The 100 best novels of all time published in English

I would not have included works that were first published in other languages and then translated into English. That would knock a fair number out of this list.

They weasel-worded it as "published in English" rather than best English language novels as is stated in the title here at Tildes, so they gave themselves wiggle room.

But what do I know? I've only read a handful of these books. Eleven for sure. Don't remember if I ever finished 1984.

Watership Down isn't there?
Lord of the Rings?
Wizard of Oz?
Salem's Lot?
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

I call shenanigans.

Watership Down is an utter masterpiece of nested storytelling. The Peter Capaldi audiobook is utterly astonishing, the way he is able to have a distinct voice for each storytelling rabbit, with each rabbit voice doing their own voices in the stories they are telling.

Lord of the Rings is almost unquestioningly the most influental novel in the last 80 years.

Wizard of Oz was declared "America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale" by the Library of Congress.

Stephen King trumped Bram Stoker with Salem's Lot the way Jonny Cash trumped NIN with Hurt.

Hitchhiker's Guide is just a good time and anybody who says otherwise probably deserves what's coming for them.

I never know how to feel about these lists. You know I think the methodology here is decent but it also leads to an obvious skew away from genre or really anything niche(I mean, the Left Hand of Darkness was seminal, but is that really the ONLY sci-fi representation here? Unless I missed something), towards the classics, and sometimes towards very high placements of books that I would personally characterize as more "impressive" than "good" (Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities). Speaking of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, I always find it slightly stupid to put works in translation on lists like these. It says English in the title, right? Why is the Quixote there? Why Pedro Páramo and One Hundred Years of Solitude and Invisible Cities -- brilliant books no doubt, that are among my personal favorites, but are also works in translation where, somewhat notoriously, their ambiguity and poeticisms often fail to come across in English?

I guess lists like these are best as jumping off points for discussion, but I tend to prefer more personal lists anyway because by attempting to be definitive these come out kinda anonymous.

Anyway I do agree with a lot of these picks in full: Catch 22, Wuthering Heights, the Nabokov stuff (if I'm right in remembering that Nabokov wrote in English and then his family translated it into Russian). All holds up marvelously. I do wonder what more recent novels will be making lists like this in fifty years when they're "eligible." Chain Gang All Stars, maybe. House of Leaves? I mostly read dyke-y genre stuff these days so I'm not hugely tapped in.

Man, what a snooze-fest. Not a single Berenstain Bears book. I read The Great Gatsby, and there wasn't anything great about it. Unbelievable.

I sort of understand why lists like this always have to have a handful of boring books on them. I think. Here's what I don't get though: why is it always the ones that are boring in a boring way (In Search of Lost Time, One Hundred Years of Solitude) when there are equally high quality boring works that are boring in an interesting way (Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum, The Name of the Rose)?

And why is there no Murakami when they've included Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, Ishiguro, Flaubert, Garcia Marquez and other such great "English language" authors? And like others already said, why go "English language" if you're then going to list all your run-of-the mill non-English classics anyway? Why not just "literature"? Maybe give a chance for actual English language authors to appear on a list like this - maybe even someone who hasn't been mentioned 15698309 times on similar lists already? What exactly is the point here?

(Sorry folks, I didn't sleep well and I'm cranky!)

The critiques in the methodology here are making me feel better about my ignorance of so many of these titles!

In quintiles (starting at 1-20 ending at 81-100), I've heard of, but not necessarily read: 15, 14, 6, 6, and 5 books on the list. Read only 11 (plus a couple more dnf'd).

Blood Meridian is an amazing read if you can stomach it. So is The Road. The quality of the prose is practically otherworldly. But good god is it hard on the soul.

Five entries go to a single author, (Woolf) and four apiece to another two authors. (Dickens and Austen)

Not a single mention of Borges or Saramago, either.

I've read 16 books that appear on here, Ulysses is my favorite of those so checks out that it's so high up. None of them feel out of place except maybe Rebecca? But even that one I like a lot. The most represented author I've read is Virginia Woolf, I've read 4 of her books that are on the list, and they certainly all belong there!