TCM Remembers 2011 - Music by OK Sweetheart, Before You Go

O Little Town of Maggody

Fasten your seat belt! The holidays are known for being a bumpy ride, but with Arly and Ruby Bee on the prowl, this Christmas is bound to be filled with bumps, laughs and a body or two before the season is over! Arly Hanks, Maggody Chief of Police, is once again called in to work, this time to find the lost relative of singing superstar, Matt Montana. When Matt and his entourage decide to come home for the holidays, Maggody (pop. 755), swells to the breaking point and the crazy locals are hot after the almighty dollar. Another side splitting adventure in the Maggody series, Joan Hess does it again. Bringing the lovably annoying denizens to life once again, we are treated to a rollicking ride through the holidays to search for missing Aunt Adele, figure out why, why, why Dahlia has confessed to murder, and nearly get a leg chewed off by Raz Buchanan's prize pig, Marjorie. Will Brother Verber get it together and find the perfect orphan for the benefit concert? Grab a burger at Ruby Bee's and crack open Joan Hess' O Little Town of Maggody to find out!

The Constantine Codex

In the third book of his Skeleton series, historian Paul L. Maier has written a taut, compelling thriller. A scrap of parchment leads archeologist Jonathon Weber and his wife Shannon on a wild chase after an ancient manuscript that could change the way the world views the Scriptures. Soon however, the precious pages are stolen and the hunt is on for the lost book of the Bible. Paul Erdman coined the phrase "theological thriller" for Prof. Maiers genre and it fits well. Carefully penned, carefully researched, the resulting story is indeed a classic thriller that takes on the well debated subject of the Ressurection. This fast-paced story is an exciting exploration of the origins of Christianity that could have been ripped from today's headlines. The Webers are well developed characters and a likable couple, the dialogue is crisp and the story never lags. From the halls of Harvard to Istanbul and Rome, The Constantine Codex keeps you on the edge of your seat. Has Jon Weber really found the missing Second Acts? Is St. Paul really buried in the crypt under the Basilica? Forgery or not, will the codex be forever lost? Pick up Paul L. Maier's newest thriller, The Constantine Codex to find out!

Bloomsbury's 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

Bloomsbury's 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

Published in 2006 by Stephen E Andrews



1984 by George Orwell   
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan   
Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop   
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers   
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison   
The Best of John W. Campbell by John W. Campbell   
Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams by C. L. Moore   
Blood Music by Greg Bear   
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley   
Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore   
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.   
A Case of Conscience by James Blish   
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison   
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke   
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh   
City Come A-Walkin' by John Shirley   
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess   
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by David G. Compton   
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester   
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin   
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick   
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis   
Dr. Adder by K. W. Jeter   
The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard   
Dune by Frank Herbert   
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart   
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card   
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury   
The Female Man by Joanna Russ   
The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock   
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge   
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes   
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman   
Foundation by Isaac Asimov   
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley   
Fury by Henry Kuttner   
The Garments of Caean by Barrington J. Bayley   
The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch   
The Glamour by Christopher Priest   
Guernica Night by Barry N. Malzberg   
Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter   
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss   
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson   
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov   
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley   
Involution Ocean by Bruce Sterling   
The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad   
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells   
The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson   
The Journal of Nicholas the American by Leigh Kennedy   
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne   
The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance   
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin   
The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson   
Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard   
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle   
The Lovers by Philip José Farmer   
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison   
The Man in the Maze by Robert Silverberg   
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl   
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis   
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury   
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham   
Moonseed by Stephen Baxter   
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon   
Neuromancer by William Gibson   
Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith   
Nova by Samuel R. Delany   
Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein   
Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw   
Pavane by Keith Roberts   
Permutation City by Greg Egan   
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks   
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs   
The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton   
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson   
Ringworld by Larry Niven   
Roadside Picnic by Arkadi Strugatsky   
Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys   
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe   
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner   
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut   
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson   
Solaris by Stanisław Lem   
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester   
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein   
Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick   
Super-Cannes by J. G. Ballard   
Synners by Pat Cadigan   
This Immortal by Roger Zelazny   
This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones   
The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs   
Tik-Tok by John Sladek   
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells   
Timescape by Gregory Benford   
Triplanetary by E. E. "Doc" Smith   
Ubik by Philip K. Dick   
The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. Van Vogt   
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells   
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

The Essential Man's Library: 50 Fictional Adventure Books

The Essential Man's Library: 50 Fictional Adventure Books

Read blurbs, look at covers and browse the complete article here.

