Lists of Great Reads for an Entire Lifetime

The Greats

In the space below, I am providing lists of many of the world's greatest books ever written. If you are looking for one of the greats to kick start that itch or resolution to read more - or you are looking for a list of reading that will last an entire lifetime - you'll likely find it.

My Everyman's Library collection has lead me straight to the front door, page one, of many of these amazing works of literature and I am forever grateful for their curation of such an amazing collection. I hope the lists below inspires you to pick a title or two or fifty - in whatever edition you can find them - and go for it!

Troy Farlow

"The Lifetime Reading Plan"

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

A Quick Few Words of How I Discovered this List

A few months back I found a wonderful book while browsing around the Housing Works Books & Café used bookstore down in SoHo, toward lower Manhattan. I was looking for another book in the literary criticism section (having already scanned the literature section to see if any Everyman’s popped out!) and stumbled across a book called “A Passion for Books” edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, with a fantastic Forward by none other than Ray Bradbury (who wrote the classic Fahrenheit 541.)

And that is where, on page 49-54, I first discovered this list – The New Lifetime Reading Plan - compiled by a gentleman named Clifton Fadiman. (And now that I think about it, perhaps I should look for Fadiman’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan book!)

Fadiman’s list suggests over 220 of the world’s greatest literature, all neatly packaged in one, seeming-short-looking list of 130 authors (but some with several books, not just one).

One short list – but easily could consume an entire “lifetime” of reading.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh

2. Homer, The Iliad

3. Homer, The Odyssey

4. Confucius, The Analects

5. Aeschylus, The Oresteia

6. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

7. Euripides, Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra, The Bacchae

8. Herodotus, The Histories

9. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

10. Sun-tzu, The Art of War

11. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, The Clouds, The Birds

12. Plato, Selected Works

13. Aristotle, Ethics, Politics, Poetics

14. Mencius, The Book of Mencius

15. The Ramayana

16. The Mahabharata

17. The Bhagavad Gita

18. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Grand Historian

19. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

20. Virgil, The Aeneid

21. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

22. Saint Augustine, The Confessions

23. Kalidasa, The Cloud Messenger, Sakuntala

24. The Koran

25. Hui-neng, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

26. Firdausi, Shah Nameh

27. Sei Shônagon, The Pillow Book

28. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji

29. Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

30. Dante, The Divine Comedy

31. Luo Kuan-chung, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

32. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

33. The Thousand and One Nights

34. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

35. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

36. Wu Ch’eng-en, Journey to the West

37. Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays

38. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

39. William Shakespeare, Complete Works

40. John Donne, Selected Works

41. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei)

42. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

43. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

44. René Descartes, Discourse on Method

45. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica

46. Molière, Selected Plays

47. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (Pensées)

48. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

49. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

50. Matsuo Bashô, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

51. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

52. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

53. Voltaire, Candide and other works

54. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

55. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

56. Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, The Dream of the Red Chamber (a.k.a. The Story of the Stone)

57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

58. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

59. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

60. Thomas Jefferson and others, Basic Documents in American History (ed. Richard B. Morris)

61. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers (ed. Clinton Rossiter)

62. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

63. William Blake, Selected Works

64. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

65. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare

66. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma

67. Stendhal, The Red and the Black

68. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette

69. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works

70. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales

71. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

72. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women

73. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species

74. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

75. Edgar Allan Poe, Short Stories and Other Works

76. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

77. Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit

78. Anthony Trollope, The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography

79. The Brontë Sisters: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

80. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience

81. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

82. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

83. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener

84. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

85. Walt Whitman, Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass, A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads

86. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

87.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov

88. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

89. Henrick Ibsen, Selected Plays

90. Emily Dickenson, Collected Poems

91. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass

92. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

93. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

94. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Castorbridge

95. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience

96. Henry James, The Ambassadors

97. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works

98. Sigmund Freud, Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Civilization and Its Discontents

99. George Bernard Shaw, Selected Plays and Prefaces

100. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

101. Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories

102. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth

103. William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography

104. Natsume Sôseki, Kokoro

105. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

106. Robert Frost, Collected Poems

107. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

108. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

109. Lu Hsün, Collected Short Stories

110. James Joyce, Ulysses

111. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves

112. Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories

113. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love

114. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

115. Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night

116. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, Collected Plays

117. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

118. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying

119. Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories

120. Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

121. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers

122. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory

123. George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984, Burmese Days

124. R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets

125. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape

126. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

127. Albert Camus, The Plague, The Stranger

128. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift

129. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, Cancer Ward

130. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

131. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

132. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

133. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Note: Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this link to see a picture of the original book that this list is from - might be a great book to pick up to assist in charting your way forward with a plan!

Modern Library's List of 100 Top Novels

Modern Library 100 Top Novels

A Few Words about Modern Library and the List:

In addition to Everyman’s Library, Modern Library is another great collection of books that many here in America have likely heard of or grown up with. And as for this list, I first saw this list in the same book that I learned about the above list, in Rabinowitz and Kaplan’s “A Passion for Books.”

How the 100 Top Novels were Chosen:

From Modern Library’s website: “The [Modern Library’s] readers’ poll for the best novels published in the English language since 1900 opened on July 20, 1998 and closed on October 20, 1998, with 217,520 votes cast.”

So out of those 217,520 votes, what were the top 100 novels chosen?

Here’s the list:

ULYSSES by James Joyce
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
1984 by George Orwell
I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara
U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durrell
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
KIM by Rudyard Kipling
A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
THE OLD WIVES’ TALE by Arnold Bennett
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
LOVING by Henry Green
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
IRONWEED by William Kennedy
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

Modern Library's List of 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

Modern Library 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

And How About the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books:

From Modern Library’s website: “The [Modern Library’s] reader’s poll for the best non-fiction published in the English language since 1900 opened on April 29, 1999 and closed on September 30, 1999 with a total of 194,829 votes cast.”

So out of those 194,829 votes, what were the highest rated 100 best non-fiction books?

Here’s the list:

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James
UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN by Virginia Woolf
SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson
SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot
THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson
SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken
THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes
THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas
THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner
BLACK BOY by Richard Wright
ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster
THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote
THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman
THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin
THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr
NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein
THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White
AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal
PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould
THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams
THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar
THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls
ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich
THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois
PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore
PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey
ON GROWTH AND FORM by D’Arcy Thompson
IDEAS AND OPINIONS by Albert Einstein
THE AGE OF JACKSON by Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.
THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON by Rebecca West
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats
SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves
HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain
CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles
A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith
PRESENT AT THE CREATION by Dean Acheson
THE GREAT BRIDGE by David McCullough
PATRIOTIC GORE by Edmund Wilson
SAMUEL JOHNSON by Walter Jackson Bate
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe
EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey
WORKING by Studs Terkel
DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling
THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Winston Churchill
OUT OF AFRICA by Isak Dinesen
JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME by Dumas Malone
IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams
CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner
THE HOUSE OF MORGAN by Ron Chernow
THE SWEET SCIENCE by A. J. Liebling
THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl Popper
THE ART OF MEMORY by Frances A. Yates
RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by R. H. Tawney
A PREFACE TO MORALS by Walter Lippmann
THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE by Jonathan D. Spence
THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn
THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW by C. Vann Woodward
THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by Elaine Pagels
JAMES JOYCE by Richard Ellmann
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Cecil Woodham-Smith
THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell
THE CITY IN HISTORY by Lewis Mumford
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James M. McPherson
WHY WE CAN’T WAIT by Martin Luther King by Jr.
THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris
STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY by Erwin Panofsky
THE FACE OF BATTLE by John Keegan
THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield
VERMEER by Lawrence Gowing
A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan
WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Beryl Markham
THIS BOY’S LIFE by Tobias Wolff
A MATHEMATICIAN’S APOLOGY by G. H. Hardy
SIX EASY PIECES by Richard P. Feynman
PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard
THE GOLDEN BOUGH by James George Frazer
SHADOW AND ACT by Ralph Ellison
THE POWER BROKER by Robert A. Caro
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Richard Hofstadter
THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by William Appleman Williams
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE by Herbert Croly
IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote
THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm
THE TAMING OF CHANCE by Ian Hacking
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS by Anne Lamott
MELBOURNE by Lord David Cecil

