Second Best? The MBR List of 101–200 Greatest Novels
What About the Books that Didn’t Make the Top 100? Here’s the MBR Shadow Canon
I was floored by your response to help build a curated list of the 100 best novels of all time. By the time the final votes were in, 126 of you suggested more than 400 novels. I tallied the votes, broke the ties with some subjective cultural evaluation, and published the list earlier this week. But what about the rest of the suggestions?
There’s a shadow canon lurking under the top 100, inspired by your eclectic reading tastes. A few readers asked about it and I decided it would be great to share. After all, besides arguing about the ranking that this or that novel received, the other activity such lists facilitate is discovery! What should I read next? The shadow canon has opinions about that question.
The ranking here was more subjective than the first. Many of these suggestions received only one and two votes apiece—meaning, I wasn’t just breaking some ties, I was ranking them almost wholly by myself based on perceived cultural value, the strength of individual novels compared to the runners-up, and so on. No ranking here is absolute; any could be contested. I don’t even agree with myself in some cases. Furthermore, if we discount the vote that established the first list, there’s a solid argument for many of these belonging in the top 100.
But stow all that for a moment. The big idea is an excuse to celebrate and share these additional suggestions of yours for our mutual benefit. As before, I’ve linked the novels I’ve reviewed.
Shadow Canon: The 101–200 Greatest Novels
101. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
102. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
103. The Trial (Franz Kafka)
104. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
105. Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol)
106. Demons (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
107. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
108. Nostromo (Joseph Conrad)
109. Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad)
110. Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)
111. Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann)
112. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
113. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
114. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
115. All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
116. Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
117. Light in August (William Faulkner)
118. Life and Fate (Vasily Grossman)
119. Petersburg (Andrei Bely)
120. Silas Marner (George Eliot)
121. The Betrothed (Alessandro Manzoni)
122. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
123. Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee)
124. Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee)
125. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
126. A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)
127. The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
128. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
129. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
130. The Human Stain (Philip Roth)
131. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
132. The Wings of the Dove (Henry James)
133. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
134. Herzog (Saul Bellow)
135. Henderson the Rain King (Saul Bellow)
136. Augustus (John Williams)
137. The Books of Jacob (Olga Tokarczuk)
138. Memoirs of Hadrian (Marguerite Yourcenar)
139. Austerlitz (W.G. Sebald)
140. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
141. Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler)
142. Shosha (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
143. The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal)
144. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)
145. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
146. The Man Without Qualities (Robert Musil)
147. The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse)
148. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
149. The Country Girls (Edna O’Brien)
150. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
151. The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
152. All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)
153. Howards End (E.M. Forster)
154. Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
155. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
156. Growth of the Soil (Knut Hamsun)
157. Underworld (Don DeLillo)
158. 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
159. The Last Samurai (Helen DeWitt)
160. The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
161. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy)
162. Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)
163. The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
164. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)
165. The Razor’s Edge (W. Somerset Maugham)
166. The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
167. The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)
168. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John le Carré)
169. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
170. Neuromancer (William Gibson)
171. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
172. Love in the Ruins (Walker Percy)
173. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
174. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
175. The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
176. The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
177. Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)
178. Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner)
179. Angle of Repose (Wallace Stegner)
180. And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)
181. A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean)
182. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
183. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)
184. Earthly Powers (Anthony Burgess)
185. The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick)
186. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin)
187. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
188. Titus Groan (Mervyn Peake)
189. The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
190. Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)
191. Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)
192. Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
193. North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)
194. Wives and Daughters (Elizabeth Gaskell)
195. The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)
196. Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
197. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
198. Plainsong (Kent Haruf)
199. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
200. Main Street (Sinclair Lewis)
My Initial Commentary
Somewhere in the afterlife Alessandro Manzoni is smiling upon us all. The Betrothed made the long list, and the psychosomatic torture I’ve endured lo these many days has finally abated. By my lights, it deserved a slot in the top 100, but I’ll take 121.