    The Adventures of Captain Hatteras by Jules Verne   
     Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne   
     Ayesha: The Return of She by H. Rider Haggard   
     The Beach by Alex Garland   
     The Call of the Wild by Jack London   
     Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini   
     Captain Grant's Children by Jules Verne   
     Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling   
     Congo by Michael Crichton   
    The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas   
     Hatchet by Gary Paulsen   
     Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad   
     The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien   
     Inca Gold by Clive Cussler   
     A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne   
     The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling   
     Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton   
     Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson   
     King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard   
     Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory   
     The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Jules Verne   
     Lord of the Flies by William Golding   
     The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien   
     The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle   
     The Lost World by Michael Crichton   
     The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling   
     Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville   
     The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne   
     The Odyssey by Homer   
     The People of the Mist by H. Rider Haggard   
     Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie   
     The Pirates of Malaysia by Emilio Salgari   
     The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope   
     Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe   
     Roughing It by Mark Twain   
    Sahara by Clive Cussler   
     The Sea Wolf by Jack London   
     She by H. Rider Haggard   
     The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien   
     Southern Mail / Night Flight (Penguin Modern Classics) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry   
     The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss   
     Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs   
     The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan   
    The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas   
     The Tigers of Mompracem by Emilio Salgari   
     Treasure by Clive Cussler   
     Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson   
     True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway   
     Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne   
     The Two Tigers by Emilio Salgari

Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time -

Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time - Mystery Writers of America


The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time is a list published in book form in 1990 by the British-based Crime Writers' Association. Five years later, the Mystery Writers of America published a similar list entitled The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time.


    The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle    1
     The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett    2
     Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe    3
     The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey    4
     Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow    5
     The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré    6
     The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins    7
    The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler    8
     Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier    9
     And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie    10
     Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver    11
     The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie    12
     The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler    13
     The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain    14
     The Godfather by Mario Puzo    15
     The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris    16
     A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler    17
     Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers    18
     The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories by Agatha Christie    19
     The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth    20
     Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler    21
     The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan    22
     The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco    23
     Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky    24
     The Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett    25
     Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer    26
     Red Dragon by Thomas Harris    27
     The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers    28
     Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald    29
     Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré    30
     The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett    31
     The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins    32
     Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley    33
     Double Indemnity by James M. Cain    34
     Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith    35
     Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers    36
     Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman    37
     Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake    38
     Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett    39
     The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart    40
     Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie    41
     The Firm by John Grisham    42
     The Ipcress File by Len Deighton    43
     Laura by Vera Caspary    44
     I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane    45
     The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall    46
     Bank Shot by Donald E. Westlake    47
     The Third Man by Graham Greene    48
     The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson    49
     Where Are the Children? by Mary Higgins Clark    50
     A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton    51
     The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders    52
     A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman    53
     In Cold Blood by Truman Capote    54
     Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household    55
     Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers    56
     The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton    57
     Smiley's People by John le Carré    58
    The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler    59
    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee    60
     Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene    61
     The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens    62
     Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey    63
     Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham    64
     The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. by Nicholas Meyer    65
     The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout    66
     Stick by Elmore Leonard    67
     The little drummer girl by John le Carré    68
     Brighton Rock by Graham Greene    69
     Dracula by Bram Stoker    70
     The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith    71
     The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin    72
     A Time to Kill by John Grisham    73
     Last Seen Wearing... by Hillary Waugh    74
     Little Caesar by W. R. Burnett    75
     The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins    76
     Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers    77
     From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming    78
     Beast in View by Margaret Millar    79
     Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert    80
     The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey    81
     Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters    82
     Shroud for a Nightingale by P. D. James    83
     The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy    84
     Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas    85
     The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad    86
     The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald    87
     The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett    88
     A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell    89
     Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey    90
     The Chill by Ross Macdonald    91
     Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley    92
     The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh    93
     God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake    94
     Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice    95
     The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr    96
     Prizzi's Honor by Richard Condon    97
     The Steam Pig by James McClure    98
     Time and Again by Jack Finney    99
     A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters    100
     Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin    100

Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time - UK Crime Writers' Association

Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time - UK Crime Writers' Association


The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time is a list published in book form in 1990 by the British-based Crime Writers' Association. Five years later, the Mystery Writers of America published a similar list entitled The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time.


