Grailing Magazine is excited to launch a new feature in collaboration with its Poet-in-Residence, Ben Niles. The feature is titled 150 Novels to Read in a Lifetime and is an annotated list of great books selected by Ben that readers ought not to miss. The list will be serialized in issues of Grailing, with five titles appearing per issue.
Below is an introduction to the list by our Poet-in-Residence, Ben Niles, as well as a preview of the full list:
150 Novels to Read in a Lifetime
A List Selected by Ben Niles
Behold! The List you’ve been searching for. Like so many bibliophiles before you, you’ve journeyed—nay, quested—in pursuit of that elusive, definitive list of the great novels to read in a lifetime. Or perhaps you’ve merely been awaiting some tweedy literary dolt brazen enough to employ the word ‘definitive’ about his list of books, which can (at best) be nothing more than a subjective collection, so that you can flex your intellectual superiority and tear his paltry opinions to bits.
If the latter is true, Dear Reader, allow me first to admit that my list is, of course, subjective, but I trust that you—who in your wisdom have deigned to read this far—are savvy enough to catch an ironic use of ‘definitive’ when you see one. Yet I hasten to assert: as subjective as this list inevitably is, I will defend confidently the greatness of every one of the 150 novels included. That is the truth, about with which I do not mess…
I shall go even further and proclaim that while it may not and (we agree) cannot be a definitive list, I believe that it is really quite a good list, well thought-through, with meritorious selections, a provocative blend of expected canonical titles and unexpected or perhaps even unknown-to-you ones, lovingly curated for your—and my—bookish pleasure.
Therefore, on to the selection criteria!
First: they had to be novels. Could you classify one or two as a novella or memoir? You could, but if genre hairs must be split, I can still defend their inclusion on this list. (You’ll have to read the entries to see whether you agree!) Are some of them fantasies, mysteries, or children’s literature? Certainly, but that doesn’t render them not novels. Do some of the titles contain multiple books? Yes, there are seven titles which incapsulate more than one book; but they’re either single narrative arcs divided some number of ways, or they’re trilogies with such strong bonds of theme and content that it seemed fitting to include them as trilogies instead of extracting one component book for inclusion on the list. Which leads me to my next criterion:
Only one selection per author. So, before you berate me for the absence of this or that, just know that in choosing “this,” I left off “that,” or vice versa. There are undoubtedly great novels which are consequently not on the list, but a great deal of the enjoyment (and a not insignificant amount of the agony) of curating this list came from having to select one and only one novel for a given writer. Here is where the aforementioned subjectivity comes resoundingly into play, but I don’t shy from it! After all, what would a list of great novels be without the requisite outrage, debate, and pontification it engenders? Fans of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Austen, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Faulkner, Roth, Nabokov, Morrison, Murakami (and so many others): we may simply disagree. Or—as Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd did in their parody rom-com They Came Together—we might just take solace in that, no way, we both like “fiction books”?!
Fifty novels each, from three timespans. Evidently, I’m a glutton for punishment, so I’ve given you another element to dispute! But if the single-novel-per-author rule was (in part) an effort to maximize the number of voices represented on the list, the 50x3 rule was a similar attempt at a relatively even representation of novels across the history of the genre. And if I’m honest, it’s also a way of differentiating this list from the many 100-book lists out there. Plus, when I began musing about creating my own great novels list, I felt that 100 was just too few, but 200 seemed like a lot. Thus, fifty novels on this list were published before 1935, there are fifty from 1936 to 1979, and the third fifty are from 1980 to the present. An arbitrary framework, but not without its historical and literary merits, and I think it yielded rather positive results if I do say so myself. And I do.
Now that you know my selection criteria, it bears emphasizing that my selection is not a ranked list. I’ve intentionally referred to these books as great novels, not ‘The Top 150’ or ‘The 150 Best.’ My one-novel-per-author rule pretty much precludes this list from resembling a ‘Best Novels of All Time’ list, but again: I’m OK with that, and I hope you will be, too.
All that remains is for me to thank the editor at Grailing Press for the opportunity to foist my literary opinions on the world, and I do so (both the thanking and the foisting) with the utmost hand-to-heart gratitude and wonder. I just love books, so what a joy it is to be in contemplation and conversation about these 150 Novels to Read in a Lifetime.
The Full List
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899
1984, George Orwell, 1949
In the Light of What We Know, Zia Haider Rahman, 2014
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, 1996
Beloved, Toni Morrison, 1987
Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar, 1963
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, 1719
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, 1984
Room, Emma Donoghue, 2010
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami, 1994
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, 1958
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson, 2003
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson, 1980
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz, 2007
Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier, 1913
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stephenson, 1886
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman, 1995
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne, 1759
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1986
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon, 2000
Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal, 1976
Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas, 2000
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, 1846
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, 1965
The Secret History, Donna Tartt, 1992
The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1925
Molloy, Samuel Beckett, 1951
The Color Purple, Alice Walker, 1982
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen, 2001
If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino, 1979
The Awakening, Kate Chopin, 1899
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861
The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay, 1989
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, 2016
Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 1954
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño, 1998
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1963
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, 2014
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865
On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel, 2014
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 1951
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774
Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967
Atonement, Ian McEwan, 2001
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, 1979
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stow, 1852
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson, 2013
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, 1877
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurtson, 1937
The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy, 2022
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, 1924
Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, 1939
HHhH, Laurent Binet, 2010
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 1929
The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1942
City of God, E.L. Doctorow, 2000
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927
Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940
Grendel, John Gardner, 1971
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, 1840
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847
The Night Trilogy, Elie Wiesel, 1962
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson, 1988
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra, 2013
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, 1930
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, 1851
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, 1920
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie, 1981
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster, 1924
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960
The Quiet American, Graham Greene, 1955
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, 2003
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1884
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847
The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster, 1985
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald, 2001
The Red and the Black, Stendhal, 1830
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980
Passing, Nella Larsen, 1929
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
A Separate Peace, John Knowles, 1959
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, 1961
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin, 1956
The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell, 2009
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, 1929
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, 1891
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch, 1954
Hannah Versus the Tree, Leland de la Durantaye, 2018
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry, 1947
City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg, 2015
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, 1967
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, 1908
Middlemarch, George Eliot, 1871
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850
Água Viva, Clarice Lispector, 1973
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles, 2016
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, 1951
Herzog, Saul Bellow, 1964
The Human Stain, Philip Roth, 2000
Candide, Voltaire, 1759
The Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis, 1954
Roots, Alex Haley, 1974
Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrera Infante, 1965
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, 1945
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, 1953
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, 2013
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, 1881
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien, 1939
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, 1962
Middlesex, Geoffrey Eugenides, 2002
The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald, 1990
The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence, 1915
A General Theory of Oblivion, José Eduardo Agualusa, 2012
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, 1980
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1957
Jacques the Fatalist, Denis Diderot, 1785
White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1985
Barabbas, Par Lagerkvist, 1950
36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 2010
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré, 1974
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1813
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, 2016
Speedboat, Renata Adler, 1976
A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul, 1961
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan, 2010
The Recognitions, William Gaddis, 1955
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding, 1749
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon, 1965
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, 1913
Photo credit: Engin Akyurt
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