100 Must-Read Classic Novels

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides

by Nick Rennison

100 Must-Read Classic Novels

Want to become a classic novel buff, or expand your reading of some of the finest novels ever published? With 100 of the best titles fully reviewed and a further 500 recommended, you'll quickly set out on a journey of discovery.

Genres: Reference, Books About Books, Nonfiction, Literature

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller. His books include Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography, Robin Hood: Myth, History, Culture, The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide and 100 Must-Read Historical Novels. He is a regular reviewer of historical fiction for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant]

My life amidst the chortling waterfalls of the happy world of novels so far - a personal taxonomy entitled

Novelists I have loved, lost, loathed or utterly misunderstood

aka

A Friday Night Frolick

1.You would have to pay me to read these people now

Jack Kerouac
John Irving
Garrison keillor
John Steinbeck

2. Once was Enough

Iris Murdoch
Donna tartt
Nicola barker
Anthony Burgess
Michael Chabon
JM Coetzee
Barbara Kingsolver
David Mitchell*
Haruki Marakami*
Thomas Keneally
James Kelman

*actually, a half was enough

3. I should read these but I think I'll hate them

Thomas Pynchon
Alan Hollinghurst
Thomas mann
The Russians (all of them)
John barth

4. I think these are past their sell-by date for me

Doris lessing
Hemingway
F Scott Fitzgerald
William Burroughs
Albert Camus

5. Two Remarkably dull writers

Penelope Fitzgerald
Peter Hoeg

6. You're hot and you're cold, you're in and you're out

Joyce Carol Oates
Philip Roth

7. Am in Awe Of

Mervyn peake
Richard Price
Charles Dickens
James joyce
Virginia Woolf
Henry james

8. Encounters with the devil aka Black Holes of Despair aka The Opposite of Writing

Paul Auster
Thomas bernhardt
Dennis Cooper

9. Whack jobs I Like

Flann O'Brien
Beryl Bainbridge
Nicholson Baker
Harry crews
Alasdair Gray
JD Salinger
Mathew Stokoe

10. For future investigation

Iain banks
BS Johnson
RK Narayan
Michel Houellebecq
AM Homes
Irvine Welsh
Rebecca West
George Pelecanos
Edith Wharton
Hillary Mantel (I think we got off on the wrong foot)
James Ellroy (I think I love this guy - one more will confirm it)

11. Avantgardists who beat me at armwrestling, ate my wife and slept with my food

David Bowman
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Italo Calvino
Steve Erickson
David Markson
Kathy Acker
Lance Olson
Alexander theroux
John hawkes

12. Panjandrums, Grand Wazoos, and Victorian Romper-stompers

Brontes
Wilkie Collins
D H Lawrence
EM Forster
Emile Zola (didn't have no motorola)

13. The honest good guy novelists who no one takes much notice of

Pete dexter
Graham Swift
Barry unsworth

14. In like but not in love

EL Doctorow
Jonathan Frankenzen
Kurt Vonnegut

15. I suppose I should give these an actual go but it would be like homework

Conrad
Graham greene
Kasuo ishiguro
Orwell

16. Great one-hit wonders I'd be scared to try anything else by

Theodore Dreiser
Gustave Flaubert
Carson McCullers*
William Godwin
Sarah waters
Evelyn Waugh
Joseph heller
Andrea levy
John Lindqvist
Tom Wolfe
Flannery O'Connor*
Charles palliser
Hubert Selby Jr*
Nabokov
VS Naipaul
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Harper Lee (no one got the chance to try anything else by her)

*I did try one other book by these and it went very badly

17. I will read anything by

Rohinton Mistry
Michel Faber

18. I humbly vow that I will give these a proper go one day

David Foster Wallace
William Faulkner
Iain Sinclair
JG Ballard
Georges Perec
Mark Helprin

19. I need more of these in my life, why O why am I wasting my time reading about pop music and true crime

Virginia Woolf
Edna O'Brien
Jose saramago

20. Regarded with a wary respect like a stately bull in a field you have to traverse

Cormac McCarthy
Martin Amis
Don DeLillo
Margaret Atwood
Saul bellow
Salman Rushdie

21. I know I read this guy but I can't remember a damn thing

Robertson Davies

22. They swung in the sixties but are they still swingin' now?

John Fowles
Alan Sillitoe


23. My mad dreams of scaling the north face of the Eiger one sweet day

Proust
Late James

24. Big guys with lots of muscles who will kick sand in my face for sure

William Gaddis
Robert Musil

25. Freaks and geeks I have yet to party with

Gilbert Sorrentino
Raymond Queneau
Will Self
William H. Gass
Samuel beckett

26. I already have the shallow grave marked out for

Mr Brett...Easton...Ellis !! (applause)


27. If I hear his name one more time I will scream

Ian McEwan

28. If I hear her name one more time I will scream


Jane Austen

[Manny]

I saw this bandwagon going past, and before I knew what had happened I'd jumped on it...

Everything worth learning, you learned at primary school
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Lewis Carroll
E. Nesbit
Astrid Lindgren
Gunilla Bergström
Dominique de Saint-Mars
J.R.R. Tolkien
A.A. Milne
Aesop
Jules Verne
Rudyard Kipling
Beatrix Potter
Captain W.E. Johns
Tove Jansson

Show respect or things could get ugly
Marcel Proust
Vladimir Nabokov
Anthony Powell
Dante Aligheri
Marguerite Yourcenar
William Shakespeare
Jan Kjærstad
Albert Cohen
Helge Kragh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
T.S. Eliot
Geoffrey Chaucer

Inexplicably perfect
Jean Anouilh
Vikram Seth
Boris Vian
J.P. Donleavy
Samuel Beckett
Don Marquis
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Henry Beard
Lev Polugayevsky
David Edgar
Stephen Potter
Tomi Ungerer
Marjane Satrapi
Edmond Rostand
Trevanian
Mark Twain
Frans G. Bengtsson
John Sladek

Avoid at parties
J.K. Rowling
Stephenie Meyer
Ayn Rand
Pauline Réage
C.S. Lewis
Philip Pullman
Suzanne Collins
Dan Brown
Jeffrey Archer
James A. Michener
Paul Coelho

Still recovering
David Foster Wallace
Carroll Quigley
Roger Penrose
Winston Churchill
John Milton
Marguerite Duras
Leo Tolstoy
Lawrence Durrell
A.S. Byatt
James Joyce

Unrepeatable experiences
Yasunari Kawabata
Ben Marcus

Can I play too?
Raymond Queneau
Jasper Fforde
Georges Perec
Christian Bök
Richard Feynman
Garry Kasparov

We should meet more often
Cormac McCarthy
Alexandre Dumas
Nicholson Baker
Franz Kafka
Thomas Pynchon
George Eliot
Stendhal
John Lanchester
Immanuel Kant
Georges Simenon
Richard Powers
Michael Chabon
Voltaire
Alison Bechdel
China Miéville
Guy de Maupassant
Virginia Woolf
Lars Saabye Christensen
George MacDonald Fraser
Honoré de Balzac
Emile Zola
André Gide
Kingsley Amis
Tom Wolfe
Selma Lagerlöf

Can't live with them, can't live without them
Ian McEwan
Stieg Larsson
Iain Banks
Richard Dawkins
Martin Amis
Michel Houellebecq
J.G. Ballard
Knut Hamsun
John le Carré
Simone de Beauvoir
Jean-Paul Sartre
David Lodge
Michel Brice
John Updike
P.D. James
Ted Hughes
Tonino Benacquista
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Iris Murdoch
August Strindberg
Henrik Ibsen

Why can't I be a feminist?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Margaret Atwood
Faye Weldon
Sylvia Plath
Liza Marklund

Where's my good old gang done gone?
Kurt Vonnegut
Walter M. Miller
Frank Herbert
Robert Heinlein
Isaac Asimov
Mario Puzo
George Orwell
Arthur Conan Doyle
Douglas Adams
Thomas M. Disch
Cordwainer Smith
Aldous Huxley
Jorges Luis Borges
Olaf Stapledon
Doris Lessing
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Erica Jong
Philip K. Dick
Norman Spinrad
Larry Niven
Brian Aldiss
Joseph Heller
Fredrik Pohl
James Blish
Harlan Ellison
Stanislaw Lem
C.M. Kornbluth
Larry Niven
Harry Harrison
John Wyndham
Ray Bradbury
John Brunner
Robert Sheckley
Roger Zelazny
Poul Anderson
H.G. Wells
George Bernard Shaw
Michael Moorcock
Arthur C. Clarke
Philip José Farmer
Alfred Bester
Zenna Henderson

It's not you, it's me
Charles Dickens
William Thackeray
Anthony Trollope
Albert Camus
William Faulkner
Various Brontës
Jean Racine

It's not me, it's you
Raymond Radiguet

I know, okay?
James Joyce

[Stephen M]

Stolen from MJ who Stole from the Ingenious Trendsetter Mr. Bryant:

Authors for Whom I Have a Borderline Personality Disorder Type of Love
David Mitchell
David Foster Wallace
Sylvia Plath
Virginia Woolf
Haruki Murakami

Loved Me Passionately But Didn’t Call the Next Morning
Thomas Pynchon
James Joyce

I Appreciate You. What Else Do You Want From Me? Don’t Get too Close.
Raymond Carver
Flannery O’Connor
Tobias Wolff

It’s Complicated
Don Delillo
Jonathan Franzen
Dave Eggers

Don’t Let my High-Brow Friends See Me Loving You!
John Green
J.K. Rowling

Hey Girls, Not All Men Are Patriarchal Pigs. I’d Love You With All the Sensitivity You Deserve
Anne Carson
Adrienne Rich

If You Ever Stop Writing, Some Puppies Are Gonna Get Hurt
Vernon D. Burns

I Wanna Be Cool Too!
Jean-Paul Sartre
Albert Camus
Franz Kafka

Want to Scream My Hate From the Highest Mountaintop
Ayn Rand

I’d Write a Dissertation on Your Grocery Lists
Billy Collins

Pomo Circle Jerkin’
Mark Z. Danielewski
Paul Auster
Italo Calvino

Why?
Hemingway
Stephen King
D.H. Lawrence
George Orwell
John Banville
Ray Bradbury
Nathaniel Hawthorne

We Have a Special Future Together (once I get around to actually reading more of you!)
Dostoyevsky
Richard Powers
B.S. Johnson
Knut Hamsun
China Mieville
Carson McCullers
Michel Faber
Joseph McElroy

New Kids on the Block had a Couple of Hits
Ryan Boudinot
Amelia Gray
Wells Tower
Karen Russell
Paul Murray

Eh, meh, mah, ummm, I mean, yeah, I guess, I mean Know, I know
Jonathan Safran Foer
Gary Shteyngart

Where is the Planet Earth?
Ben Marcus
Brain Evenson

That Nostalgic Childhood Love, the Best Kind
J.D. Salinger
Avi

Ughh.... Mom! Do I have to???
Phillip Roth
Jane Austen
Dickens

Ya’ll Just a Bunch a Freaky Geniuses
Gabriel García Marquez
William Faulkner
Vladimir Nabokov
Cormac McCarthy
Jorge Luis Borges

Sci-Fi Feminists are freakin’ Sexy
Ursula K. Le Guin
Octavia E. Butler
Margaret Atwood

[MJ Nicholls]

An irresistible opportunity for pointless listing, stolen from Mr. P Bryant:

Cherries to Pop

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Jorge Lois Borges
3. Virginia Woolf
4. Manuel Puig
5. Samuel Beckett

Make-or-Break Next Books

1. John Barth
2. Donald Barthelme
3. Charlotte Brontë
4. Gustave Flaubert
5. Leo Tolstoy
6. Colette
7. John Hawkes
8. Stanley Elkin
9. George Saunders
10. Jeanette Winterson
11. Tom McCarthy

Desperately Seeking a Second Book

1. Laurence Sterne
2. Lydia Davis
3. Guy de Maupassant
4. Joseph Heller
5. Tatyana Tolstaya
6. Emmanuel Bove
7. Richard Powers
8. Stendhal
9. Kathy Acker
10. Micheline Aharonian Marcom
11. D. Keith Mano
12. Stanley Crawford
13. Stacy Richter
14. David Shields
15. Rupert Thomson
16. J.M. Coetzee
17. Aldous Huxley
18. George Orwell
19. Boris Vian
20. Robert Coover

Creeping into the Canon

1. Miguel de Cervantes
2. Francois Rabelais
3. Ivan Turgenev
4. Jane Austen
5. George R. Gissing
6. Jaroslav Hašek

Mike Puma’s Southern Fried Chickitas (& Spaniards)

1. Enrique Vila-Matas
2. Javier Marías
3. César Aira
4. Juan Goytisolo
5. Alejandro Zambra

The Great American Dullards Standards

1. William Faulkner
2. John Irving
3. Harper Lee
4. Norman Mailer
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Saul Bellow
7. Truman Capote

Dalkey Archive Alliances

1. William H. Gass
2. William Gaddis
3. Rikki Ducornet
4. David Markson
5. Alexander Theroux
6. Curtis White
7. Nicholas Mosley

Done With for the Foreseeable Future

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Martin Amis
3. Émile Zola
4. Raymond Queneau
5. Harry Mathews
6. Tom Robbins
7. Chuck Palahniuk
8. Thomas Hardy
9. J.G. Ballard
10. Italo Calvino

[Cecily]

I probably won't read this, but inspired by Paul Bryant's review (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) and a trio of others in the same style (MJ Nicholls, http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..., and
Stephen M, http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..., and Manny, http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), here's my first draft in a similar vein:


Put off for too long, but then enjoyed
Miguel Cervantes (Don Quixote)
Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange)
Franz Kafka
Albert Camus
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fell for the hype – and wished I hadn’t
Joshua Ferris
Sophie Kinsella
Julian Fellowes
John Boyne
Joseph Connolly
Brett Easton Ellis
Marina Lewycka

Guilty pleasure
(I'm sure there ought to be something for this category - watch this space)

Guilty dislike
Proust (I prefer Monty Python: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4...)
Virginia Woolf

Guilty
Vladimir Nabakov

Different every reread
Margaret Drabble
Mark Haddon
Franz Kafka

Different every book
David Mitchell
William Nicholson
Arnold Bennett

One-hit wonders (in terms of my liking them)
Cormac McCarthy
Aldous Huxley

Wrote too little
Mervyn Peake
Carson McCullers
Franz Kafka
Charlotte Bronte
Elizabeth Bowen
Richard Yates
Marghanita Laski

Wrote too much
Douglas Adams
Gene Brewer

I'm not at school any more
Jane Austen
William Shakespeare

Grim – but amazing
Ian McEwan
Anthony Burgess

It’s all a blur - I don’t want what he’s having
Dave Eggers
Charles Bukowski
Raymond Carver

Never would have read without GoodReads
Walter Moers = good
Lisa See = good
Kathryn Stockett =good
Pearl Buck = good
Mark Dunn = bad
Louisa May Alcott = bad
Suzanne Collins = very bad

Need to find another career
Neil Jordan (and he has one)

Pretentious poppycock
Jasper Fforde
Paul Coelho
Richard Bach

Style over substance
Ivy Compton-Burnett
George Grossmith
Bill Bryson

Long-term relationship
PG Wodehouse
Mervyn Peake
Carson McCullers
John Wyndham
Alan Bennett
Richmal Crompton

Awesome. Just Awesome
Mervyn Peake


There are quite a few authors I need to add to this, but I haven't thought of a suitable category for them yet.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

So along with the 100 must-read crimes I got the Classic novels here too - I will admit that my exposure to the classics is very limited to the point of being laughable - I admit it.
However this book if it is to be believed showed me that I am not only aware of more than I realise but in fact I own and have read a fair few of them (okay lets not get ahead of ourselves there are more that I do not have a clue over than I do but there is still a decent number - so my ego is still intact).
But I have to say that even on a subject that I did not really feel confident with this book has given me only only the confidence to read more also opened up a number of books I knew by title a lone and to be honest want to now go out and find and read (and since they have been around for some time and in various prints they will be a lot easier to find than some titles I want read thats for sure).
So even though I wasnt sure what I was going to find this book has been a real eye-opener and I will admit I am considering investing in some of the other titles as well.

[James Dyke]

Damn I love these lists so much I had to spend my Sunday afternoon compiling one of my own.


Recently fallen for and WILL be returning to/NEED MORE:

-Jose Saramago
-William T. Vollmann


Taken a while but finally won me over:

-David Foster Wallace
- Jorge Luis Borges
-Samuel Beckett


Supposedly awesome but yet to win me over:

-Joseph Conrad (loved HoD but Lord Jim put me off him for good)
-Ernest Hemingway
-John Fowles
-Charles Bukowski
-Joseph McElroy (I realise it's brilliant in bursts just don't know if I ENJOY reading Mr Mc)

Over it

-John Barth (I just don't know if there's any enjoyment to be drawn from your work any longer Mr Barth, on my part)
-Jack Kerouac (because I'm not 17 anymore)
-Hunter S. Thomson
-Thomas Pynchon (KIND OF - not long ago I would have proclaimed him my favourite writer. But I'm not enjoying the hippie-ish shlemihl aspects to his absurd characters anymore ('Duuuude'). Gravity's Rainbow I think is 50% genius, 50% I can barely comprehend (which is fine by me but I just cannot justify Pynchon as a great writer using that novel). Vineland I found fairly rubbish, not because it was light, I just felt it had nothing to say other than to those who were in their 20s in the 1960s. Against the Day - too long? V. CoL49 remain two of my favourite novels, however. I'm scared I'm going to grow out of Pynchon even though I do love his work, is what I'm trying to say.

I will get round to you VERY soon

-Zadie Smith
-Saul Bellow
-Franz Kafka
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-Donald Barthelme
-Richard Powers
-Robert Bolano
-Julio Cortazar
-Cormac McCarthy

I am guilty not to have read at all or very much of

-Charles Dickens (2 novels only...)
-Franz Kafka (at all)
-William Faulkner (I think you'll be right up my street)
-Mark Twain
-Herman Melville
-Henry James


I love what I've read of you, and yet I'm apprehensive of continuing/reading more In fear it won't be as good

-Joseph Heller
-Vladimir Nabokov
-Philip Roth


On the fence about

-Don DeLillo (Still, despite LOVING Underworld and regarding Point Omega as a slice of genius)
-Joseph McElroy
-Robert Coovrer
-Jonathan Franzen
-Jonathan Safran Foer
-Evelyn Waugh
-Dave Eggers

DIFFICULT AND YET I CAN'T STOP READING YOU

-James Joyce
-William Gaddis
-Thomas Pynchon
-Dostoevsky
-William T. Vollmann

Loves of my life

-James Joyce
-Thomas Pynchon (Despite what I said earlier, yes)
-David Foster Wallace (Connects to the reader like no other)

[Lee Broderick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second of the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides that I've read now and I have to say that I'm rather impressed. This one doesn't need much of a preamble - after all, everyone knows what a classic is, right? So the only introduction necessary is to explain their arbitrary limits of publication before 1950 and no more than two books in the list by any one author.

Once again, the book lists 100 novels alphabetically by author (again, there is no intent for them to be argued as 'the best'), with a synopsis of each, together with suggested follow-up reading, and additional short lists of books on a theme (not books included in the main list).

Overall I was impressed - there were a lot of books I'm aware of, some that I've read, and several that I'd never heard of before and which I now intend to. A nice surprise which is making my TBR list increasingly unwieldy.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading the introduction, I knew I was giving this book at least four stars. The author has a self-awareness of the hangups the Everyman has with classic literature. Instead of insulting the reader, he acknowledges there are quite a few "boring" books that he himself doesn't think people should bother reading.

Following the Intro, we get an alphabatezed ordering of classics he believes are great and enjoyable reads. Each section covers a book, gives some backstory on the author, and provides an advertisement for the story without revealing spoilers.

By the time I finished reading this book, I added about a dozen books to my "to-read" queue that I wasn't familiar with.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that received a kindle or other e-reading device and is looking for enjoyable, classic literature in that is free due to being in the public domain.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is pretty cool, but it seems to be lacking in some ways. Written in 2006, it contains a list of 100 novels that you must read. So it is a good beginning point for people looking for ideas. It contains lists of the authors alphabetically along with their biggest works and a bit of information on those works. It contains references to other versions of the same story (i.e. movies) if you swing that way and other books to read if you like that book.

I give it 4/5 stars and would probably scour it for ideas in the future.

[Richard]

Book may never be read. Review with list to follow.