100 Books to Read Before it is Too Late

My open global List with a hat tip to Liza Libes of Pens and Poison

May 10, 2025

This week’s post is a special intermission on the World History World Tour. I am sharing a list of 100 classic novels (mainly). It is global, not just Western. It is open to your suggestions, not just a definitive canon.

In February 2025

Liza Libes

dared to share the The Definitive List of 100 Classic Novels to Read Before You Die. I only discovered Liza’s popular list in April, and I loved the idea. It reacted to a list by another author that was dull and conventional, as if it was AI-generated or cribbed from Goodreads. Liza parried:

Because this list will circulate the Internet and lead many people astray, I must immediately save the general populace from living with the impression that The Handmaid’s Tale is a better book than The Master and Margarita—a grave error that might absolutely ruin your entire intellectual life. So, instead, I present the definitive list of 100 classics to read before you die—written by someone with a brain.

Thankfully, although Liza takes her literature seriously, she does not take herself too seriously. Any list of the ‘best books’ is a topic of intelligent debate, and Liza issued to her readers on Substack, which I had just become, an invitation and a challenge.

If you would like to contest my list—and call me an ignoramus and a dullard in the process—I readily accept the challenge and invite you to create your own definitive book ranking.

So, I accepted the challenge to create my own list. However, I hesitate to call it definitive. That is why it is an open list.

I also wanted to make my list more global, reflecting the theme of this Substack. Last year I read all 121 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As I scanned Liza’s list, too many non-Anglophone winners of the Prize were missing. Too many second-rate Americans made the cut. And non-Western classics were under-represented. My list returns those treasures.

A few more quick notes on my selection.

I included about 40 of Liza’s list.
I defined ‘classic’ as published before 10 years ago and celebrated by tradition or the Nobel Prize.
I included some series in single entries - so not just Swann’s Way but all the volumes of In Search of Lost Time are counted as one entry.
There are a few plays and other works that are strictly speaking not “novels.” But, ever since modernism, what, after all, is a “novel”?
Poetry is, in the main, excluded (how to classify Pale Fire?) since I will make another list of 100 poems to read out loud before it is too late
Item 85 is a substitute for one book from Liza’s list. Can you guess which (hint: check my Nobel Archive for the year 1924)?
The list reflects my reading history, habits, and library.
The list is weighted towards my long-standing interests in modernism and Russia.
This list is not in order of merit.
I have added author and location, whereas Liza only included titles.

I share it with you as an open, global list of the 100 classics to read before it is too late. Since I am in my 60s, I am being a little gentler in my title about that good night.

Please take the list in a spirit of celebration of great literature and world cultural history. I would love to hear your proposals for classics to include or if the list has spurred you to read one work from a culture different to your own.

The open, global list of the 100 classics to read before you die

1. The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov, Russia)

2. The White Guard (Bulgakov, Russia)

3. Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky, Russia)

4. The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky, Russia)

5. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy, Russia)

6. War and Peace (Tolstoy, Russia)

7. Middlemarch (Eliot, Britain)

8. The Palliser Novels (Trollope, Britain)

9. Madame Bovary (Flaubert, France)

10. The Red and the Black (Stendhal, France)

11. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy, Britain)

12. Portrait of a Lady (James, USA)

13. The Plague (Camus, France/Algeria)

14. Wuthering Heights (Bronte, Britain)

15. The Sound and Fury (Faulkner, USA)

16. Heart of Darkness (Conrad, Poland/Britain)

17. The Secret Agent (Conrad, Poland/Britain)

18. Pale Fire (Nabokov, Russia)

19. Speak, Memory (Nabokov, Russia)

20. Faust Parts 1 & 2 (Goethe, Germany)

21. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, Nigeria)

22. Doctor Faustus (Mann, Germany)

23. The Magic Mountain (Mann, Germany)

24. Buddenbrooks (Mann, Germany)

25. In Search of Lost Time (Proust, France)

26. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera, Czech Republic)

27. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, USA)

28. Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, USA)

29. Darkness at Noon (Koestler, Hungary)

30. The Age of Innocence (Wharton, USA)

31. Brave New World (Huxley, Britain)

32. 1984 (Orwell, Britain)

33. Homage to Catalonia (Orwell, Britain)

34. Dead Souls (Gogol, Russia)

35. Pride and Prejudice (Austen, Britain)

36. The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa, Portugal)

37. The Metamorphosis (Kafka, Czech German)

38. The Castle (Kafka, Czech German)

39. The Parables & Diaries (Kafka, Czech German)

40. Moby Dick (Melville, USA)

41. The Real Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, China)

42. The Waves (Woolf, Britain)

43. Ulysses (Joyce, Ireland)

44. Don Quixote (Cervantes, Spain)

45. The Decameron (Boccacio, Italy)

46. Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak, Russia)

47. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn, Russia)

48. Frankenstein (Shelley, Britain)

49. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez, Colombia)

50. Life and Fate (Groszman, Soviet Union)

51. Collected Works (Borges, Argentina)

52. The Books of Jacob (Tokarczuk, Poland)

53. Flights (Tokarczuk, Poland)

54. Wittgenstein's Nephew (Bernhard, Austria)

55. Death of Virgil (Broch, Austria)

56. Rings of Saturn (Sebald, Germany)

57. Austerlitz (Sebald, Germany)

58. Mahabharata (India)

59. Ramayana (India)

60. Hojoki (Kamo no Chōmei, Japan)

61. The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Basho, Japan) [Note: Richard Flanagan’s recent novel of the same title is also great though I have not yet read, but I mean the original Japanese classic by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), which I assume Flanagan is alluding to]

62. The Queen of Spades (Pushkin, Russia)

63. The Captain's Daughter (Pushkin, Russia)

64. Eugene Onegin (Pushkin, Russia)

65. My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk, Türkiye)

66. The Children of the Dead (Elfriede Jelinek, Austria)

67. Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee, South Africa/Australia)

68. Tin Drum (Gunter Grass, Germany)

69. Cairo Trilogy (Mahfouz, Egypt)

70. Red Sorghum (Mo Yan, China)

71. Captive Mind (Miłosz, Poland)

72. Voss (White, Australia)

73. Vivisector (White, Australia)

74. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Böll, Germany)

75. The Unnameable (Beckett, Ireland)

76. Waiting for Godot (Beckett, Ireland)

77. Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata, Japan)

78. The English Patient (Ondaatje, Canada)

79. If On A Winter's Night a Traveller (Calvino, Italy)

80. And Quiet Flows the Don (Sholokhov, Soviet Union)

81. The Bridge on the Drina (Andric, Yugoslavia)

82. The Thibaults (du Gard, France)

83. Six Characters in Search of An Author (Pirandello, Italy)

84. Kristin Lavransdatter (Undset, Norway)

85. Bunt (Revolt) (Reymont, Poland)

86. Growth of the Soil (Hamsun, Norway)

87. Stories (Tagore, India)

88. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Pu Songling, China)

89. The Name of the Rose (Eco, Italy)

90. The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (H.H. Richardson, Australia)

91. The Tale of the Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, Japan)

92. The Prose Edda (Snorri Sturluson, Iceland)

93. Finnegans Wake (James Joyce, Ireland)

94. Stories (Chekhov, Russia)

95. Plays (Chekhov, Russia)

96. Petersburg (Bely, Russia)

97. The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin, China)

98. Midnight's Children (Rushdie, India/Britain)

99. The Man Without Qualities (Musil, Austria)

100. Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey, Australia)

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