    The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey    1
    The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler    2
     The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré    3
     Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers    4
     The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie    5
     Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier    6
     Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler    7
     The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins    8
     The Ipcress File by Len Deighton    9
     The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett    10
     The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey    11
     Last Seen Wearing... by Hillary Waugh    12
     The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco    13
     Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household    14
     The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler    15
     Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles    16
     The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth    17
     The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers    18
     And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie    19
     The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan    20
     The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Short Stories Omnibus) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle    21
     Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers    22
     Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe    23
     A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler    24
     The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin    25
     The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham    26
     The False Inspector Dew by Peter Lovesey    27
     The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins    28
     A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine    29
     The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain    30
     The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett    31
     The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle    32
     Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré    33
     Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley    34
     From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming    35
     Cop Hater by Ed McBain    36
     The Dead of Jericho by Colin Dexter    37
     Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith    38
     A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell    39
     The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr    40
     The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley    41
     A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters    42
     The Leper of Saint Giles by Ellis Peters    43
     A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin    44
     The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith    45
     Brighton Rock by Graham Greene    46
    The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler    47
     Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow    48
     A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell    49
     The Devil in Velvet by John Dickson Carr    50
     A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine    51
     The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes    52
     A Taste for Death by P. D. James    53
     The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins    54
     My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart    55
     Bertie and the Tinman by Peter Lovesey    56
     Penny Black by Susan Moody    57
     Game, Set & Match by Len Deighton    58
     The Danger by Dick Francis    59
     Devices and Desires by P. D. James    60
     Under World by Reginald Hill    61
     Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart    62
     A Running Duck by Paula Gosling    63
     Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert    64
     The Rose of Tibet by Lionel Davidson    65
     Innocent Blood by P. D. James    66
     Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers    67
     Hamlet, revenge! by Michael Innes    68
     A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman    69
     A Bullet in the Ballet by Caryl Brahms    70
     Deadheads by Reginald Hill    71
     The Third Man by Graham Greene    72
     The Labyrinth Makers by Anthony Price    73
     The Quiller Memorandum by Adam Hall    74
     Beast in View by Margaret Millar    75
     The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell    76
     Running Blind by Desmond Bagley    77
     Twice Shy by Dick Francis    78
     The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon    79
     The Killings at Badger's Drift (Inspector Barnaby Mysteries) by Caroline Graham    80
     The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake    81
     Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith    82
     Death Comes As the End by Agatha Christie    83
     Green for Danger by Christianna Brand    84
     Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare    85
     The Collector by John Fowles    86
     Gideon's Day by J. J. Marric    87
     The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson    88
     The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean    89
     The Color of Murder by Julian Symons    90
     Greenmantle by John Buchan    91
     The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers    92
     Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey    93
     Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett    94
     The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett    95
     Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain    96
     The Murder of the Maharajah by H. R. F. Keating    97
     What Bloody Man is That? by Simon Brett    98
     Shooting Script by Gavin Lyall    99
     The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace    100

IMBA's 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century

IMBA's 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century


selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association

     Aunt Dimity's Death by Nancy Atherton   
     The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake   
     The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King   
    The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler   
     Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke   
     Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini   
     Booked to Die by John Dunning   
     Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron   
     Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey   
     A Broken Vessel by Kate Ross   
     Cat of Many Tails by Ellery Queen   
     Child of Silence by Abigail Padgett   
     The Chill by Ross Macdonald   
     Chinaman's Chance by Ross Thomas   
     The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart   
     The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte   
     A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler   
     Concourse by S. J. Rozan   
     The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly   
     Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes   
     Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters   
     Dark Nantucket Noon: A Homer Kelly Mystery by Jane Langton   
     Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane   
     Dead Right by Peter Robinson   
     Deadlock by Sara Paretsky   
     Death By Sheer Torture by Robert Barnard   
     Death's Bright Angel by Janet Neel   
     The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald   
     Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley   
     A Dram of Poison by Charlotte Armstrong   
     Dreaming of the Bones by Deborah Crombie   
     Edwin of the Iron Shoes by Marcia Muller   
     An English Murder by Cyril Hare   
     The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown   
     Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard   
     A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George   
     Green for Danger by Christianna Brand   
     Hamlet, revenge! by Michael Innes   
     The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle   
     The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin   
     I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich   
     The Ice House by Minette Walters   
     If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O by Sharyn McCrumb   
     In the Heat of the Night by John Ball   
     A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton   
     The Killings at Badger's Drift (Inspector Barnaby Mysteries) by Caroline Graham   
     The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley   
     The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall   
     The List of Adrian Messenger by Philip MacDonald   
     Looking for Rachel Wallace by Robert B. Parker   
     Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell   
     The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett   
     The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes by K. C. Constantine   
     The Man With a Load of Mischief by Martha Grimes   
     The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais   
     The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin   
     Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers   
     The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie   
     No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell   
     Old Bones by Aaron Elkins   
     On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill   
     One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters   
     One for the Money by Janet Evanovich   
     The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain   
     Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow   
     Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier   
     The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman   
     Rough Cider by Peter Lovesey   
     Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain   
     The Sands of Windee by Arthur Upfield   
     Sanibel Flats by Randy Wayne White   
     The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris   
     Sleeping Dog by Dick Lochte   
     Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert   
     Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout   
     The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré   
     A Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar   
     Strike Three, You're Dead by Richard Dean Rosen   
     The Sunday Hangman by James McClure   
     Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh   
     The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith   
     A Test of Wills by Charles Todd   
     A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman   
     The Thin Woman by Dorothy Cannell   
     The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan   
     The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr   
     Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell   
     The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham   
     Time and Again by Jack Finney   
    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee   
     Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen   
     Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr   
     An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D. James   
     Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry   
     When the Bough Breaks by Jonathan Kellerman   
     When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block   
     Whip Hand by Dick Francis   
     Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? by G. M. Ford   
     The Wrong Murder by Craig Rice   
     The Yellow Room Conspiracy by Peter Dickinson

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books

 The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books

 125 writers submitted top-ten lists of their favorite works. Editor J. Peder Zane then utilized a point system and compiled a best-of list based on all the lists.



     Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy    171 points
     Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert    160 points
     War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy    150 points
     Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov    131 points
     Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain    126 points
     Hamlet by William Shakespeare    111 points
     The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald    110 points
     In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust    107 points
     Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov    105 points
     Middlemarch by George Eliot    100 points
     Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra    91 points
     Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville    88 points
     Great Expectations by Charles Dickens    87 points
     Ulysses by James Joyce    85 points
     The Odyssey by Homer    81 points
     Dubliners by James Joyce    79 points
     Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky    72 points
     King Lear by William Shakespeare    72 points
     Emma by Jane Austen    67 points
     One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez    66 points
     The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner    63 points
     To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf    62 points
     The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky    61 points
     The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri    56 points
     The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor    55 points
     The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne    54 points
     Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen    52 points
     Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë    52 points
     The Bible by Anonymous    50 points
     Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov    49 points
     Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner    47 points
     The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James    45 points
    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee    44 points
     The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer    43 points
     Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad    42 points
     Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf    42 points
     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison    41 points
     Bleak House by Charles Dickens    40 points
     The Trial by Franz Kafka    40 points
     Beloved by Toni Morrison    40 points
     Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë    39 points
     The Stranger by Albert Camus    38 points
     The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck    36 points
     All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren    35 points
     The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford    32 points
     The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger    32 points
     Persuasion by Jane Austen    31 points
     Macbeth by William Shakespeare    31 points
     The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides by Aeschylus    30 points
     The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne    30 points
     The Red and the Black by Stendhal    28 points
     Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetrology by John Updike    28 points
     The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel    27 points
     Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald    27 points
     A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce    27 points
     Catch-22 by Joseph Heller    26 points
     Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut    26 points
     The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever    24 points
     Paradise Lost by John Milton    24 points
     The Aeneid by Virgil    24 points
     Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy    23 points
     Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman    23 points
     Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol    22 points
     The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann    22 points
     The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty    22 points
     The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov    21 points
     Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens    21 points
     As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner    21 points
     The Hamlet by William Faulkner    21 points
     The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway    21 points
     The Iliad by Homer    21 points
     The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio    20 points
     The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky    20 points
     The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead    20 points
     The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal    20 points
     The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway    19 points
     Independent People by Halldór Laxness    19 points
     The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights by Richard Burton    18 points
     Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky    18 points
     Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston    18 points
     The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King    18 points
     The Tempest by William Shakespeare    18 points
     Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson    17 points
     Don Juan by Lord George Gordon Byron    17 points
     Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe    17 points
     Tom Jones by Henry Fielding    17 points
     A Passage to India by E. M. Forster    17 points
     Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson    17 points
     Candide by Voltaire    17 points
     Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges    16 points
     The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler    16 points
     Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell    16 points
     Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell    16 points
     Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy    16 points
     The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka    16 points
     1984 by George Orwell    16 points
     Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift    16 points
     The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West    16 points
     A Death in the Family by James Agee    15 points
     Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino    15 points
     The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson    15 points
     Howards End by E. M. Forster    15 points
     The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene    15 points
     Selected Stories by Alice Munro    15 points
     A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell    15 points
     The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark    15 points
     Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr    14 points
     The Tin Drum by Günter Grass    14 points
     Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare    14 points
     David Copperfield by Charles Dickens    13 points
     Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser    13 points
     The Bear by William Faulkner    13 points
     For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway    13 points
     Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson    13 points
     The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa    13 points
     Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter    13 points
     The Three Theban Plays: Antigone ; Oedipus at Colonus ; Oedipus the King by Sophocles    13 points
     East of Eden by John Steinbeck    13 points
     The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson    13 points
     Daniel Deronda by George Eliot    12 points
     Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez    12 points
     The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard    12 points
     So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell    12 points
     Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison    12 points
     Germinal by Émile Zola    12 points
     Ask the Dust (P.S.) by John Fante    11 points
     Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford    11 points
     The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro    11 points
     The Ambassadors by Henry James    11 points
     Nine Stories (U.S.) by J. D. Salinger    11 points
     Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray    11 points
     Native Son by Richard Wright    11 points
     The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous    10 points
     The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe    10 points
     Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe    10 points
     The Untouchable by John Banville    10 points
     Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett    10 points
     The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad    10 points
     The Outward Room by Millen Brand    10 points
     Casa Guidi Windows by Elizabeth Barrett Browning    10 points
     Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel by Truman Capote    10 points
     The Golden Argosy: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Short Stories in the English Language by and Cartmell Charles Grayson, Van Henry    10 points
     The Professor's House by Willa Cather    10 points
     The Awakening by Kate Chopin    10 points
     Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee    10 points
     Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee    10 points
     Geek Love by Katherine Dunn    10 points
     Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich    10 points
     JR by William Gaddis    10 points
     I, Claudius by Robert Graves    10 points
     The Golden Bowl by Henry James    10 points
     Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence    10 points
     The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis    10 points
     Embers by Sandor Marai    10 points
     The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville    10 points
     The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter    10 points
     The Homecoming by Harold Pinter    10 points
     The Time of the Doves by Merce Rodoreda    10 points
     Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare    10 points
     The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki    10 points
     L'Assommoir by Émile Zola    10 points
     Nana by Émile Zola    10 points
     Aesop's Fables by Aesop    9 points
     Mahābhārata (John D. Smith ed.) by Vyasa    9 points
     The Zoo Story by Edward Albee    9 points
     The American Dream by Edward Albee    9 points
     Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee    9 points
     Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac    9 points
     The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos    9 points
     The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler    9 points
     The Fall by Albert Camus    9 points
     Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather    9 points
     The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût    9 points
     Selected Stories by Andre Dubus    9 points
     The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot    9 points
     Medea by Euripides    9 points
     Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon    9 points
     Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg    9 points
     1982, Janine (Canongate Classics) by Alasdair Gray    9 points
     The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story of a Man of Character by Thomas Hardy    9 points
     The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst    9 points
     A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen    9 points
     Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann    9 points
     Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann    9 points
     The Misanthrope and Other Plays: A New Selection by Jean-Baptiste Moliere    9 points
     Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec    9 points
     Wheat That Springeth Green by J. F. Powers    9 points
     Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym    9 points
     The Life of Henry the Fifth by William Shakespeare    9 points
     Othello by William Shakespeare    9 points
     Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson    9 points
     The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson    9 points
     The Master by Colm Tóibín    9 points
     Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset    9 points
     The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West    9 points
     A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams    9 points
     Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac    8 points
     Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges    8 points
     Bullet Park by John Cheever    8 points
     Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov    8 points
     Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee    8 points
     Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad    8 points
     The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad    8 points
     The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies    8 points
     Hard Times by Charles Dickens    8 points
     The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble    8 points
     Bacchae by Euripides    8 points
     Light in August by William Faulkner    8 points
     Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding    8 points
     The gate of angels by Penelope Fitzgerald    8 points
     The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow    8 points
     Red Dragon by Thomas Harris    8 points
     The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway    8 points
     Almost Paradise by Susan Isaacs    8 points
     Shining Through by Susan Isaacs    8 points
     Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson    8 points
     The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera    8 points
     The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis    8 points
     Man's Fate by Andre Malraux    8 points
     Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant    8 points
     The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien    8 points
     Norwood by Charles Portis    8 points
     The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie    8 points
     Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini    8 points
     The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott    8 points
     Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald    8 points
     The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein    8 points
     Sophie's Choice by William Styron    8 points
     Golpo Guccho by Rabindranath Tagore    8 points
     Sketches from a Hunter's Album by Ivan Turgenev    8 points
     The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain    8 points
     The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde    8 points
     Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory    7 points
     Little Women by Louisa May Alcott    7 points
     Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen    7 points
     Nightwood by Djuna Barnes    7 points
     Herzog by Saul Bellow    7 points
     My Ántonia by Willa Cather    7 points
    The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler    7 points
     The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov    7 points
     The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute    7 points
     Letourneau's Used Auto Parts by Carolyn Chute    7 points
     Merry Men by Carolyn Chute    7points
     The Hours by Michael Cunningham    7 points
     U.S.A. by John Dos Passos    7 points
     The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble    7 points
     Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, The by Mavis Gallant    7 points
     The Comedians by Graham Greene    7 points
     The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard    7 points
     Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen    7 points
     The Thin Red Line by James Jones    7 points
     One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey    7 points
     Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré    7 points
     Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry    7 points
     The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers    7 points
     Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller    7 points
     The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu    7 points
     Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov    7 points
     McTeague by Frank Norris    7 points
     The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien    7 points
     Metamorphoses by Ovid    7 points
     The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick    7 points
     Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais    7 points
     The Burning Plain, and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo    7 points
     The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald    7 points
     The Lorax by Dr. Seuss    7 points
     A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith    7 points
     Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson    7 points
     The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien    7 points
     A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole    7 points
     Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope    7 points
     The Color Purple by Alice Walker    7 points
     Charlotte's Web by E. B. White    7 points
     The Golden Days by Cao Xueqin    7 points
     Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates    7 points
     The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker    6 points
     Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett    6 points
     Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard    6 points
     The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles    6 points
     Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown    6 points
     Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (Library of America) by Raymond Carver    6 points
     The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary    6 points
     Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer    6 points
     The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge    6 points
     The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky    6 points
     A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley    6 points

