Open Thread: 100 Best Novels, Seriously?
Let’s Create Our Own List of the 100 Best Novels in English
To both great fanfare and frustration—not to mention a little befuddlement—the Guardian has released its definitive list of the 100 best novels of all time published in English. Such lists largely exist for people to argue with, which seems appropriate; the only reason to voice an opinion is to provoke a reaction. So, let’s react.
Compare, Contrast
Cathy Young suggests some benefit in comparing the Guardian’s 2003 list of 100 greatest novels of all time to the paper’s most recent adventure. Indeed. Interestingly, the lists only overlap in thirty titles.
On both the 2003 list and the 2026 list, though in different positions:
Don Quixote (Cervantes), Tristram Shandy (Sterne), Emma (Austen), Frankenstein (Shelley), David Copperfield(Dickens), Wuthering Heights (Brontë), Jane Eyre (Brontë), Vanity Fair (Thackeray), Moby-Dick (Melville), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), The Portrait of a Lady (James), Jude the Obscure (Hardy), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), The Rainbow (Lawrence), The Good Soldier (Ford), Ulysses (Joyce), Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), The Trial (Kafka), Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), Lolita(Nabokov), Things Fall Apart (Achebe), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Spark), Catch-22 (Heller), One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), Song of Solomon (Morrison), Housekeeping (Robinson), Austerlitz (Sebald).
Now, I studied communications in college, but this math is pretty easy. If only thirty titles made the new cut, that means seventy fell off the list. Some of the new titles on the list are by authors whose prior selections were culled, but fifty-nine fell off entirely:
The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), Tom Jones (Fielding), Clarissa(Richardson), Dangerous Liaisons (Laclos), Nightmare Abbey (Peacock), The Black Sheep (Balzac), The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal), The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), Sybil (Disraeli), The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), The Woman in White (Collins), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), Little Women (Alcott), The Way We Live Now (Trollope), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson), Three Men in a Boat (Jerome), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), The Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith), The Riddle of the Sands (Childers), The Call of the Wild (London), The Wind in the Willows (Grahame), The Thirty-Nine Steps (Buchan), Journey to the End of the Night (Céline), Brave New World (Huxley), Scoop (Waugh), USA (Dos Passos), The Big Sleep (Chandler), The Pursuit of Love (Mitford), The Plague (Camus), Malone Dies (Beckett), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), Wise Blood (O’Connor), Charlotte’s Web (White), The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), Lucky Jim (Amis), Lord of the Flies (Golding), On the Road (Kerouac), The Tin Drum (Grass), To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), Herzog (Bellow), Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (Taylor), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (le Carré), The Bottle Factory Outing (Bainbridge), The Executioner’s Song (Mailer), Lanark (Gray), The New York Trilogy (Auster), The BFG (Dahl), The Periodic Table (Levi), Money (Amis), Oscar and Lucinda (Carey), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kundera), L.A. Confidential (Ellroy), Wise Children (Carter), Atonement (McEwan), Northern Lights (Pullman), American Pastoral (Roth).
As far as authors who hung on, though their favored books were changed, we’ve got these eleven:
Daniel Deronda (Eliot), Nostromo (Conrad), A Passage to India (Forster), Men Without Women (Hemingway), As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), The Quiet American (Greene), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Calvino), A Bend in the River (Naipaul), Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), An Artist of the Floating World (Ishiguro), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie).
Here are the new titles for each of those:
Middlemarch (Eliot), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), Howards End (Forster), A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), The End of the Affair (Greene), Invisible Cities (Calvino), A House for Mr Biswas (Naipaul), Disgrace (Coetzee), Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro), Midnight's Children (Rushdie).
As it happens, I’ve only read twenty-two books on the 2026 list; I’ve got several others in the chamber as part of my big-ass classic novel goal for this year, including Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. I’m reading Tom Jones right now. It fell off the 2026 list, which seems a pity; it’s great.
A hundred and one reasons might explain these changes. For starters, the earlier list was the product of one critic, Robert McCrum. And the new list? “We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank their choices in order of preference,” said the paper. “We scored the titles according to how often they were voted for, and then added a weighting based on individual rankings to produce the overall list of 100 greatest books.” That alone would be enough to account for the discrepancies, but there are undoubtedly cultural currents swirling the mix, plus other factors as well.
New books clamber up the register, while others lose their footing. But what’s missing? I was somewhat surprised that Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed was on neither list. Same with Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. And there’s no Shusaku Endo either! Outrageous, really. That got me thinking about everything else missing— and that’s where you come in.
What Would Our Own List Look Like?
I don’t know if this will work; it’ll depend entirely on your reaction and engagement. There were hundreds of reactions when I asked about your favorite children’s stories. That’s what we’re going to need to pull this off.
Here’s what I suggest: Let’s have everyone who cares to—and that’ll need to be a substantial number of you—suggest the five-to-seven best novels in English; as with the Guardian’s list this can include novels in translation.
There are no right or wrong answers—just what you regard as best. We’ll leave this open for several days, and then I’ll compile the list and report on the findings, hopefully by middle of next week.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share it with your friends (especially if they have strong opinions about lists).
Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. I’ll send you my top-fifteen quotes about books and reading. Thanks again!