The other day I was minding my on business, enjoying the latest results of my Google news-feed’s culling under my “shark attacks” heading (go Truro!), when a side-bar box caught my eye. It said “The 100 Greatest Books of All Time,” and when I clicked on it, I sprang down the rabbit hole into a world of such appalling aesthetic relativism that the list in question contained Samuel Beckett – Samuel Beckett. Knowing that Samuel Beckett wouldn’t even make the top 100 list of “authors named Samuel Beckett,” I realized at once that something was very wrong. Wrong, and dangerous – what would happen, I thought, if some impressionable reader (young or young at heart) stumbled upon that list and actually believed it? It had links to many other, similar lists, and I quickly found the conceptual rot to be discouragingly widespread.
Clearly, a corrective is in order. Hence:
Before we get started, a few clarifications: a) this list of course countermands all other lists, no matter where you might find them – there are only about six people in the world who’ve read more than I have, and I know for a fact that not one of them has made a competing list; b) this list necessarily uses a somewhat loose definition of ‘book’ – trusting that conceptual validity will trump pickiness; and c) this list offers no apology for that rococo term ‘greatest’ and estimates it according to the three R’s – rectitude (even if only to its own compass), relevance (in the eternal sense), and above all rereadability. A classic you’ve always been meaning to read is your failing; a classic you’ve always been meaning to re-read is the classic’s failing.
No real attempt at chronology here, and no dickerings about competing merits of English translations. Plenty of time for all that later – this is just to lay the ground rules:
1. The Iliad - Homer
2. The Odyssey – Homer
3. The King James Bible
4. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles
5. Lysistrata – Aristophanes
6. Electra – Euripides
7. The Oresteia – Aeschylus
8. The Annals – Tacitus
9. The Histories – Herodotus
10. History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
11. The Aeneid – Virgil
12. The Metamorphoses – Ovid
13. The Ethics – Aristotle
14. The Koran
15. The Republic – Plato
16. The Lives – Plutarch
17. The Mahabharata
18. The Ramayana
19. The Shahnameh – Ferdowsi
20. The poems of Li Po
21. The poems of Horace
22. The Arabian Nights
23. Njal’s Saga
24. The Confessions – St. Augustine
25. The Divine Comedy – Dante
26. The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer
27. The Riverside Shakespeare - 2nd edition
28. Paradise Lost – Milton
29. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Gibbon
30. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
31. The Novum Organum – Francis Bacon
32. The Essays of Montaigne
33. The Praise of Folly – Erasmus
34. The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
35. On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
36. Faust – Goethe
37. Vanity Fair – Thackeray
38. Middlemarch – George Eliot
39. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
40. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – William Shirer
41. The Odes of John Keats
42. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
43. Boswell’s Life of Johnson
44. The Roman Revolution – Ronald Syme
45. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
46. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
47. Notre-Dame de Paris – Victor Hugo
48. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
49. Orlando Furioso – Ariosto
50. Candide – Voltaire
51. Eichmann in Jerusalem – Hannah Arendt
52. The Heimskringla
53. Leviathan – Hobbes
54. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – Rebecca West
55. Democracy in America – de Tocqueville
56. The Diary of Samuel Pepys
57. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
58. The Rights of Man – Thomas Paine
59. Arcadia – Philip & Mary Sidney
60. War and Peace – Tolstoy
61. The French Revolution – Carlyle
62. The Poems of Catullus
63. Religio Medici - Thomas Browne
64. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
65. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
66. Don Quixote – Cervantes
67. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
68. The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser
69. The Anatomy of Melancholy – Robert Burton
70. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – John Locke
71. Capital – Marx
72. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
73. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
74. The Variety of Religious Experience -William James
75. The Education of Henry Adams – Henry Adams
76. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
77. The Once and Future King – T.H.White
78. The Ring and the Book – Robert Browning
79. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
80. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
81. Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
82. The Poems of John Donne
83. The Oxford Book of English Verse – the Helen Gardner edition
84. Biographia Literaria - Coleridge
85. U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
86. Kristin Lavransdatter – Sigrid Undset
87. Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
88. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – David Hume
89. Shakespeare’s Lives – Samuel Schoenbaum
90. The Poems of William Butler Yeats
91. The Decameron – Boccaccio
92. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom – T. E. Lawrence
93. The Summa Theologica – St. Thomas Aquinas
94. Wuthering Heights -Emily Bronte
95. The Poetic Edda
96. Africa – John Reader
97. Animal Liberation – Peter Singer
98. The Tain
99. History of the World – J. M. Roberts
100. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
Yo, this list is wack.
Keeping to these criteria, I’d just add Descartes’s Meditations and Spinoza’s Ethics.
No Alice Munro?
“A classic you’ve always been meaning to read is your failing; a classic you’ve always been meaning to re-read is the classic’s failing.”
That’s a great line.
I’m interested in your choice of A Christmas Carol as the only Dickens — unless I missed another one somewhere. At first I thought you were crazy! His best novel is obviously Bleak House. But the more I think about it, the more I just might agree–it certainly wins on two of those three Rs, anyway.
Glad to see T.H. White on here!
One book I greatly miss: Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.
Jim: the reason why Descartes will never be on any list of mine should be obvious, but I thought long and hard about Spinoza!
Greg: I’m working on a very different, and Alice Munro features prominently on it
Rohan: I stand by “A Christmas Carol”! It has far, far less of the shameless pandering and mugging that mars all the rest of Dickens and makes it such an ongoing mystery to me why so many people like his books
Not obvious to me. Can you explain?
Excellent list!!
This is the only top-100 list where I can see Thomas Browne, Robert Browne, Boccaccio. Really happy about this. However, it is sacrilege that you missed Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.
Damn! I misspelled Robert Burton.