Here is a list of 623 books! A List of Books.

This is actually 13 Top 100 lists combined, which always makes me wonder who makes up these lists and what criteria do they use?

Let’s take a look at one list and see if we can figure it out.

The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2004), written by Daniel S. Burt. Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, where he has also taught literature courses since 1989.

He also decided to make his definition of “novel” very narrow and include, basically, books the represent life as we know it, rather than get into anything too “speculative.” He does include a few classics of speculative fiction (i.e., Dracula), but he excluded works that seemed to veer too much from primarily naturalistic and contemporary-oriented narratives, thus excluding from consideration most science fiction and fantasy. Books such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Card’s Ender’s Game, Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Frank Herbert’s Dune were excluded from consideration as “novels.”

Here is his list:

1 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2 War and Peace byLeo Tolstoy
3 Ulysses by James Joyce
4 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5 The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky
6 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
7 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
8 Middlemarch by George Eliot
9 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
10 The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
11 Emma by Jane Austen
12 Bleak House by Charles Dickens
13 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
14 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
15 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
16 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
17 Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
18 The Ambassadors by Henry James
19 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
21 To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
22 Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky
23 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
24 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
25 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
26 Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
27 The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
28 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
29 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
30 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
31 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
32 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
33 Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
34 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
35 Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
36 Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
37 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
38 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
39 The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
40 Molloy Malone Dies The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
41 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
42 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
43 Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
44 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
45 Beloved by Toni Morrison
46 An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
47 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
48 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
49 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
50 Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
51 The Trial by Franz Kafka
52 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
53 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
54 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
55 Petersburg by Andrey Bely
56 Things Fall Apart by Chinue Achebe
57 The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
58 The Stranger by Albert Camus
59 My Antonia by Willa Cather
60 The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
61 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
62 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
63 The Awakening by Kate Chopin
64 A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
65 Herzog by Saul Bellow
66 Germinal by Emile Zola
67 Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
68 U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
69 Hunger by Knut Hamsun
70 Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
71 Cities of Salt by ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif
72 The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
73 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
74 Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75 The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
76 The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
77 Robinson Crusoe by by Daniel Defoe
78 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79 Candide by Voltaire
80 Native Son by Richard Wright
81 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
82 Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
83 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
84 Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
85 Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari
86 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
87 The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
88 The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
89 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
90 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
91 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
92 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
93 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
95 The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
96 The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
97 Dracula by Bram Stoker
98 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
99 The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
100 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Obviously, this is a subjective list, and after editing this so it would fit on the blog, I probably won’t be sharing all the lists. However, are there books on here that are your favorites?

I personally LOVE Gone with The Wind, Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Great Gatsby and of course, Pride and Prejudice. There are a few on here I’ve always meant to read, too.

I’d love to hear your opinions.