All-Time Top Ten Lists | The Top Ten Books

These lists are compiled from all the author lists – as we add new lists, they are subject to change. We awarded points for each selection – 10 points for a first-place pick, nine points for a second-place pick, and so on. We totaled all the points and ranked them accordingly. These are the books with the highest total in each category.

New List

Michael Connelly

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
2. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1962)
6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
7. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953)
8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
9. The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1976)
10. Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain (1941)

Classic List

John Irving

1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860–61).
2. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891).
3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851).
4. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850).
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849–50).
6. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1886).
7. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959).
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967).
9. The Deptford trilogy by Robertson Davies (1983).
10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857).