars by Wu Jingzi
47. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
48. Poems of Catullus
49. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
50. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
51. The Aeneid by Virgil
52. Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
53. A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman
54. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
55. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
56. The Mahabharata by Vyasa
57. Stories of Lu Xun
58. A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
59. Odes of Horace
60. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
61. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
62. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
63. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
64. The Secret History by Procopius
65. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
66. The Republic by Plato
67. The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
68. Candide by Voltaire
69. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
70. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
71. Roughing It by Mark Twain
72. The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin
73. Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
74. Confessions of Saint Augustine
75. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
76. Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto
77. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
78. The First Folio of William Shakespeare
79. Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
80. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
81. The Demons by Heimito von Doderer
82. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
83. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
84. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
85. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
86. The Once and Future King by T. H. White
87. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
88. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
89. Paradise Lost by John Milton
90. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
91. The Poetic Edda
92. Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus
93. North and South by Elizabeth Bishop
94. Germinal by Émile Zola
95. The Water Margin by Shi Nai’an
96. History of the Conquest of Mexico by William H. Prescott
97. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
98. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
99. The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart
100. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

[ami]

This list will guide my reading for many years to come. Thank you Steve!

[garethreeves]

Whoa, no Ovid?! Is this exclusion the biggest twist of all time?! I was also shocked by the lack of Plutarch’s Lives, Herodotus, the King James I Bible, The Praise of Folly, and Montaigne. But I've got over 40 potentially wonderful books to discover so much thanks, Steve!

[BeenjLike]

Infinite Jest takes the number-one spot! Staggering.

[CoynieReads]

No sooner had I recovered my senses from the shocking (though admittedly entirely expected) lambasting of my beloved Les Miserables than I was hit with the entirely unexpected shock of no Ovid Metamorphoses. Really keeping us on our toes! 😂

[pattube]

Thanks, Steve! 🙂 Great list! Also please consider doing a list of your top 100 favorite books? (Whether that's all non-fiction, all fiction, a mix of both, or entirely separate lists.) I just can't get enough of your lists! Please and thank you, good sir.

[katherinedote]

Thank you for taking the time to assemble this list. So far, Dante's Divine Comedy is my all time favorite, with Moby Dick and The Tale of Genji tied for second place. BTW, you are much better at "lists" than the NYTimes!

[anthonysuppa]

I saw a stage production of The Oresteia two years ago, exactly 2, 480 years after its debut. It played at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City and seeing it was one of the highlights of my theater-going life.

[kathleenmerrett]

Thank you Steve. I've really enjoyed this countdown. Lots to think about and choose my picks for my TBR.

[crypsid]

Thanks for the list Steve! I'll be digging at it for a long time to come. I'd have never guessed that The Magic Mountain won't feature at all here though, you always called it the greatest novel of the 20th century, and there many other novels of that century here except that one..

[GrammaticusBooks]

Couldn't agree more about 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. An amazing tale. Epic, as you said. Almost mythic. And written beautifully.

[Tolstoy]

Biggest surprise for me is no Ovid. Followed by the King James Bible and Mann.

[cliffknoll]

Thank you! Your presentation is very nice and allows me to understand your love of each book

[willieluncheonette]

" Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, an immensely beautiful novel.. Anna Karenina is one of my most loved books. How many times I have read it I can’t remember. I mean the number of times – I remember the book perfectly well, I can relate the whole book.

If I was drowning in the ocean and had to choose just one novel out of all the millions of novels in the world, I would choose Anna Karenina. It would be beautiful to be with that beautiful book. It has to be read and read again; only then you can feel it, smell it, and taste the flavor. It is no ordinary book.

Leo Tolstoy failed as a saint, just as Mahatma Gandhi failed as a saint, but Leo Tolstoy was a great novelist. Mahatma Gandhi succeeded as – and will remain forever – a pinnacle of sincerity. I don’t know of any other man in this century who was so sincere. When he wrote to people ‘sincerely yours’ he was really sincere. When you write ‘sincerely yours’, you know, and everybody else knows, and the person to whom you are writing also knows, that it is all bullshit. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to really be ‘sincerely yours’. That’s what makes a person religious – sincerity.

Leo Tolstoy wanted to be religious but could not be. He tried hard. I feel great sympathy with his effort, but he was not a religious person. He has to wait at least a few more lives. In a way it is good that he was not a religious man ; otherwise we would have missed Resurrection, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and dozens more beautiful, immensely beautiful books.

nobody is more worthy of a Nobel Prize than Leo Tolstoy. His creativity is immense, he was unsurpassed by anyone. He was nominated, but refused by the committee because of his unorthodox stories on Christianity. The Prize committee opens its records every fifty years. When records were opened in 1950, researchers rushed to see whose names were nominated and cancelled and for what reason. Leo Tolstoy was nominated, but never given the prize as he is not an orthodox Christian."

Another book by Leo Tolstoy: one of the greatest in all the languages of the world, War and Peace. Not only the greatest but also the most voluminous...thousands of pages, so big, so vast, they make you afraid.

But Tolstoy’s book has to be vast, it is not his fault. War and Peace is the whole history of human consciousness – the whole history; it cannot be written on a few pages. Yes, it is difficult to read thousands of pages, but if one can one will be transported to another world. One will know the taste of something classic. Yes, it is a classic."

[karlalikestoread]

So many books on your list I haven't read! How exciting! And some I've read just this year and loved like War and Peace, The Pillow Book, and Mrs. Dalloway. Thank you for putting this list together, I'm excited to research more about the many titles I'm not familiar with.

[thenewterrorbilly]

Great list! glad to see The Shahnameh and War & Peace on the list.
Now make the list of 100 overrated books of all time...just for fun!

[capturedbyannamarie]

I just read Odyssey and Tale of Genji in the last few months. Both of them were very good. Tale of Genji was way better than I expected, I read the Washburn translation. I also read War and Peace last year, and it was very difficult to finish. However, it is excellent, and I think of it often. I definitely wanna reread it. I am about to start the Divine Comedy this month, and I cannot wait. I need to read the Iliad soon. Adding it to my TBR next year.

[yelisieimurai]

Wow Stephen King is in top 10! Amazing.

[EastLancashireJohn]

Thank you, Steve. This series of videos has been enjoyable and educational. Today, John Hersey's Hiroshima arrived from Amazon but there are plenty of others that are now on my radar.

[melodyd]

Wonderful. Thank you for this amazing list.