An Introduction to The 100 Greatest Books Challenge: The What, Why, and How

In mid-2011, I finished a wildly fascinating and completely useless Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics.

You’d think job searching and student loans would be the most stressful part of the months that followed, but they weren’t. For the first time in my life, I had exactly zero reading assignments cluttering my desk—no textbooks, no fiction, no poetry, no JSTOR articles. It felt freeing, and exhilarating, and deeply unsettling, all at once.

I had no idea where to begin—couldn’t even remember how—to select a book to read, out of ALL THE BOOKS EVER. There were so many. TOO many. And, in some weird conspiracy against my sanity, there were new ones being published EVERY DAY.

So I gave myself a reading assignment.

I found a list of classic novels at thegreatestbooks.org and pounced on it, thinking it would give me the opportunity to catch up on all the popular authors and cultural references that had fallen between the cracks of my studies. It lists The 100 Greatest Books of All Time, from Don Quixote to Midnight’s Children.

Many of these lists exist. The Observer, the Modern Library, the BBC, and TIME magazine have all published similar lists. I’m not even sure why I picked this one in the first place; if I’d looked at it any closer, I would have noticed four (four!) of Faulkner’s novels in prominent positions and deleted the site from my Google history.

But maybe Faulkner is an acquired taste, like coffee, and maybe I will learn to love him, unlike coffee. We shall see.

Faulkner aside, this list suits my project well: It was compiled based on 43 “Best Books of All Time” lists from around the internet and designed to allow readers to tick books off as they finish them. My goal, of course, is to read all 100, as eventually as it takes. This will be a space for me to share notes, reviews, recommendations, and cautionary tales for anyone interested in following me on my bittersweet journey from one end of my bookshelf to the other.

Will I love them all? No. If anything, I’m guessing a few of them could stand to be taken down a peg and I’m happy to help.

On the other hand, I’ve always suspected that reading the classics is a lot more fun when we choose to read them, with no quizzes or essays or book reports in sight.

With this in mind, the rules of The Challenge are as follows:

1. I must read all 100 books on The List in their entirety (duh).
2. I must read all volumes of each work, if the author considered them to be a single book. (This, unfortunately, is the case for The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien, three volumes—and In Search of Lost Time—Proust, six freaking volumes.)
3. I don’t have to reread any books I’ve read before. (Before beginning this List, I had only read 16/100 in full, despite majoring in World Literature as an undergrad. In all fairness to the American education system, however, I’ve read a handful of those 16 books multiple times, and several other books by the same authors. And I’ve read excerpts from another 18 books on The List. TBH, though, this rule is mainly my way of avoiding another slog through The Grapes of Wrath. Once was plenty, thanks.)
4. If I can’t remember whether I’ve already read one of the books on The List in full (which happens to be the case for The Odyssey and The Wind in the Willows), I have to (re)read them.
5. I can read the books in whatever order and format I wish, read multiple books at once, and take as long as I damn well please to read them all.
6. I have to read the French books in French. But for any other books originally written in a foreign language, I can choose any suitable translation.

*SPOILERS* abound among these posts, so be warned. Frankly, if you’re still wondering what happened to Moby Dick 150 years later, that’s kind of on you.

Here we go, in order of greatness: The 100 Greatest Books of All Time.

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Ulysses, James Joyce Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 1984, George Orwell War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Middlemarch, George Eliot One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf On the Road, Jack Kerouac Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck Moby Dick, Herman Melville Beloved, Toni Morrison The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James The Iliad, Homer Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner A Passage to India, E.M. Forster Native Son, Richard Wright Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf The Odyssey, Homer Catch-22, Joseph Heller A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen The Trial, Franz Kafka As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Emma, Jane Austen Nostromo, Joseph Conrad Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë Lord of the Flies, William Golding All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton The Aeneid, Virgil Tom Jones, Henry Fielding The Tin Drum, Günter Grass Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray The Call of the Wild, Jack London The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett Animal Farm, George Orwell Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Oedipus the King, Sophocles Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais U.S.A., John Dos Passos The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer Clarissa, Samuel Richardson Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence Finnegans Wake, James Joyce Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne Hamlet, William Shakespeare A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing Light in August, William Faulkner Rabbit, Run, John Updike The Stranger, Albert Camus Herzog, Saul Bellow Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin The Awakening, Kate Chopin A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe King Lear, William Shakespeare Dangerous Liaison, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie