Here at Books of Brilliance, we love browsing through various lists to see how they fair as well as helping readers find books to read. That is why we will be looking at 100 must read classics chosen by Penguin Random House. Keep reading to see which novels made the list.
Before we dive into the list, we have to mention that this list actually has only 99 books on the list. The number 27 was skipped (by accident we imagine) and we can’t help but wonder what that book would have been. The list was compiled by data of readers of Penguin Random House. You can see the full list below.
100 Must Read Classics Chosen by Penguin Random House
- 1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
- 2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
- 3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- 4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
- 5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
- 6. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)
- 7. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
- 8. I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
- 9. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
- 10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
- 11. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
- 12. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
- 13. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)
- 14. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818)
- 15. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
- 16. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)
- 17. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
- 18. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
- 19. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)
- 20. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1823)
- 21. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966)
- 22. The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (1953)
- 23. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
- 24. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
- 25. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901)
- 26. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
- 28. The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse (1938)
- 29. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
- 30. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)
- 31. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
- 32. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860)
- 33. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
- 34. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
- 35. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
- 36. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
- 37. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
- 38. The Iliad by Homer (8th century BC)
- 39. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847)
- 40. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
- 41. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
- 42. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
- 43. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860)
- 44. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (1857)
- 45. Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
- 46. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862)
- 47. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964)
- 48. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1967)
- 49. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
- 50. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
- 51. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)
- 52. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880)
- 53. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
- 54. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
- 55. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
- 56. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)
- 57. Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith (1892)
- 58. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
- 59. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1827)
- 60. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
- 61. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)
- 62. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
- 63. The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
- 64. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (1922)
- 65. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (1962)
- 66. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
- 67. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1920)
- 68. Staying On by Paul Scott (1977)
- 69. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
- 70. My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918)
- 71. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
- 72. Perfume by Patrick Süskind (1985)
- 73. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867)
- 74. Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham (1915)
- 75. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
- 76. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (1837)
- 77. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (1973)
- 78. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
- 79. Silas Marner by George Eliot (1861)
- 80. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
- 81. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
- 82. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)
- 83. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (1974)
- 84. The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
- 85. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
- 86. Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (1904)
- 87. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
- 88. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (1944)
- 89. Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson (1939)
- 90. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878)
- 91. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)
- 92. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
- 93. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1854)
- 94. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
- 95. What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (1994)
- 96. The Godfather by Mario Puzo (1969)
- 97. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (2004)
- 98. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
- 99. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1848)
- 100. Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854)
A Multitude of Classics
If you love classics, then this is the list for you. There are a lot of solid selections throughout the list. I loved seeing some of my personal favorites make the list such as A Confederacy of Dunces and The Godfather. Both are amazing novels that are often forgotten on many lists.
A novel I was surprise to see on this list is The Secret History by Donna Tartt on the list. Mostly because it is much more modern and people are hesitant to label modern novels as classics often times. I feel justified including it on my list of must read classics.
Overall, this is a great list of classics. The list is consistent and yet includes a few surprises throughout. I love that and it keeps this list fresh and it even includes a novel from 2004! The readers of Penguin Random House have gotten respect after seeing this list!
Conclusion
That is all for the 100 must read classics chosen by Penguin Random House. What did you make of the list? Are there any classics that should have made the list? Let us know in the comments below!
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I think you forgot David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. Thank you for the list!🙏🏼
El ingenioso hidalgo, Don Quixote de la Mancha
The Good Earth by Pearl S. BUCK
Far Pavilions by MM Kaye
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher
Sea Hawk by Rafael Sabatini
Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier.
This list is another list that disproportionately highlights white authors. Yes there are authors of color, but only a few. Penguin can do better
I would have liked to see Hemingway’s ‘The old man and the sea’, featured in the list
Gibran Khalil Gibran : The Prophet. Translated into 22 languages. The most read book worldwide.500 million sold around the world.
Stockholm – Sweden.
How they FARE, not fair
I recently finished ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot. It should definitely be on the list of classics to read. Although having been written in the 19th century it retains a sagacious relevance even in the 21st. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Pretty good list but missing some really key books… No Don Quixote?? No Faulkner?? Where’s 1984?
I think Sound and the Fury must be included.
I recommend Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Is Beloved by Toni Morrison. It’s there on the penguin article with this list
Madam Bovary (Gustav Flaubert) and Swann’s Way (Proust)!
#27?
The Invisible Man?
Old man and the sea, zorba the Greek, sidhartha, The Stranger,
Where is Hemingway?
Choosing a beat book list is bound to exclude other worthy considerations. Not seen here is Gulliver’s Travels, a very adult fantasy by Jonathan Swift, The Trial, a companion piece to The Castle, and Dicken’s, A Tale of Two Cities.