The Guardian List of 100 Novels

Guardian List of 100 Novels

The Guardian is a daily newspaper in England. I like the Guardian. I always click on a news link if the article title trips my fancy and I see that it has been printed in The Guardian.

Here's an article with a list of 100 of the greatest novels according to a gentleman named Robert McCrum, who took two years to compile his list. And then, in August of 2015, the Guardian ran this article with McCrum's list.

I'll leave it up to the viewer to simply check out the article itself - rather than list the 100 here - as the article does a nice job with explaining the details of the list and also gives a few-sentence blurb about each book that is nice and helpful and informative.

Learn More About This List

Check out this Guardian article with a list of 100 great novels and a tiny bit of what each book is about.

Here's the Article/List

The BBC's 25 Greatest British Novels

The BBC: 25 Greatest British Novels

Who doesn't love the BBC? And books? And Britain? And here are all three together! A perfect storm (and bit of an alliteration of sorts, ha!)

Here's the list of 25, but I've also provided the link straight to the article, as there is great commentary on each book and pictures of each as well.

The List and RANKED as well:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Howards End by EM Forster
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Emma by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Learn More about this list

25 Great British Novels with a solid bit of commentary - a healthy paragraph - about each one and its author.

Find out more

Bibliography for the Lists of Great Reads

Bibliography

Here is the bibliography for the above lists of great books that you might want to simply throw a dart at and start reading!

The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman

“A Passion for Books” by Harold Rabinowitz & Rob Kaplan, p. 49-54.

Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan (HarperCollins, 1998).

I also found the list electronically and simply copied and pasted the list and after some formatting, added it above. The website that I copied it from said that there is no copyright and that all material is for free use, but regardless, here’s credit due to the website that I retrieved the Fadiman list from – and it seems to be a great literary site for those interested in having a look:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/book-lists/fadiman.htm

Modern Library List of 100 Top Novels

http://www.modernlibrary.com/

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

“A Passion for Books” by Harold Rabinowitz & Rob Kaplan, p. 334-336

Modern Library Best 100 Non-Fiction Books

http://www.modernlibrary.com/100-best-novels-subfeature/

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/

The Guardian List of 100 Novels

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-best-novels-written-in-english-the-full-list

25 Greatest British Novels

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151204-the-25-greatest-british-novels

100 Books Every Man Should Read

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/100-books-every-man-read/

A Shout-Out to Fadiman & Major's Book!

The Actual Book about a list mentioned above

At the beginning of this "Great Reading List" link, I began with a list of 130 authors (over 220 books) that is a list that is referred to as "The New Lifetime Reading Plan" list. I discovered this list from another book (as mentioned and credited above), but upon creating this website and digging more, discovered the book itself that the list came from - written by the two authors' that worked hard to compile the list itself!

So, without further ado (again!), here is a picture of their book! A worthy book to pick up and check out for sure.

100 Books Every Man, Woman, or They Should Read

100 Great Books

This list of classics flying under the moniker "100 Books Every Man Should Read" shows up on the website called "The Art of Manliness" - and while I like a lot of books on the list - and am a man, ha! - the just "man" part bothers me. Why can't this list be for anyone who loves some or all of these 100 books - for him OR her OR they/them, right?! So, two things: 1), regardless of the title of the list and how you identify, have a look, and, 2) thank you to the hes, shes, and/or theys over at Art of Manliness for putting together this list for ALL of us to enjoy! Much appreciated! :-)

Here's the List!

My Everyman's Library Collection

My Collection of Books by Everyman's Library