The Guardian’s 100 Greatest Novels [30/100]
by Charlotte Reads Classics
Now here is a goal: The Guardian’s 100 Greatest Novels list. This is my favourite 100 list so far because I’ve read enough to not make me disheartened, there is plenty on it that I want to read and a few things I haven’t heard of or wouldn’t normally pick. So it is a challenge, but an achievable one. Plus, I always enjoy a list.
- Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes
- Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
- Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
- Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
- Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
- Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
- Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
- Emma, Jane Austen
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock
- The Black Sheep, Honore De Balzac
- The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
- Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli
- David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
- Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
- Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
- Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott
- The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
- Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
- Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
- The Diary of a Nobody, George Grossmith
- Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
- The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
- The Call of the Wild, Jack London
- Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
- The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
- In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust [In progress I, II]
- The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
- The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
- Ulysses, James Joyce
- Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
- A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway
- Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
- As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
- USA, John Dos Passos
- The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
- The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
- The Plague, Albert Camus
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
- Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
- Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
- Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
- Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White
- The Lord Of The Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
- Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
- Lord of the Flies, William Golding
- The Quiet American, Graham Greene
- On the Road, Jack Kerouac
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
- Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
- To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller
- Herzog, Saul Bellow
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John Le Carre
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- The Bottle Factory Outing, Beryl Bainbridge
- The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino
- A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul
- Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
- Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
- Lanark, Alasdair Gray
- The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
- The BFG, Roald Dahl
- The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
- Money, Martin Amis
- An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
- Haroun and the Sea af Stories, Salman Rushdie
- La Confidential, James Ellroy
- Wise Children, Angela Carter
- Atonement, Ian McEwan
- Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
- American Pastoral, Philip Roth
- Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
Charlotte Reads Classics 
I love the list that you’ve posted 🙂
I’ve set myself the Guardian’s “Top 100 books of all time” list as a challenge – it’s a lot more difficult than I expected! There are so many universal and diverse books, and I know that if I read them all I will have gained so much. It’s just a case of getting hold of the lesser-known books and motivating myself to read them…
I know what you mean, when I look at all the books on lists like that I just think I’ll have learnt so much by the time I get to the end. Although there are some books on the list that I think I’ll only read if I get really into the list! I did see the other list you mentioned but I thought that one seemed much trickier 😉
This is a really good list! And it seems achievable and not too silly. I’ve read 33 of them, so I’m pretty happy with that! 🙂
Yep good achievement… I can only get on board with lists that I’ve read at least a quarter!
That is a good list, and I’d have to agree with you that’s it’s not disheartening (though I’ve read less than you the others are popular enough to be appealing and/or already on the TBR).
Even better when you’ve already lined a few up ready TBR!
Great list. I’ve also read 29 (some different from yours) and really should complete this list.
It’d be really satisfying to be able to get to 100…
Oh wow, I love lists! I’m already working through a 100 Greatest list, but I’m not terribly far off finishing it (reckon I’ll finish 2013). This list is my next list! Thank you for posting it! 🙂
Me too, book lists are too compelling. Glad you’re going to attempt it too – you’ll spur me on!
Oh, that does look like a good list! If I weren’t dedicating myself to reading from my own personal project lists, this is one I would consider challenging myself to complete. Enjoy!
Thank you!
Some unexpected choices in this list like the Stendhal one. Scarlet and Black is usually the one that is considered his best. Likewise Daniel Deronda rather than Middlemarch is a surprise. But I agree with others that its a good list. A bit challenging in some part – I would have to really work at the Tristram Shandy
Agree, I like that it doesn’t always pick the most famous book of an author because I think that would inspire me to read the more well known ones too.
I found that the Guardian has a 1001 book list also. So when you’re done with the 100 hundred, you could always start on the bigger list knowing you’re a tenth of the way done!
Now that would be a life time commitment!