Greatest Books algorithm

Other Names: Greatest Book algorithm, Greatest Books algo
209 Works 4,461,577 Books 68,503 Reviews 4.1
This list is generated from 128 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists show more count more than others. I generally trust "best of all time" lists voted by authors and experts over user-generated lists. On the lists that are actually ranked, the book that is 1st counts a lot more than the book that's 100th. show less
WorkOrder Label
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1
Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
2
Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
3
In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
3
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
5
Moby Dick (2014) by Herman Melville
6
War and Peace (1869) by León Tolstói
7
Hamlet (1603) by William Shakespeare
8
The Odyssey (750 BCE) by Homer
9
Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
10
The Divine Comedy (1308) by Dante Alighieri
11
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
12
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
13
Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
14
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
15
Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen
17
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
18
Anna Karenina (1875) by León Tolstói
19
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
20
The Iliad (750 BCE) by Homer
21
To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
22
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
23
Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad
24
The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner
25
1984 (1949) by George Orwell
26
Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens
27
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (2001) by Richard Burton
28
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
29
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner
30
Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
31
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
32
The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
33
The Red and the Black (1830) by Stendhal
34
Middlemarch (1871) by George Eliot
35
Gulliver's Travels (1996) by Jonathan Swift
36
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
37
Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
38
Stories (1889) by Anton Chekhov
39
The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus
40
Jane Eyre (1960) by Charlotte Brontë
41
The Aeneid (29 BCE) by Virgil
42
Collected Fictions (1988) by Jorge Luis Borges
43
The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
44
David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens
45
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) by Laurence Sterne
46
Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman
47
The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann
48
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce
49
Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
50
Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) by Sophocles
51
Candide (1759) by Voltaire
52
The Lord of the Rings (1954) by J. R. R. Tolkien
53
The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
54
Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo
55
A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
56
The Old Man and the Sea (1950) by Ernest Hemingway
57
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe
58
Emma (1815) by Jane Austen
59
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway
60
The Complete Stories (1971) by Franz Kafka
61
The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
62
The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James
63
Frankenstein (2022) by Mary Shelley
64
Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
65
Antigone (441) by Sophocles
66
As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
67
The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker
68
Demons (1871) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
69
Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell
70
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
71
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
72
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1824) by Edgar Allan Poe
73
The Age of Innocence (2008) by Edith Wharton
74
Dead Souls (1842) by Nikolai Vassilievitx Gogol
75
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
76
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
77
Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
78
Orlando: A Biography (1928) by Virginia Woolf
79
The Canterbury Tales (1380) by Geoffrey Chaucer
80
Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray
81
Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry
82
The Waste Land and Other Poems (1922) by T. S. Eliot
83
A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway
84
Journey to the End of the Night (1983) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
85
The Castle (1925) by Franz Kafka
86
Sentimental Education (1869) by Gustave Flaubert
87
The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
88
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
89
The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood
90
Charlotte's Web (1952) by E. B. White
91
Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
92
The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) by Stendhal
93
Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton
94
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) by François Rabelais
95
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) by Emily Dickinson
96
Faust I & II (1808) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97
Rebecca (1938) by Daphne Du Maurier
98
The Flowers of Evil (1936) by Charles Baudelaire
99
The Decameron (1469) by Giovanni Boccaccio
100
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy
101
Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (1953) by Samuel Beckett
102
Robinson Crusoe (1994) by Daniel Defoe
103
The Master and Margarita (1966) by Mikhail Bulgakov
108
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
110
A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole
124
All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
126
Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott
128
Tender is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
132
The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen
147
