Labeling a book “great” is definitely a matter of opinion, but when you pile together the opinion of 13 other book-loving folks, you start to get somewhere close to credibility.
Alistofbooks.com went through the trouble of compiling 13 lists of the greatest books ever published using contributions from individuals and organizations ranging from The Harvard Book Store to the BBC.
Below, then, is one take on the 623 greatest books ever published–100 included below, and below that a link to the other 523.
In terms of classic and modern literature, this just might be the only reading list you ever need.
The 623 Greatest Books Of All Time
1. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
2. The Grapes Of Wrath (Steinbeck)
3. 1984 (Orwell)
4. Ulysses (Joyce)
5. Lolita (Nabokov)
6. Catch 22 (Heller)
7. The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
8. Beloved (Morrison)
9. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
10. To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
11. The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
12. 100 Years of Solitude (Marquez)
13. Brave New World (Huxley)
14. To the Lighthouse (Wolf)
15. Invisible Man (Ellison)
16. Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
17. Jane Eyre (Bronte)
18. On the Road (Kerouac)
19. Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
20. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
21. Middlemarch (Eliot)
22. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
23. Animal Farm (Orwell)
24. A Passage to India (Forster)
25. In Search of Lost Time (Proust)
26. Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
27. The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis)
28. The Color Purple (Walker)
29. Midnight’s Children (Rushdie)
30. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
31. Winnie the Pooh (Milne)
32. Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
33. Mrs. Dalloway (Wolf)
34. Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
35. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
36. Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
37. Moby Dick (Melville)
38. Little Women (Alcott)
39. Native Son (Wright)
40. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
41. Great Expectations (Dickens)
42.The Sun Rises (Hemmingway)
43. Rebecca (Maurier)
44. The Stranger (Camus)
45. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
46. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
47. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
48. Madame Bauvary (Flaubert)
49. The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
50. The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood)
51. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy)
52. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston)
53. A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving)
54. Emma (Jane Austen)
55. Copperfield (Dickens)
56. The Portrait of a Lady (James)
57. The Trial (Kafka)
58. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
59. A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
60. The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
61. Don Quixote (Cervantes)
62. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
63. His Dark Materials (Pullman)
64. Brideshead Revisited (Waugh)
65. The Golden Notebook (Lessing)
66. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
67. Things Fall Apart (Achebe)
68. Tom Jones (Fielding)
69. Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
70. Song of Solomon (Morrison)
71. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (Beckett)
72. Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce)
73. Absalom! Absalom! (Faulkner)
74. The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy, Gentleman
75. Charlotte’s Web (White)
76. The Ambassadors (James)
77. Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
78. A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway)
79. Women in Love (Lawrence)
80. Birdsong (Faulks)
81. Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)
82. Watership Down (Adams)
83. Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon)
84. Frankenstein (Shelley)
85. Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (Richardson)
86. The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
87. Dune (Herbert)
88. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
89. Go Tell it on the Mountain (Baldwin)
90. All the King’s Men (Warren)
91. The Magic Mountain (Mann)
92. The Call of the Wild (London)
93. The Tin Drum (Grass)
94. The 42nd Parallel (Passos)
95. Under the Volcano (Lowry)
96. Disgrace (Coetzee)
97. The Diary of a Young Girl (Ann Frank)
98. Bleak House (Dickens)
99. Light in August (Faulkner)
100. The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne
Read the rest of the article on a listofbooks.com