| 5 STARS | ||
| 1 | A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
| 2 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| 3 | The Lord of the Rings | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| 4 | Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| 5 | The Chronicles of Narnia | C. S. Lewis |
| 6 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas |
| 4 1/2 STARS | ||
| 7 | Gone With the Wind | Margaret Mitchell |
| 8 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| 9 | The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
| 10 | The Stand | Stephen King |
| 11 | Dune | Frank Herbert |
| 12 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| 13 | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand |
| 14 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| 15 | Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| 16 | Watership Down | Richard Adams |
| 17 | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë |
| 18 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| 19 | Deliverance | James Dickey |
| 20 | Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| 21 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy |
| 22 | The Cellist of Sarajevo | Steven Galloway |
| 23 | In Cold Blood | Truman Capote |
| 24 | Ragtime | E. L. Doctorow |
| 25 | An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser |
| 26 | Bleak House | Charles Dickens |
| 27 | The Blue Castle | Lucy Maude Montgomery |
| 28 | The Ox-Bow Incident | Walter Van Tilburg Clark |
| 29 | The Call of the Wild | Jack London |
| 4 STARS | ||
| 30 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy |
| 31 | The Oak Openings | James Fenimore Cooper |
| 32 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy |
| 33 | Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck |
| 34 | A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens |
| 35 | Something Wicked This Way Comes | Ray Bradbury |
| 36 | If on a Winter's Night a Traveller | Italo Calvino |
| 37 | American Pastoral | Philip Roth |
| 38 | Uncle Tom's Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe |
| 39 | Les Misérables | Victor Hugo |
| 40 | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain |
| 41 | Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| 42 | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury |
| 43 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison |
| 44 | Coraline | Neil Gaiman |
| 45 | The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles |
| 46 | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| 47 | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| 48 | The French Lieutenant's Woman | John Fowles |
| 49 | Nineteen Eighty Four | George Orwell |
| 50 | Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray |
| 51 | The Man Who Was Thursday | G. K. Chesterton |
| 52 | The Screwtape Letters | C. S. Lewis |
| 53 | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| 54 | The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers |
| 55 | The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway |
| 56 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad |
| 57 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| 58 | All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren |
| 59 | The Moon is a Harsh Mistress | Robert Heinlein |
| 60 | Cry, the Beloved Country | Alan Paton |
| 61 | Nicholas Nickleby | Charles Dickens |
| 62 | The Country of the Pointed Firs | Sarah Orne Jewett |
| 63 | Winnie the Pooh | A. A. Milne |
| 64 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh |
| 65 | Atonement | Ian McEwan |
| 66 | The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| 67 | The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 68 | Where the Red Fern Grows | Wilson Rawls |
| 69 | The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym | Edgar Allan Poe |
| 70 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow |
| 71 | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey |
| 72 | The Last of the Mohicans | James Fenimore Cooper |
| 73 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| 74 | Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather |
| 75 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| 76 | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy |
| 77 | Emma | Jane Austen |
| 78 | The House at Pooh Corner | A. A. Milne |
| 79 | The Princess Bride | William Goldman |
| 80 | The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett |
| 81 | Gadsby | Ernest Vincent Wright |
| 82 | An Antarctic Mystery | jules verne |
| 83 | The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story | Horace Walpole |
| 84 | Germinal | Émile Zola |
| 85 | Murder on the Orient Express | Agatha Christie |
| 86 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams |
| 87 | Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| 88 | Lost Horizon | James Hilton |
| 89 | Wives and Daughters | Elizabeth Gaskell |
| 90 | The Sea, The Sea | Iris Murdoch |
| 91 | Ratman's Notebooks (Willard) | Stephen Gilbert |
| 92 | The Clan of the Cave Bear | Jean M. Auel |
| 93 | Tom Jones | Henry Fielding |
| 94 | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame |
| 95 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov |
| 96 | Go Tell it on the Mountain | James Baldwin |
| 97 | Native Son | Richard Wright |
| 98 | The Old Curiosity Shop | Charles Dickens |
| 99 | Riders of the Purple Sage | Zane Grey |
| 100 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
Well, you did it...sort of. I like to think of my canon as my standard of literature, works that matter to me. But, yes, it is obviously very personal. Hence, "personal favorites" does the job.
ReplyDeleteOnes we share: In Cold Blood, P&P, AK, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Tale of Two Cities, Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies. I still need to read: Little Prince, David Copperfield, Les Miz, Atlas Shrugged, and Bleak House! I have a feeling many of those will end up on my PC, too.
I'm pretty sure you'll like all of those, except perhaps The Little Prince...but if I had to recommend one for you...I'd say Bleak House, the only Dickens novel written from a Female narrator's point of view. Thanks for checking out my list.
DeleteI know, I need to stop being intimidated by these big books.
DeleteI've tried reading The Little Price to my kids, and all of us were perplexed. So I quit. I mean to return to it, at least by myself.