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