Time's All-Time 100 Novels selection

Book awards: Time's All-Time 100 Novels selection


     1984 by George Orwell   
     The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow   
     All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren   
     American pastoral by Philip Roth   
     An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser   
     Animal Farm by George Orwell   
     Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara   
     Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume   
     The Assistant by Bernard Malamud   
     At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien   
     Atonement by Ian McEwan   
     Beloved by Toni Morrison   
     The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood   
    The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler   
     The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood   
     Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy   
     Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh   
     The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Niven Wilder   
     Call it Sleep by Henry Roth   
     Catch-22 by Joseph Heller   
     The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger   
     A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess   
     The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron   
     The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen   
     The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon   
     A Dance to the Music of Time. 4th movement, Winter by Anthony Powell   
     The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West   
     Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather   
     A Death in the Family by James Agee   
     The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen   
     Deliverance by James Dickey   
     Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone   
     Falconer by John Cheever   
     The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles   
     Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin   
     The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing   
     Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell   
     The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck   
     Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon   
     The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald   
     A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh   
     The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers   
     The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene   
     Herzog by Saul Bellow   
     A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul   
     Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson   
     I, Claudius by Robert Graves   
     Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace   
     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison   
     Light in August by William Faulkner   
     The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis   
     Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov   
     Lord of the Flies by William Golding   
     The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien   
     Loving by Henry Green   
     Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis   
     The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead   
     Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie   
     Money by Martin Amis   
     The Moviegoer by Walker Percy   
     Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf   
     Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs   
     Native Son by Richard Wright   
     Neuromancer by William Gibson   
     Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro   
     On the Road by Jack Kerouac   
     One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey   
     The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski   
     Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov   
     A Passage to India by E. M. Forster   
     Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion   
     Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth   
     Possession by A.S. Byatt   
     The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene   
     The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark   
     Rabbit, Run by John Updike   
     Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow   
     The Recognitions by William Gaddis   
     Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett   
     Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates   
     The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles   
     Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut   
     Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson   
     The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth   
     The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner   
     The Sportswriter by Richard Ford   
     The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré   
     The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway   
     Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston   
     Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe   
    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee   
     To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf   
     Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller   
     Ubik by Philip K. Dick   
     Under the Net by Iris Murdoch   
     Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry   
     Watchmen by Alan Moore   
     White Noise by Don DeLillo   
     White Teeth by Zadie Smith   
     Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels

Book awards: The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels: The Board's List


Titles    Order

Ulysses by James Joyce    1
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald    2
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce    3
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov    4
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley    5
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner    6
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller    7
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler    8
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence    9
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck    10
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry    11
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler    12
1984 by George Orwell    13
I, Claudius by Robert Graves    14
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf    15
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser    16
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers    17
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut    18
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison    19
Native Son by Richard Wright    20
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow    21
Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara    22
U.S.A. by John Dos Passos    23
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson    24
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster    25
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James    26
The Ambassadors by Henry James    27
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald    28
Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell    29
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford    30
Animal Farm by George Orwell    31
The Golden Bowl by Henry James    32
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser    33
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh    34
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner    35
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren    36
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Niven Wilder    37
Howards End by E. M. Forster    38
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin    39
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene    40
Lord of the Flies by William Golding    41
Deliverance by James Dickey    42
A Dance to the Music of Time. 4th movement, Winter by Anthony Powell    43
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley    44
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway    45
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad    46
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad    47
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence    48
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence    49
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller    50
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer    51
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth    52
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov    53
Light in August by William Faulkner    54
On the Road by Jack Kerouac    55
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett    56
Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford    57
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton    58
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm    59
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy    60
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather    61
From Here to Eternity by James Jones    62
The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever    63
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger    64
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess    65
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham    66
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad    67
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis    68
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton    69
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell    70
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes    71
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul    72
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West    73
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway    74
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh    75
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark    76
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce    77
Kim by Rudyard Kipling    78
A Room with a View by E. M. Forster    79
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh    80
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow    81
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner    82
A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul    83
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen    84
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad    85
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow    86
The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett    87
The Call of the Wild by Jack London    88
Loving by Henry Green    89
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie    90
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell    91
Ironweed by William J. Kennedy    92
The Magus by John Fowles    93
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys    94
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch    95
Sophie's Choice by William Styron    96
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles    97
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain    98
The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy    99
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington    100

What Shoppers Don’t Realize About Amazon’s Reviews

For many online shoppers, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is their starting point for researching products they want to buy—and Amazon’s customer reviews, in particular, play a key role in those purchasing decisions.

