I’ve only read two books on the list - “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (#39) and Hexbear’s favorite “1984” (#16!)
No Grapes of Wrath 😞 Any omissions you feel should’ve been included or works that are too high/low on the list?
At the bottom of the list is a “see all votes” list of the authors and other people asked to make a top 10.
I’ve read some? of The Metamorphosis recently, not sure how I got sidetracked or even if I finished it. Got a few pages into Catch-22 back in high school but I didn’t connect with it.
Not even sure where to begin in filling in the holes in my classics and modern gems of reading. The classic Black writings of Walker, Baldwin, and Morrison maybe? Jump right into Moby Dick? Maybe some female writers?
I also struggle to read books like I used to as a voracious bookworm teenager; with phones, Hexbear, YouTube, and streaming taking up much of my free time when I’m not working or parenting. I’m currently past the halfway mark in East of Eden but I’ve been working on that for a couple of months now.
i really like cormac mccarthy so i’m always going to recommend the road and blood meridian, though they’re both really bleak so fair warning i guess
han kang’s the vegetarian is a fantastic book about women’s bodily autonomy, and if her other works are as good or better then i fully get why she won the nobel prize for literature in 2024.
dracula is dracula, and would deserve to be on the list for its influence alone, but it’s also very good in itself
I can’t believe that Matthew Stover’s novelization of Revenge of the Sith didn’t make the list. What the fuck?
I read 32 but two or three I only read substantial portions of (like a few hundred pages of The Magic Mountain (which was really good) and Bleak House (which was boring)). I took lots of literature classes in college and decades later still can’t get a good job and I knew this was going to happen even at the time but w/e.
Western writers are in love with Nabokov even though he is sus as fuck. His cousin was in the CIA. Not one, but two of his novels are about pedophilia. And the mystique about his style really wears off if you know a little French. A lot of his hypnosis of the English-speaking intelligentsia comes from just translating French terms into English. Nabokov is like “mauve” and “wavelets” and college-educated westerners are like HOLY FUCK. I want to like Orhan Pamuk but the dude is literally just super into Nabokov and also has nothing to say about Palestine.
Anyway.
Interesting that Middlemarch is at the top. George Eliot has other novels that are much shorter and more approachable. But she’s good, folks. I only read the first few pages of Middlemarch but it was about the beginnings of capitalism in England so that was cool.
Ulysses is doable if you get some books to help you. There are books out there with a line-by-line analysis of Ulysses (shitloads of the confusing shit in that book are just lyrics from 19th century Irish songs). The first couple of chapters are so good too. There’s also a podcast called re:joyce where the guy reads like a paragraph of Ulysses and then talks about it. Sadly he died before he could finish the book.
IMO Virginia Woolf is suuuuuuuuuuuper overrated. White feminists fucking LOVE her but not many other people are interested, maybe because she was into blackface? Holy shit, they put almost all her fucking novels on this list. The only one I kind of liked was Orlando.
Gogol is the best of the famous 19th century Russian writers, way better than Tolstoy (who would be much better if he would just shut the fuck up and let his characters breathe) and Dostoevsky (who ends one of his most famous novels with his main characters reading the fucking Bible). I spent years believing that Tolstoy was my favorite writer. The Bondarchuk film of War and Peace is superior to the novel and very true to it. But if you read any Gogol you will be hooked immediately. Fun should be a factor in these considerations. Gogol is fun.
Tolstoy is also like the George Lucas of 19th century Russian novels. His wife “helped” a LOT with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, obviously his best books, but when they stopped working together and decided to spend the next few decades screaming at each other (while Tolstoyremovedd his peasants) his writing quality fell off a cliff. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is still good though, but it’s a short story he wrote much later in life.
Borges and Lovecraft didn’t make it because they didn’t write novels, but they’re both great. Borges was super racist and so was Lovecraft, but Lovecraft has a redemption arc while Borges doesn’t.
I didn’t see any Zola here. L’Assommoir is SO GOOD. And Dostoevsky clearly began Crime and Punishment by ripping it off.
