100 Novels List

This regularly-updated list is part of a reading project begun in 2006, a project inspired by Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. I plan to read, and sometimes write about, 100 novels. Some of the novels I’m selecting come from various reading lists, including the list in Smiley’s book. Others are novels I’ve wanted to read, or new books coming out that I’ve bought. I also welcome any suggestions.

1. Atonement by Ian McEwan
2. The Bone People by Keri Hulme
3. The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan
4. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
5. The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
6. Windfall by James Magnuson
7. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
9. Good Faith by Jane Smiley
10. Moo! by Jane Smiley
11. Possession by A.S. Byatt
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
13. The Borderland by Edwin Shrake
14. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
15. Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose
16. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
17. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
18. How to be Good by Nick Hornby
19. The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart
20. Girls in Peril by Karen Lee Boren
21. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
22. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
23. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
24. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
25. A Changed Man by Francine Prose
26. Modern Baptists by James Wilcox
27. Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
28. Angels by Denis Johnson
29. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
30. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
31. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
32. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
33. Blindness by Jose Saramago
34. The New City by Stephen Amidon
35. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
38. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
39. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
40. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
41. Hound-dog Man by Fred Gipson
42. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
43. Dracula by Bram Stoker
44. The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White
45. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
46. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
47. Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
48. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
49. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
50. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
51. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
52. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
53. Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry
54. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence