The Top of the Top Books Lists

By Jason Boog 

One reader created a massive chart collecting and comparing the top 100 books mentioned across eleven different top 100 lists. Joseph HellerVladimir Nabokov and  F. Scott Fitzgerald led the rankings, appearing on ten out of the eleven lists.

You can explore the complete list at the Scribd link embedded below (along with how many times the individual books appeared on the eleven different lists). Below, we’ve also linked to free samples of the top ten books on this list. Check it out:

This post linked to 10+ “Top 100” book lists from sources such as TIME magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Modern Library, etc. They were all in such different formats, and such different ways of being presented that I wanted to amalgamate all of these into one master “list” in order to compare them (thirteen lists in total since I also added in the first 100 of the Reddit’s 200 favorite books). I have since thrown this into a pdf file on Scribd if anyone is interested. My next step was to compare each of these and see what books are most recommended in top lists … I made one giant list that combined 11 “Top 100” Book Lists.

Interestingly enough, these Top 100 lists seemed weighted towards men. Out of the top ten books drawn from these eleven different top books lists, only one was written by a woman.

Free Samples of the Top 10 of the Top Books Lists

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – (10/11 Lists)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – (10/11 Lists)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – (10/11 Lists)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison – (9/11 Lists)

Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut – (9/11 Lists)

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – (9/11 Lists)

The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner – (9/11 Lists)

1984 by George Orwell – (8/11 Lists)

Beloved by Toni Morrison – (8/11 Lists)

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – (8/11 Lists)

 

Combined List from 11 “Top 100” Book Lists by scerakor