Flaubert is really good, don’t miss him, but Sentimental Education SUCKS. Madame Bovary and Salaambo are amazing though. But he’s also a lib and just totally contemptuous of humanity. There are no good people in any of his novels. Tres Contes is a good quick backdoor into Flaubert if you’re interested. Flaubert literally spent his life writing, masturbating, and catching syphilis from sex workers. Once a month he hung out in Paris with other writers. The rest of the time, he was either jerking off or shouting at the top of his lungs in his house in the countryside in order to read his own prose and make sure that the style was good. His family tolerated this because he was a famous writer.
Moby Dick fucking rules and is one of the few genuinely good novels written by a white American, no wonder it was ignored for decades until the French discovered it (like Poe, the only other genuinely good white American writer).
Cormac McCarthy is good but he’s such a fucking chud though. I was rereading a bit of the road and he has a lengthy random scene where the MC and his uncle or whatever go fishing for a whole day and don’t say a word to each other the whole time, and he’s like, that day fucking ruled bro, my uncle and I did DUDE STUFF and we didn’t even FUCKING SAY ANYTHING unlike ALL YOU FUCKING PANSIES WHO WON’T SHUT THE FUCK UP. I imagine that the road is how reactionary men view the world at all times. Like when they go to the gas station, they expect to be attacked by cannibals from all directions at any moment.
Things Fall Apart is really good and quick but the author’s other novels seem to have been written by another person.
I actually read The Leopard a long time ago. I tried to read it again but couldn’t. It’s like…I’m a Sicilian landlord at the turn of the century and everyone’s angry at me, why???
I have tried so many times to read A Fine Balance. Just can’t get into it.
A House For Mr. Biswas was really good but the author is a dickhead.
Kindred is really good. And Parable of the Sower. But I couldn’t finish Dawn. I tried to…twice! It still sticks with me though. Also couldn’t finish Parable of the Talents.
I guess they didn’t include The Satanic Verses. Stylistically I liked it. A much, much, much, much, much better book about Islam is No God But God, which also reads like a novel.
I read Beloved and The Great Gatsby in high school and wasn’t ready for them. I glanced at Beloved recently and was like, whoa. I’m not sure if The Great Gatsby is actually good. Ditto for Catch 22. Catch 22 is white male boomers’ favorite novel (if they have ever actually read any novels).
They didn’t include The Dispossessed…which is like, the hexbear novel.
This list is of course super lib. And Quiet Flows The Don (gonna be Trump’s epitaph) should be there as well as Memed, My Hawk, just off the top of my head. They include Flaubert so they should include these. The Forever War, Explosion in a Cathedral, Black Boy, A Grain of Wheat, The Sorrow of War, Sea of Lentils—should also be here.
Funny I read Moby Dick and it did not strike me at all, meanwhile The Great Gatsby was just what I needed. I read them both while I was out sailing on a tall ship too, so the mood was totally Moby Dick. I’d be interested in hearing why you like Moby Dick so much. I felt like it was a book that screamed for an editor. Like a sort of rough second draft or something.
I love every word of moby dick. I love every pointless meandering digression. I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re a writer, but I am, and maybe it’s just a writer’s novel in a way…like he just breaks every rule, and he’s also so intense and so passionate, and who the fuck gives a shit about starbuck? Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab are all you need. I loved it. I also read part of his memoir (?) about going awol in the south pacific and falling in love with the indigenous culture he found there and I also thought it was good. But I haven’t closely read moby dick in awhile. Ditto for the great gatsby.
Many of these are book associated with childhood. Though I didn’t read them, I know they are commonly assigned or picked up by kids.
I read a dozen of them before age 17 or 16. The other dozen or so I read later were mostly written by black writers whos work was not as easily available in the small public library back in the pre woke days of when I grew up. (And many of them not so much aimed at children. Since there is a good half of this list I don’t know anything about, I wouldnt draw any strong conclusions. But I wonder if that pattern is borne out by the others.)