A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) by John Irving
151
Rabbit Is Rich (1981) by John Updike
153
Doctor Zhivago (1957) by Boris Pasternak
154
The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus
166
The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro
177
Look Homeward, Angel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe
182
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde
189
An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser
207
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
209
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
213
The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition (1990) by Stephen King
214
The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irving
230
Moll Flanders (1722) by Daniel Defoe
247
The Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand
275
The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells
280
Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
281
Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
282
I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves
283
Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
285
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997) by J. K. Rowling
304
The Once and Future King (1940) by T. H. White
305
Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand
312
Crash (1973) by J. G. Ballard
318
The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver
320
Oliver Twist (1837) by Charles Dickens
327
Song of Solomon (1977) by Toni Morrison
334
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy
339
The Godfather (1969) by Mario Puzo
347
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum
353
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons
388
Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson
394
We (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin
397
Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice
411
Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) by Dorothy Allison
412
Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler
419
Hawaii (1959) by James A. Michener
427
Underworld (1992) by Peter Conrad
467
Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) by Thomas Malory
469
The Shining (1977) by Stephen King
495
Franny and Zooey (1955) by J. D. Salinger
526
Jazz (1992) by Toni Morrison
540
Ivanhoe (1819) by Sir Walter Scott
541
Arrowsmith (1925) by Sinclair Lewis
542
Written on the Body (1992) by Jeanette Winterson
591
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
600
Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn
643
Sula (1973) by Toni Morrison
649
Play It As It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion
666
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson
688
Time and Again (1970) by Jack Finney
699
Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand
706
The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison
717
The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
735
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder
750
The Lottery and Other Stories (1949) by Shirley Jackson
793
Beowulf (1000) by Beowulf Poet
801
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams
812
East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck
819
The Mists of Avalon (1982) by Marion Zimmer Bradley
836
The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth
848
The Turn of the Screw, and Other Short Novels (1962) by Henry James
867
Jurassic Park (1990) by Michael Crichton
907
Delta of Venus (1969) by Anaïs Nin
1171
Sexing the Cherry (1989) by Jeanette Winterson
1173
Quo Vadis (1895) by Henryk Sienkiewicz
1182
The Cider House Rules (1985) by John Irving
1342
At the Mountains of Madness [novella] (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft
1362
The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall
1385
Story of O (1954) by Pauline Réage
1435
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson
1467
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) by J. K. Rowling
1504
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) by J. K. Rowling
1505
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) by J. K. Rowling
1513
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) by J. K. Rowling
1523
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) by J. K. Rowling
1524
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) by J. K. Rowling
1525
The Little Stranger (2009) by Sarah Waters
1530
It (1986) by Stephen King
1534
The Alienist (1994) by Caleb Carr
1547
Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) by Rita Mae Brown
1550
Swan Song (1987) by Robert R. McCammon
1788
Valley of the Dolls (1966) by Jacqueline Susann
1800
Watchers (1987) by Dean Koontz
1819
Red Dragon (1981) by Thomas Harris
1841
Misery (1987) by Stephen King
1876
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987) by Fannie Flagg
1881
Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton
1889
Burr (1973) by Gore Vidal
1919
This Side of Paradise (1920) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1941
The Eighth Day (1967) by Thornton Wilder
2002
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson
2193
Good Omens (1990) by Terry Pratchett
2201
Cat's Eye (1988) by Margaret Atwood
2237
Black Water (1992) by Joyce Carol Oates
2259
Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany
2270
The Martian Chronicles (1950) by Ray Bradbury
2329
The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons
2463
Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood
2507
Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens
2535

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1001(8,916) 1001 books(9,705) 19th century(21,559) 20th century(20,934) adventure(11,731) American(13,977) American literature(22,806) British(14,676) British literature(13,924) children(7,719) children's(12,296) classic(80,306) classic literature(11,089) classics(88,910) drama(7,847) dystopia(13,333) ebook(12,268) England(14,442) English(10,707) English literature(15,382) fantasy(100,052) favorites(11,784) fiction(372,293) goodreads(9,052) hardcover(8,376) Harry Potter(28,550) historical fiction(18,258) horror(21,877) humor(10,542) Kindle(10,293) literature(69,900) magic(23,225) novel(63,298) own(18,766) owned(9,574) paperback(8,482) poetry(26,129) read(48,443) Roman(9,721) romance(13,210) Russia(7,673) Russian literature(10,127) satire(8,304) science fiction(42,650) series(11,017) to-read(136,075) unread(15,484) wizards(9,043) ya(8,338) young adult(16,394)

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