So it only took 10 years, but I got through the whole list of 100 novels. Here are a few final thoughts and my highly subjective ranking of the books -
-If you asked before I started this project to list my four favorite books they would be the same as the top 4 books my final ranking. I think it is hard to have a new "favorite" something after a certain age. Plus, a book can't really be one of your all time favorites if you've only read it once. So maybe if I ever reread A Farewell to Arms it'll become one of my all time favorites then.
-Some books from the list that I'd consider rereading again - Les Miserables, Invisible Man, Don Quixote, A Farewell to Arms, The Magic Mountain and Pale Fire.
- Books that I was surprised that I really enjoyed - Birdsong, Tom Jones and Don Quixote.
- Book that I least understand the appeal of - Ulysses.
- Books that I already forgot most of what they were about - Tristram Shandy, Sons and Lovers, The Ambassadors.
- Biggest slog - the final four volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.
- Books I had previously read that disappointed me both on the first and second go - On The Road, the 3rd volume of His Dark Materials.
- Biggest disappointment - The Count of Monte Cristo.
- Don Quixote is mentioned in at least 6 of the books. And that's not including Don Quixote itself which in a meta way references itself as a book (or at least that's how I remember it).
-Overall I really enjoyed 80 of the books on the list, 10 were maybe just not my thing and 10 of them I'd probably advise people to avoid. Life is short, don't spend time reading Atlas Shrugged. I'm sure that I'd be even more infuriated by it now if I had to read it again.
1. Slaughterhouse-Five
2. The Catcher in the Rye
3. The Lord of the Rings
4. Dune
5. Les Miserables
6. Invisible Man
7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
8. Don Quixote
9. The Hobbit
10. A Farewell to Arms
11. The Grapes of Wrath
12. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
13. The Trial
14. The Magic Mountain
15. 1984
16. David Copperfield
17. Great Expectations
18. Love in the Time of Cholera
19. Lolita
20. Birdsong
21. Moby Dick
22. The Harry Potter series
23. Tom Jones
24. A Clockwork Orange
25. The Stand
26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
27. Pale Fire
28. The Handmaid's Tale
29. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
30. The Chronicles of Narnia
31. The Name of the Rose
32. The Great Gatsby
33. The Sound and the Fury
34. Frankenstein
35. Pride and Prejudice
36. The Call of the Wild
37. As I Lay Dying
38. Lord of the Flies
39. Tess of the D'Ubervilles
40. The Brothers Karamazov
41. The Old Man and the Sea
42. The Color Purple
43. Of Mice and Men
44. Jane Eyre
45. To Kill a Mockingbird
46. Things Fall Apart
47. Tristram Shandy
48. Heart of Darkness
49. Midnight's Children
50. Wind in the Willows
51. Anne of Green Gables
52. Rebecca
53. The Stranger
54. Brave New World
55. Atonement
56. One Hundred Years of Solitude
57. Native Son
58. Anna Karenina
59. Sons and Lovers
60. War and Peace
61. A Passage to India
62. Beloved
63. A Tale of Two Cities
64. Animal Farm
65. Vanity Fair
66. An American Tragedy
67. I, Claudius
68. A Prayer for Owen Meany
69. Middlemarch
70. Watership Down
71. Madame Bovary
72 Brideshead Revisited
73. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
74. The Count of Monte Cristo
75. The Scarlet Letter
76. Winnie-the-Pooh
77. Crime and Punishment
78. Emma
79. Catch-22
80. Persuasion
81. The Age of Innocence
82. The Portrait of a Lady
83 Charlotte's Web
84. Wuthering Heights
85. For Whom the Bell Tolls
86. On the Road
87. Remembrance of Things Past
88. Possession
89. Bleak House
90. Little Women
91. The Sun Also Rises
92. Nostromo
93. His Dark Materials
94. Absalom, Absalom
95. The Ambassadors
96. To the Lighthouse
97. Mrs. Dalloway
98. Gone with the Wind
99. Ulysses
100. Atlas Shrugged
So what now? I'm still working on reading the ever changing top 50 Science Fiction books at https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-science-fiction-novels-of-all-time and the top 50 horror books at https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-horror-books-of-all-time. It is only "slightly" frustrating that these lists keep changing. There's also the 100 mystery books list, https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+Top+100+Mystery+Novels+of+All+Time+Mystery+Writers+of+America. Somehow even though I haven't touched anything on there for two years I've managed to read over a third of the books. So maybe I'll continue with those? Just a lot of the books on the list seem to be somewhat "disposable" types of books. In a hundred years no one will be reading or talking about Wobble to Death or The Steam Pig. And then of course there's the continuation of the original list that goes from 101-200. It is tempting to continue... but there are 8 books that are 1000+ pages! A Dance to the Music of Time is 3000+!