Honestly if your goal of reading is to be more keyed into culture and references, you should read the Bible if not already done. I bet you all 100 books on that list reference the bible. Ive only read parts but they really stuck in my mind. I would like to get a good, modern, annotated version.
Also this list is discredited by Lolita being #25. I read that one at 15 or so because it is culturally associated with horned up kids, such as myself. Nothing but disappointment. In 2026, who is voting for this book?
Yeah this list seems like the books people read before graduation that felt the most intellectual. I would guess this is related to dropping literacy and reading levels, as well as directly related to the type of person to vote on this stuff. Majority are likely just normal people who don’t read much anymore and remember a favorite high school book.
Edit: just checked methodology. It’s the best read who were polled, which surprises me a bit more… idk what to think now. I guess it’s likely what people considered impactful on their lives. So it has a huge bias towards old and for younger audience.
A high school reading list and it doesn’t even have The Picture Of Dorian Gray? For shame!
Is that the one where the image gets more fucked up the more bad things he does? I remember reading that when my English got good enough, but I still don’t really understand what it was supposed to mean except “they may look ugly on the outside but be rotting on the inside” or something like that. Still had fun i think
Though I must admit I was pretty young when I read it. Just remembered that aspect hahah
I’ve read like 30 of these 100 I think, just from finding lists somewhere or references from articles which made me interested. Only a few held up to my expectations, though. Like Dostoevsky (don’t kill me, it’s just that his writing style gets me sometimes, even though hes reactionary), Bronte, Austen, Catch-22, the old children’s stories (Dracula, frankenstein), and a few about American Racism. Of the 30 or so, I’d only include like 5 on the top 100 though.
I guess its unclear what sort of criteria they expected the polled people to use, so it evens out to a mush.
I think that our problem of illiteracy is so bad that we’d be 100x better if everyone read like 20 of these at random. So for that, I’m fine with this. Even reading anything might get some brains working in a way which makes the malleable to learning and get us out of this western sinkhole. I’d prefer a different list for myself, and think a different one would be much more effective (read What is to be Done, both of em). But it’s the guardian
I could also just prioritize my long long long procrastination in reading theory and Marx
Did read Blackshirts and Reds and The Jakarta Method in the last two years, so I’m proud ofyself for that 🙂👍🏽❤️
Euro-American culture jacking off contest: the top 100 books to make you feel like white intelligentsia
I don’t read anything that isn’t from Oprah’s book club.
I enjoyed Catch 22. Took a bit for it to make sense to me, though, so I understand not connecting with it initially.
I really liked that book. It was the first humorous book I read as an adult and it was a lot of fun. It also did the super interesting thing of showing the disconnect between soldiers who never actually see their enemies.
Not ONE Horus Heresy book? No 40k books at all? Not even a Ciaphas Cain omnibus? smh books havbve gone woke
While having read most of this list, there are just a few on it that stayed with me.
There are even fewer that had an impact.
If you do a list of 100 books there is one thing you need to consider. Never make a list trying to look like you are well read. Don’t do that. Gave me a list of books that made you feel stuff, hate stuff, love stuff. Don’t be a fucking snob because people that read a lot lot are gonna see.
What a shit list.
Do NOT read Moby Dick. I have no idea how it has gotten the accolade of “greatest american novel”. Shit needs an editor STAT. 80 Chapters about whale facts and the first of those chapters starts out with stating that whales are fish, so the facts aren’t even real facts. There’s a good book in there somewhere, but you gotta skip a lot of stuff. And also be fine with the book introducing a bunch of plot elements that then never get resolved.
Chapter 1 is a banger though. And the confidence scheme that the two captains run on Ishmael is funny. And the gay stuff with Queequeg is cool.I read To Kill A Mockingbird three consecutive years from 8th grade to tenth grade in school. And I had already read the book when I found it at a library sale when I was 10 or 11. So that sapped three semesters of prime assigned reading books.
Throw in Shakespeare, Huck Finn, Brave New World, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and that was pretty much my high school reading curriculum