SEE ALSO: Who Are Amazon's Citizen Reviewers?

But there is some new evidence suggesting that Amazon’s customer reviewers—particularly the top 1,000 reviewers—do not always make independent decisions about which books and other products they write about. According to a new Cornell study that we previewed last week, the reviewers in many cases acknowledge that in order to maintain their high rankings and continue to receive free products (one of the perks of being a top reviewer), they have to make surprisingly calculated decisions about what to review and what to say about those products. 

The author of the study, Cornell professor Trevor Pinch, says the fundamental problem is that people reading the reviews probably naturally assume that the Amazon reviewers are regular shoppers just like them—when, in fact, their relationship to the products they review can be a little more complicated. “The issue of the ‘customers’ not really being customers needs to be addressed,” says Pinch, who surveyed 166 of Amazon’s top 1,000 reviewers for his study.
We reached out to Amazon to talk about its product-review system, and to get the company’s response to some of Pinch’s claims. But the company didn’t respond.
History
In Amazon’s early days, in the late 1990s, the “Editorial Reviews” that appeared on book pages were written by Amazon employees—especially editors, but “anyone who worked for the company, including warehouse staff, were asked to write as many as 10 reviews a week.” Amazon later made deals with book review publications like Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, The Library Journal and the New York Times Book Review, to copy their reviews of newly published books. Over time, the literary editors hired to write reviews in those early years have either left or moved to other positions in the company, and customers themselves have become the main source of reviews on the site—though the Editorial Reviews remain.
For the most part, though, Amazon has outsourced the job of writing reviews to thousands of unpaid citizen reviewers. Seventy percent of the top reviewers are male, their median age is 51-60, and more than half hold a graduate degree. About 14 percent of those reviewers are professional writers. Why do they write the reviews for free? Respondents to Pinch’s survey overwhelmingly mentioned “self-expression” and “enjoyment” as their motivations. Many respondents also cited altruistic reasons for reviewing—“hope to help others decide whether to buy,” “wanting to share what I have liked with others,” etc. And some said they write reviews to help them keep track of the books they’ve read and the movies they’ve watched.
But in the interviews with Pinch, respondents talk about some other motivations that might interest readers of these reviews. The study, for example, found that 85 percent of respondents had received free products from publishers, agents, authors, and others. Why is that an issue? Professional critics—at a publication like the New York Times—also receive free books to review, of course. But those critics are paid by the publications they write for, and their job is to review these books objectively. For Amazon’s unpaid customer reviewers, the only tangible benefit of their “job”—and the study indeed found that for top reviewers reviewing is akin to a second “career,” a “crossover occupation”—is any free books and products they receive. The way to keep those freebies flowing is to pump out glowing book reviews. (Amazon explicitly tells reviewers to “please clearly and conspicuously disclose that that you received the product free of charge,” but Pinch says reviewers don’t always adhere to that directive.)
Some 88 percent of respondents reported that most or all of the reviews they wrote were positive. “I don’t want to make waves, and I don’t want to offend the author,” one said. “I’m in the midst of writing a book myself, and I’m thinking it might be prudent not to be TOO overly critical of books that go through the traditional publishing process.”
The Ranking System
One reason reviewers care about being “prudent” is the way that Amazon’s reviewer ranking system works. In 2008, Amazon made broad changes to the system, causing many longtime reviewers to lose their top rankings. These changes have been a subject of great debate on Amazon forums. While Amazon has been secretive about the algorithms for its reviewer rankings, it says that under the new ranking system rank is determined by the “overall helpfulness” of all of reviewer’s reviews (as rated by customer votes), the number of reviews the person has written, and the recentness of the review. Recent reviews get more weight.
Sixty-seven percent of the respondents to Pinch’s survey disliked the new ranking system: “It rewards the newbies at the expense of long-term reviewers who have worked for years on the site,” one top reviewer wrote. Confusingly, Amazon still includes both reviewer ranking systems on its website, listing reviewers by both New Reviewer Rank and Classic Reviewer Rank. The top-10 lists are different, and nobody who is a top-10 reviewer also holds a top-10 spot in the classic rankings.
“Not Helpful”
Some reviewers told Pinch that they steer clear of books on controversial topics like politics and religion—because reviewing those books can increase their number of “not helpful” ratings. One said: “A positive review of a conservative politics title is sure to attract a great number of ‘not helpful’ votes by those who don’t like the author’s politics.” Wrote another: “Since some people mark reviews as ‘unhelpful’ simply because they disagree with them, this means a top reviewer is most likely to be someone who only gives the ‘correct’ review of a book, rather than a more nuanced and balanced review, or critical one. The new system discriminates against minority opinions and seeks homogeneous reviews and fans of those reviews.” And a third respondent said, “A reviewer can either be willing to address a controversy OR simply go for a higher Amazon ranking. He cannot do both as Amazon has made them mutually exclusive!”
“Helpful” votes lead not only to higher rankings, but also to more free books. Pinch says it appears that publishing companies and agents start to offer free review copies to Amazon reviewers when they hit the top 1,000. Once they made it into the top 100 or top 50 reviewers, they got many more offers. Some respondents mentioned that if they didn’t like a book they received, they would give its sender the choice of whether or not they should post the review. Not surprisingly, the answer was “invariably” no.
To be sure, Amazon isn’t the only site that has critics who question the soundness of its reviews. Yelp, one of the top review sites by traffic, has its share of detractors. In May, a group of small-business owners filed a lawsuit against the site, accusing it of offering to bury bad reviews if the business bought ads. Yelp has rejected the claims, and that case is currently in court.
Who’s to blame for apparent flaws with Amazon’s reviews? There don’t appear to be any obvious villains here. There’s no evidence that Amazon is secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes to keep all the reviews upbeat. And it certainly doesn’t seem as if the citizen reviewers have some innate desire to avoid important but politically charged topics.
That said, reading Pinch’s interviews with reviewers, you get a sense of how hard it is maintain the integrity of a process that is dependent on a virtual army of unpaid but still presumably capitalist-minded laborers. If they’re not paid, they are going to find other incentives and motivations—which may in some cases work at cross purposes with their primary mandate, to produce honest and independent-minded reviews. 