The shadow canon also made room for some folks whom the critics and academics would undoubtedly say belonged in the top 100: Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Proust (In Search of Lost Time), and Kafka (The Trial). I let them sniff the upper atmosphere of this second list because of their cultural standing.
In some ways this list is even more accessible than the first. For one thing, there are more recent novels, both popular and literary: The Last Samurai (2000), The Human Stain (2000), Austerlitz (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), Never Let Me Go (2005), The Road (2006), 2666 (2008 in English), The Goldfinch (2013), The Underground Railroad (2016), Pachinko (2017), and The Books of Jacob (2021 in English).
There are also more genre novels here. I clustered most of these in the second half of the stack with some exceptions—e.g., Bram Stoker’s Dracula deserves higher billing for its cultural importance. As for the others, there’s sci-fi, even cyberpunk (The Man in the High Castle, The Left Hand of Darkness, Neuromancer); mystery and noir (And Then There Were None and The Big Sleep); historical adventure (The Three Musketeers, The Last of the Mohicans, Kim); thriller and espionage (Darkness at Noon, The Quiet American, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy); the campus novel (The Secret History, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Lucky Jim); and even a couple fantasy novels (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Titus Groan).
But, despite the genre entries, there’s still plenty to please the professors. Modernism makes itself known, including several examples on the top half of the ladder, plus there are several postmodern favorites in this list as well, including DeWitt, Pynchon, and Mitchell. Of course, in keeping with the readerliness of the top 100, many of these are still quite accessible. Cloud Atlas practically turns its own pages.
In a way, of course, none of these labels really matter. One especially fun entry in this list? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, my June book for my big-ass classic novel goal. Originally published over eight years in nine volumes, from 1759–1767, Tristram Shandy foreshadows many of the experimental tricks and methods of the later modernists and postmodernists.
“It is certainly the maddest book ever written,” C.S. Lewis wrote his friend Arthur Greeves in 1916. “It gives you the impression of an escaped lunatic’s conversation while chasing his hat on a windy May morning.” Borges and Nabokov were still schoolboys in 1916, Flann O’Brien was in short pants, and Calvino and Pynchon were still years away from making their natal debuts. Madder books might come along, but Sterne was already there, providing stage direction. And one of you lovely readers ensured he made the list, along with my beloved Betrothed.
Let me know what you think of our shadow canon. Which shadow-canon entries tempt you most?
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If I’m scanning the top 200 correctly, Mark Twain is officially a one-hit wonder.
Why the hell did I read that 1000 page biography of him?)
I have read 20 of these, and have attempted a number of others (Proust, Joyce, Sterne) or have read multiple other works by the same author (Le Guin, Steinbeck), or otherwise know the work - for example, I know the 'Last of the Mohicans' from an abridged version that I used to borrow from the library as a child, which had vivid full-colour, full-page illustrations, and I have seen at least multiple film versions of Christie's 'And Then There Were None', as it made a great play.
What struck me about this list, was that the books are darker than those on the first list. There are exceptions: The Betrothed isn't dark and neither is Eliot's Silas Marner, or Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (which has the unique distinction of being highly respected, even beloved, while also being unfinished).
But The Road, Neuromancer, The Poisonwood Bible, Dracula, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Slaughterhouse Five, 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', The Old Man and the Sea, The Call of the Wild, The Bell Jar, The Big Sleep, The Razor's Edge, Far From the Madding Crowd, even Gaskell's North and South, are books that seemed to have an atmosphere filled with heavy gray clouds when I read them. That doesn't mean they were bad - several on the list I would or have read again - but their heaviness could be a burden when readers are already weighed down by life.
Two books in this list that were a disappointment: Waugh's Decline and Fall and Cold Comfort Farm. Both of them are from the same era and meant to be amusing satire. Decline and Fall was a pale version of P.G. Wodehouse, while Cold Comfort Farm was chaotic - both were too much of their era and the jokes no longer quite land.