50 Must Reads

Here's a list that I'll probably argue with myself on several weeks from today. I won't say that these are the 50 best novels, but they are 50 that you should read. A few are novellas. Many great writers are not on the list. [I prefer the short stories of Hemingway and Faulkner to their novels.] The books are not ranked, but the first one deserves to be first.

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy


2. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad


3. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope


4. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens


5. Bleak House by Charles Dickens


6. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry


7. The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor


8. Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres


9. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco


10. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame


11. 1984 by George Orwell


12. I, Claudius by Robert Graves


13. Burmese Days by George Orwell


14. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope


15. The Road by Cormac McCarthy


16. The Warden by Anthony Trollope


17. The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor


18. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck


19. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe


20. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe


21. The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian


22. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel


23. The Known World by Edward P. Jones


24. The Time of the Assassins by Godfrey Blunden


25. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood


26. A River Town by Thomas Keneally


27. Provinces of Night by William Gay


28. Mendelssohn Is On The Roof by Jiri Weil


29. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens


30. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen


31. East of Eden by John Steinbeck


32. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck


33. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


34. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin


35. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa


36. Benito Cereno by Herman Melville


37. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


38. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole


39. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding


40. The Odyssey by Homer


41. Moby Dick by Herman Melville


42. Treblinka by Jean-Francois Steiner


43. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry


44. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman


45. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn


46. Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser


47. Fong and the Indians by Paul Theroux


48. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee


49. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor


50. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard