An ambitious soul on Reddit compiled the information from 11 “Top 100” book lists into a combined master list. The results are interesting. Only three books made 10 of the list and only 26 made it on more than half the lists.
Here’s the books and the number of lists they’ve made. I’ve italicized those I’ve read.
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (10/11)
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (10/11)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (10/11)
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (9/11)
- Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut (9/11)
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (9/11)
- The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner (9/11)
- 1984 by George Orwell (8/11)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison (8/11)
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (8/11)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (8/11)
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (7/11)
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (6/11)
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (6/11)
- Brave New World by Alduos Huxley (6/11)
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (6/11)
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (6/11)
- My Antonia by Willa Cather (6/11)
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac (6/11)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (6/11)
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers (6/11)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (6/11)
- The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (6/11)
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (6/11)
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (6/11)
- Ulysses by James Joyce (6/11 Lists)
Frankly, I’m surprised I’ve read a third of them. And I have another four sitting on a bookshelf or ereader.
The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough,
Louise Erdich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