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Jane Austen 'died from arsenic poisoning'

Crime writer Lindsay Ashford bases claim on reading of author's letters and claims murder cannot be ruled out

Almost 200 years after she died, Jane Austen's early death at the age of just 41 has been attributed to many things, from cancer to Addison's disease. Now sleuthing from a crime novelist has uncovered a new possibility: arsenic poisoning.
Author Lindsay Ashford moved to Austen's village of Chawton three years ago, and began writing her new crime novel in the library of the novelist's brother Edward's former home, Chawton House. She soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen's letters, and one morning spotted a sentence Austen wrote just a few months before she died: "I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."
Having researched modern forensic techniques and poisons for her crime novels, Ashford immediately realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause "raindrop" pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black, and other areas go white.
Shortly afterwards she met the former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, who told her that the lock of Austen's hair on display at a nearby museum had been tested for arsenic by the now deceased American couple who bought it an auction in 1948, coming up positive.
Ashford says that chronic arsenic poisoning gives all the symptoms Austen wrote about in her letters, unlike other possibilities which have been put forward for her death, from Addison's disease, to the cancer Hodgkin's disease and the auto-immune disease lupus. Arsenic was also widely available at the time, handed out in the form of Fowler's Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis.
"After all my research I think it's highly likely she was given a medicine containing arsenic. When you look at her list of symptoms and compare them to the list of arsenic symptoms, there is an amazing correlation," Ashford told the Guardian. "I'm quite surprised no one has thought of it before, but I don't think people realise quite how often arsenic was used as a medicine. [But] as a crime writer I've done a lot of research into arsenic, and I think it was just a bit of serendipity, that someone like me came to look at her letters with a very different eye to the eye most people cast on Jane Austen. It's just luck I have this knowledge, which most Austen academics wouldn't."
Although Ashford thinks that, based on her symptoms and on the fact arsenic was so widespread, it is "highly likely" that Austen was suffering from arsenic poisoning after being prescribed it by a doctor for another disease, she explores the possibility that the novelist was murdered with arsenic in her new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen. "I don't think murder is out of the question," she said. "Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder. In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn't until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic."
Professor Janet Todd, editor for the Cambridge edition of Jane Austen, said that murder was implausible. "I doubt very much she would have been poisoned intentionally. I think it's very unlikely. But the possibility she had arsenic for rheumatism, say, is quite likely," she said. "It's certainly odd that she died quite so young. [But] in the absence of digging her up and finding out, which would not be appreciated, nobody knows what she died of."
Although Ashford would be keen to see Austen's bones disinterred for modern forensic analysis, she accepts this is unlikely to happen. "I can quite understand that people would be outraged by the idea," she said.

• guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 November 2011 09.40 EST