There are few websites that are more trusted when it comes to books. It has made a name for itself and has made it easy to keep track of the books you are reading. Today, we decided to look at Goodreads’ 100 best books of all time list. Keep reading to find out which books made their list
The great thing about Goodreads is that their lists are often created by users voting. That is the best way in our opinion to make these lists. After browsing the list, it feels like a list my fellow readers would make. There are your typical books and a few surprises here and there. You can see the full list below.
Goodreads’ 100 Best Books of All Time
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Moby-Dick or, the Whale by Herman Melville
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Candide by Voltaire
- The Master and Margarita
- by Mikhail Bulgakov
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) by Chinua Achebe
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Blindness by José Saramago
- I, Claudius (Claudius, #1) by Robert Graves
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy, #3) by Willa Cather
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Middlemarch/Silas Marner/Amos Barton by George Eliot
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
- Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
- Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1) by Henry Miller
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
- The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
- Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Gilead (Gilead, #1) by Marilynne Robinson
- Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels by John Updike
- The Alexandria Quartet (The Alexandria Quartet, #1-4) by Lawrence Durrell
- Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
- V. by Thomas Pynchon
- Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
- The Forsyte Saga (The Forsyte Chronicles, #1-3) by John Galsworthy
- Adam Bede by George Eliot
- Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
- Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2) by Toni Morrison
- The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
- T he Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
- Therese Raquin by Émile Zola
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
- The Recognitions by William Gaddis
- The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
- Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
- Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
- Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
- JR by William Gaddis
- 1919 by John Dos Passos
- The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- The Tunnel by William H. Gass
- Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux
1984
A sci-fi novel that has risen to popularity in modern times is 1984 by George Orwell. When some ideas in this sci-fi and dystopian novel came true, people’s interest in the novel rose. The novel touches on issues such as mass surveillance, a controlling regime, and disinformation. When Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s mass surveillance of the public, the novel was mentioned by many and how it predicted the government spying on the public.
The Count of Monte Cristo
One of my favorite classics of all time has to be The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It is an adventure novel unlike anything else. The book is entertaining and has held up well centuries later. Who doesn’t love a good revenge story? Even after a couple centuries after it was published, this novel is still considered one of the best works of literature.
A Confederacy of Dunces
A book that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The novel was published 11 years after the author committed suicide. Toole’s mother repeatedly asked Walker Percy, an author and a college instructor to read it. When the novel was finally published, it was well received and Toole went on to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
That just goes to show you publishers don’t know anything about books. Toole’s story is a tragic tale of unrecognized talent. Now if you go to New Orleans, you will most likely see a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces a few times. One of the reasons I visited New Orleans was because of how Toole writes about the city in his novel.
The Maltese Falcon
It has been almost a century since hardboiled fiction novels have had their heyday. But the classics that these era produced are still worth reading such as The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel filled with lots of murder and blood. One of my favorite elements of a hardboiled fiction novel is the constant plot twists as if you are in a maze. There is never a dull moment and Dashiell Hammett’s novel delivers on all fronts.
Conclusion
That is all for the Goodreads’ best books of all time list. What did you make of the list and how many of these books have you read? What books should have made the list? Let us know in the comments below!