These are the 100 ‘Best Books Ever’ according to Goodreads
If you’re a bibliophile or member of a book club, you’re probably starting to curate your summer reading list. But since you devour books so fast, you might be having a hard time finding good ones that you haven’t already read.
To help, Goodreads has compiled a list of the 100 “best books ever.” The list was compiled based on votes from the general Goodreads community, so keep that in mind as you read through. (We’re guessing your favorite literature professor wouldn’t put “Twilight” above “Jane Eyre.”)
Chances are you voracious readers have already read a good deal of the books on this list. But perhaps it can help point you to a new favorite or remind you to revisit a classic. For some more inspiration, you can check out other Goodreads lists. Ones we especially like for summer: “Light But Not (Too) Dumb” and “Most Anticipated May 2017 New Releases.”
Without further ado, here are the 100 best books, as determined by Goodreads readers. How would you rearrange the list?
1. “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
2. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” by J.K. Rowling
3. “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
4. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
5. “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer
6. “The Chronicles of Narnia #1-7” by C.S. Lewis
7. “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak
8. “Animal Farm” by George Orwell
9. “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell
10. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams
11. “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
12. “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein
13. “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” series by J.R.R. Tolkien
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14. “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë
15. “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown
16. “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden
17. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll
18. “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo
19. “Divergent” by Veronica Roth
20. “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare
21. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde
22. “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
23. “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë
24. “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho
25. “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
26. “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
27. “City of Bones” by Cassandra Clare
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28. “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger
29. “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White
30. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
31. “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett
32. “Anne of Green Gables” by L.M. Montgomery
33. “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck
34. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
35. “Dracula” by Bram Stoker
36. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
37. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez
38. “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman
39. “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
40. “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
41. “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini
42. “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
43. “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
44. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
45. “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold
46. “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak
47. “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss
48. “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (Editor’s note: This book appears twice on the GoodReads list. Here, at No. 48, and again at No. 90. It’s unclear how the title was added to the list twice, but we just assume the GoodReads community really loves this book!)
49. “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
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50. “Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen
51. “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens
52. “A Game of Thrones” by George R.R. Martin
53. “The Odyssey” by Homer
54. “The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan
55. “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton
56. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
57. “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
58. “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
59. “Dune” by Frank Herbert
60. “The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett
61. “Frankenstein” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
62. “The Stand” by Stephen King
63. “Watership Down” by Richard Adams
64. “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
65. “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” by Arthur Conan Doyle
66. “My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult
67. “The Giver” by Lois Lowry
68. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey
69. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
70. “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath
71. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling
72. “Outlander” by Diana Gabaldon
73. “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy
74. “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier
75. “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith
76. “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
77. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson
78. “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt
79. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
80. “Matilda” by Roald Dahl
81. “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess
82. “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott
83. “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
84. “Vampire Academy” by Richelle Mead
85. “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver
86. “The Fellowship of the Ring” by J.R.R. Tolkien
87. “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse
88. “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand
89. “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes
90. “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (Editor’s note: This book appears twice on the GoodReads list. Here, at No. 90, and again at No. 48. It’s unclear how the title was added to the list twice, but we just assume the GoodReads community really loves this book!)
91. “The Golden Compass” by Philip Pullman
92. “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks
93. “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway
94. “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens
95. “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving
96. “The Complete Stories and Poems” by Edgar Allan Poe
97. “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale” by Herman Melville
98. “Interview with the Vampire” by Anne Rice
99. “Winnie-the-Pooh” by A.A. Milne
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100. “The Red Tent” by Anita Diamant