
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.
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
- The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
- Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- 1984 by George Orwell
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- Burmese Days by George Orwell
- The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- The Warden by Anthony Trollope
- The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
- A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
- The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
- The Time of the Assassins by Godfrey Blunden
- The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
- A River Town by Thomas Keneally
- Provinces of Night by William Gay
- Mendelssohn Is On The Roof by Jiri Weil
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
- Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
- Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Treblinka by Jean-Francois Steiner
- Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
- Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
- Fong and the Indians by Paul Theroux
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
- City Primeval by Elmore Leonard
4 comments:
Good list. I'm ashamed how many I haven't read.
Thank you!!!
& also to the great Cultural Offering for this handy tip (print & take to library!) http://culturaloffering.com/2010/08/19/your-reading-list-starts-here.aspx?ref=rss
12 Down 38 to go. Please send me some time. E.
I've read nine of them! That only leaves 41. I wonder how many I can get on my Kindle for free because they are in the public domain... Hmmm...
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