The Observer 100 Greatest Novels of All Time

In October of 2003, The Observer released a (highly controversial) list entitled “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time.” The list was written in response to the rumors circulating about a BBC top 100 list of “favorite novels,” generated by a large-scale poll. Its authors claim to have written it mostly to cause debate, and they succeeded admirably. The difference between the Oberver’s and BBC’s lists is that the latter is a poll of the nation's favorite books.

On the other hand, the Observer’s list is not a list of most-loved books. It was created to serve as a list of one hundred essential novels, making the list “less sentimental, and probably less contemporary” than the BBC’s. It was written in chronological order, so therefore does not determine a “best” book. Still, the list inevitably reflects the age and education of its creators. Nominations for the top ten novels of the list were originally given in an e-mail sent throughout the Observer’s office.

The regulations applying to which books were allowed are highly subjective. Although the list is fundamentally English, it includes novels that were originally written in foreign languages. Due to the large amount of interest that Britain has typically had throughout the centuries in foreign literature, translated novels were allowed on the list. It is, however, restricted to novels; no poetry or plays were allowed. As such, important contributors to English literature, including Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Eliot were excluded along with Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, and the Odyssey. Also, selections were limited to one novel per author, encouraging variety.

Personally, I believe that the list is fairly weak. While a large number of the choices should be included, for obvious reasons, there are a number of books where one has to ask themself “what were they thinking?” The Wind in the Willows, LA Confidential and The Call of the Wild make the list over works by Steinbeck, Ballard, Pynchon, Burgess, Vonnegut and Voltaire? I have a hard time believing that Roald Dahl’s literary contributions to history have been more important than Victor Hugo’s. I love Roald Dahl as much as the next guy, but I would not rate his works among the top 100 literary achievements in history. At the very least, the list shouldn't be named The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time.

Still, the list is, at the worst, a recommended reading list from the guys over at the Observer. There’s a surprisingly large number of books included that I’ve never heard of (and a much larger amount of books I’ve never read). If I ever run out of things to read, I suppose I would look here…

Here’s the list.

1. Don Quixote -- Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress -- John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe -- Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones -- Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa -- Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons -- Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma -- Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey -- Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep -- Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil -- Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair -- William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women -- Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now -- Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda -- George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat -- Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody -- George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure -- Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands -- Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild -- Jack London
39. Nostromo -- Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow -- D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier Ford -- Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps -- John Buchan
45. Ulysses -- James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India -- E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial -- Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women -- Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
53. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop -- Evelyn Waugh
55. USA -- John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love -- Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague -- Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
60. Malone Dies -- Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood -- Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web -- E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
67. The Quiet -- American Graham Greene
68. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum -- Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -- Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
75. Herzog -- Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont -- Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy -- John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon -- Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing -- Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song -- Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller -- Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River -- V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians -- J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping -- Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark -- Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy -- Paul Auster
88. The BFG -- Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table -- Primo Levi
90. Money -- Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World -- Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda -- Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting -- Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories -- Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential -- James Ellroy
96. Wise Children -- Angela Carter
97. Atonement -- Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights -- Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral -- Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz -- W. G. Sebald