Books to Read

Fiction

Combined list: Time's 100 best English-language novels (1923-present) and The Modern Library's 100 Best Fiction (Board's list and Reader's list)

  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  3. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
  4. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
  5. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durell
  6. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
  7. The Ambassadors by Henry James
  8. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
  9. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
  10. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
  11. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  12. Anthem by Ayn Rand
  13. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
  14. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
  15. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
  16. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  17. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
  18. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'brien
  19. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
  20. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  21. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  22. Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
  23. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  24. A Bend In the River by V.S. Naipaul
  25. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
  26. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
  27. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  28. Blood Meridian by Cormac Mccarthy
  29. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  30. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  31. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
  32. Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
  33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  34. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  35. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  36. Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
  37. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  38. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
  39. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  40. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
  41. The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
  42. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
  43. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
  44. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
  45. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
  46. A Death in the Family by James Agee
  47. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
  48. Deliverance by James Dickey
  49. Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
  50. The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein
  51. Double Star by Robert Heinlein
  52. Dune by Frank Herbert
  53. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
  54. Falconer by John Cheever
  55. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  56. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  57. Fear by L. Ron Hubbard
  58. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
  59. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
  60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  61. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
  62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
  63. The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
  64. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
  65. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
  66. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
  67. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  68. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
  69. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  70. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  71. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  72. Greenmantle by Charles De Lint
  73. Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
  74. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
  75. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
  76. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  77. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers
  78. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  79. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
  80. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
  81. Herzog by Saul Bellow
  82. A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes
  83. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  84. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
  85. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  86. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
  87. Howards End by E.M. Forster
  88. The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy
  89. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  90. Illusions by Richard Bach
  91. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  92. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  93. Ironweed by William Kennedy
  94. It by Stephen King
  95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
  96. Light in August by William Faulkner
  97. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  98. The Little Country by Charles De Lint
  99. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  100. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
  101. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  102. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  103. Loving by Henry Green
  104. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
  105. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
  106. The Magus by John Fowles
  107. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
  108. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
  109. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
  110. Memory and Dream by Charles De Lint
  111. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
  112. Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
  113. Money by Martin Amis
  114. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
  115. Moonheart by Charles De Lint
  116. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
  117. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  118. Mulengro by Charles De Lint
  119. My Antonia by Willa Cather
  120. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
  121. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
  122. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  123. Native Son by Richard Wright
  124. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  125. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  126. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
  127. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  128. The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
  129. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
  130. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  131. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  132. One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane
  133. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
  134. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  135. Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
  136. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  137. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
  138. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
  139. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
  140. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  141. Possession by A.S. Byatt
  142. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
  143. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
  144. A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
  145. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
  146. The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein
  147. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
  148. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
  149. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
  150. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
  151. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
  152. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
  153. A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
  154. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
  155. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
  156. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
  157. Shane by Jack Schaefer
  158. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
  159. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
  160. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  161. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  162. Someplace to Be Flying by Charles De Lint
  163. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
  164. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
  165. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  166. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
  167. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
  168. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  169. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
  170. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
  171. The Stand by Stephen King
  172. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
  173. Stranger In a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
  174. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell
  175. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  176. Suttree by Cormac Mccarthy
  177. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  178. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  179. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  180. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  181. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  182. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
  183. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
  184. Trader by Charles De Lint
  185. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
  186. Trustee From the Toolroom by Nevil Shute
  187. U.S.A. (Trilogy) by John Dos Passos
  188. Ubik by Philip K. Dick
  189. Ulysses by James Joyce
  190. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
  191. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
  192. V. by Thomas Pynchon
  193. The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
  194. Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
  195. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  196. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
  197. We the Living by Ayn Rand
  198. White Noise by Don DeLillo
  199. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
  200. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
  201. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
  202. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
  203. Wise Blood by Flannery O'connor
  204. Women In Love by D.H. Lawrence
  205. The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
  206. The World According to Garp by John Irving
  207. The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
  208. Yarrow by Charles De Lint
  209. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
  210. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

Non-Fiction

Combined list: The Modern Library's 100 Best Non-Fiction (Board's list and Reader's list)

