The Best 100 Novels Challenge

The Champ!

Nathan Bransford posted a list of his 100 favorite novels and extended an invitation for other bloggers to do the same. Intrigued by the idea (and eager to waste some time), I decided to take him up on the challenge. 

It was a fun, if exasperating, exercise. What I found most difficult was evaluating books I hadn't read in ages, but remembered having strong feelings about. It's difficult to rank the things you love, anyway, but how to rank books you last read in high school against the ones you read last year? I'm a different person now. The older books' nuances (and sometimes, entire plots) might have escaped me in the intervening years. In the end, though, I figured if the book was powerful enough to have left an emotional fingerprint, then it deserved to make the cut (though it likely ended up in the bottom part of this list). 

I did not include collections of unrelated short stories, shorter novellas or memoirs. 

So, without further ado, here's my list of the top 100 novels: 

1. Jane Eyre
2. Anna Karenina
3. A Room with a View
4. Persuasion
5. Women In Love
6. Gilead
7. The English Patient
8. The Razor's Edge
9. Emily of New Moon
10. On Chesil Beach
11. A Passage to India
12. Charlotte's Web
13. Bel Canto
14. Madame Bovary
15. Olive Kitteridge 
16. Pride and Prejudice
17. The Age of Innocence
18. Anne of Green Gables
19. The Corrections
20. Breathing Lessons
21. Silk
22. Home
23. Crime and Punishment
24. The Anthologist
25. Middlesex
26. The Book of Ruth
27. The Burgess Boys
28. The Remains of the Day
29. Middlemarch
30. Villette
31. The BFG
32. The God of Small Things
33. Freedom
34. Lila
35. My Ántonia
36. The Sorrows of Young Werther
37. A Thousand Splendid Suns
38. Mrs. Dalloway
39. Atonement
40. The Road
41. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
42. Jude the Obscure
43. Les Misérables
44. The Lowland
45. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
46. Sense and Sensibility
47. The Portrait of a Lady
48. Great Expectations
49. Mudbound
50. The Grapes of Wrath
51. Winesburg, Ohio
52. Of Love and Other Demons
53. The Art of Fielding
54. The Sense of an Ending
55. The House of Mirth
56. Little Women
57. To Kill a Mockingbird
58. Mrs. Dalloway
59. Life After Life
60. One Hundred Years of Solitude
61. Siddhartha
62. The Namesake
63. An Artist of the Floating World
64. A Map of the World
65. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66. The Ten-Year Nap
67. And the Mountains Echoed
68. Elegies for the Brokenhearted
69. Little Children
70. And Then There Were None
71. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
72. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
73. Emma
74. Digging to America
75. The Vagabond
76. To the Lighthouse
77. Animal Farm
78. White Teeth
79. Amy and Isabelle
80. A Farewell to Arms
81. Things Fall Apart
82. The Scarlet Letter
83. The Song is You
84. Elective Affinities
85. Talking It Over
86. The Great Gatsby
87. The Red and the Black
88. The Westing Game
89. Station Eleven
90. Howard's End
91. Life of Pi
92. The Wings of the Dove
93. Lady Chatterley's Lover
94. Wonder Boys
95. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
96. My Name is Lucy Barton
97. Searching for Caleb
98. Norwegian Wood
99. All Quiet on the Western Front
100. Brooklyn

So there you go! No doubt I've forgotten a few. And I clearly have some big holes here. No James Joyce, no Marcel Proust, no Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, or Vladimir Nabokov—not because I haven't read their work, but because I haven't read any one book to completion. I hope to remedy that someday. I'm also not that adventurous when it comes to genre fiction, and I know I'm missing out on some wonderful mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, etc. 

If we were keeping tabs on frequency of mentions, Anne Tyler, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Strout, E.M. Forster and Marilynne Robinson would take the prize. 

One final note: Jane Eyre may or may not be the best novel of all time, but I've come to believe that the novels we read at a formative age (I was 13) are the ones that stick to our souls and won't let go. I've read that book a couple times since in the intervening years, and it's always held up. I love Jane. I love Mr. Rochester. I even love poor Bertha, raving away in that attic of hers.   

They're why I fell in love with literature. And they're at least partly responsible for why I write today.

Thanks for the fun challenge, Nathan! I hope others take it up. If you do, be sure to share your list in the comments section of Nathan's original post, and he'll link his post to your blog. 

Like the weather

when he lowers his voice

and raises his eyes 

to ask her a question

her heart skips a beat

stomach falls

and she wishes

them both

away

from it all

so the rain

could be the answer 

The Gaffer

(photo by Dennis Jarvis)

Lousy at speech,
she became a writer

marching her words out
single file 

(some missing shoes,
others tottering)

instead of enduring the
alarm bell's clamor

sentences smothered,
meaning kinked

everyone panicking,
losing their shit—

hearing that crunch of bone
on teeth.  



Now, years later,
I'm still learning

what it is
to make a story

where to shine
the point of focus

to feel the scourge  
of self-immolation

leave my body 
for the length

of a page — and

shape the fire
into glass.