There are many great books that are written every year and some books tend to be discussed and read for years to come. That made us want to create a list of the 100 best books of all time and that ended up being much harder than we first imagined.
Why a hundred you ask? It feels like a great number to end a list with. There are many people who haven’t read a hundred books while others achieve that in a year. Choosing the books for this list was hard partly because of how many incredible books there are and your brain wants to forget the important ones.
But we still were able to compile a list of the 100 best books of all time in our opinion. You can see the full list below.
The 100 Best Books of All Time
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
- Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
- The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
- Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
- Fahrenheit 451 by by Ray Bradbury
- Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
- The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Harry Potter series by J. K Rowling
- A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson
- J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
- The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks
- The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss
- The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski
- The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Book Thief Markus Zuzaf
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Watership Down by Richards Adams
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Outsiders by S. E Hinton
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- One Thousand and One Nights ANon
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
- 78. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne,
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
- Charlie And The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
There are many classics on this list and it is hard to create a list of the best books of all time and not mention them. There will be some classics that didn’t make my list and that came down to my personal preference.
Making this list was difficult partly because it is hard to justify removing some of the books on the list and adding more recent books. Should The Hunger Games have made the list? That is a question that is going to get a bunch of different answers but ultimately, it checks off all of the boxes to be considered one of the best books of all time.
Conclusion
No list is perfect and I imagine I forgot some contemporary classics or modern novels that should have made the list. Older novels also tend to be highly regarded and tend to have biases. Even then, it is hard not to include books that shaped authors that came after them.
What books should have made the list but didn’t? Let us know in the comments below and we may include them in a follow up post. Until then, happy reading!