  1. 101 Things to Do Til the Revolution by Claire Wolfe
  2. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
  3. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
  4. Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do by Peter Mcwilliams
  5. American Gay by Stephen O. Murray
  6. The American Language by H. L. Mencken
  7. The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter
  8. America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard
  9. An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal
  10. Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
  11. The Ants by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
  12. Art and Illusion by Ernest H. Gombrich
  13. The Art of Memory by Frances Yates
  14. The Art of the Soluble by Peter B. Medawar
  15. Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
  16. Autobiographies by W. B. Yeats
  17. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
  18. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
  19. The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain
  20. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life by Michael Paxton
  21. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
  22. Behind the Mask by Ian Buruma
  23. Beyond Liberal and Conservative by William Maddox and Stuart Lilie
  24. Black Boy by Richard Wright
  25. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
  26. A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
  27. But Is It True? by Aaron Wildavsky
  28. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
  29. Children of Crisis by Robert Coles
  30. The City In History by Lewis Mumford
  31. The Civil War by Shelby Foote
  32. Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being by Tibor Machan
  33. Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders by Aaron T. Beck
  34. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell
  35. The Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams
  36. Darkness Visible by William Styron
  37. Death by Government by R. J. Rummel
  38. The Declaration of Independence by Carl L. Becker
  39. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard
  40. The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane
  41. Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
  42. The Double Helix by James D. Watson
  43. Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
  44. Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
  45. Ecoterror by Ron Arnold
  46. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
  47. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White
  48. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
  49. The End of Racism by Dinesh D'souza
  50. Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
  51. The Face of Battle by John Keegan
  52. A Feeling For Books by Janice Radway
  53. Fingerprints of the Gods by G. Hancock
  54. Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith
  55. The Flute of God by Paul Twitchell
  56. Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
  57. Freedom In Chains by James Bovard
  58. The Frontier In American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
  59. The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel
  60. The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan D. Spence
  61. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
  62. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
  63. The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson
  64. The Golden Bough by James Frazer
  65. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
  66. The Great Bridge by David Mccullough
  67. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
  68. The Greatest Story Never Told by Lana Cantrell
  69. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  70. Healing Our World by Mary Ruwart
  71. The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
  72. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
  73. The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow
  74. How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff
  75. Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
  76. In a Dark Wood by Alston Chase
  77. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
  78. In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams
  79. James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
  80. Jefferson and His Time by Dumas Malone
  81. The Job by William Burroughs
  82. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
  83. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling
  84. Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz
  85. A Life of One's Own by David Kelley
  86. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
  87. Longitude by Dava Sobel
  88. The Mainspring of Human Progress by Henry Grady Weaver
  89. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
  90. The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson
  91. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos
  92. A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy
  93. Melbourne by Lord David Cecil
  94. Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone
  95. The Minuteman: Restoring An Army of the People by Gary Hart
  96. The Mirror and the Lamp by Meyer Howard Abrams
  97. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
  98. A Modern Prophet by Harold Klemp
  99. Modern Times by Paul Johnson
  100. More Guns, Less Crime by John R. Lott
  101. More Liberty Means Less Government by Walter Williams
  102. The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr
  103. Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz
  104. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
  105. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff
  106. On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Thompson
  107. The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
  108. Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
  109. Ordinarily Sacred by Lynda Sexson
  110. Orientalism by Edward Said
  111. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
  112. Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming
  113. Parliament of Whores by P. J. O'rourke
  114. Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson
  115. Philosophy and Civilization by John Dewey
  116. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
  117. Placing Movies by Jonathon Rosenbaum
  118. The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
  119. A Preface to Morals by Walter Lippmann
  120. Present At the Creation by Dean Acheson
  121. Principia Ethica by G. E. Moore
  122. Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
  123. Private Parts by Howard Stern
  124. The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
  125. The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin
  126. Property Matters: How Property Rights Are Under Assault and Why You Should Care by James V. De Long
  127. Psychiatry: The Ultimate Betrayal by Bruce Wiseman
  128. Radical Son by David Horowitz
  129. Real Presences by George Steiner
  130. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R. H. Tawney
  131. Reverse Angle by John Simon
  132. Right From the Beginning by Patrick J Buchanan
  133. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
  134. Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics by Michael Novack
  135. The Rise of the West by William H. McNeill
  136. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
  137. The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
  138. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
  139. The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn
  140. Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate
  141. Science and Civilization In China by Joseph Needham
  142. The Second World War by Winston Churchill
  143. Selected Essays, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot
  144. Send In the Waco Killers by Vin Suprynowicz
  145. The Sense of An Ending by Frank Kermode
  146. Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families by Sheldon Richman
  147. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia
  148. Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison
  149. The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses by Alan Charles Kors
  150. Silent Interviews by Samuel R. Delany
  151. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  152. Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman
  153. Slats Grobnik and Some Other Friends by Mike Royko
  154. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
  155. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
  156. Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens
  157. The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward
  158. The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield
  159. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
  160. Studies In Iconology by Erwin Panofsky
  161. A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee
  162. The Sweet Science by A. J. Liebling
  163. The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking
  164. The Telephone Book by Avital Ronell
  165. The Texan by C. S. Barrios
  166. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
  167. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
  168. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
  169. The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
  170. The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon
  171. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose
  172. Under the Sign of Saturn by Susan Sontag
  173. Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
  174. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
  175. Vermeer by Lawrence Gowing
  176. Vindicating the Founders by Thomas West
  177. The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
  178. Waking and Dreaming by Joseph Hart
  179. Ways of Seeing by John Berger
  180. West With the Night by Beryl Markham
  181. The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
  182. The White Goddess by Robert Graves
  183. Why Government Doesn't Work by Harry Browne
  184. Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.
  185. Working by Studs Terkel