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
Thursday, December 8, 2011
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
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
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
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
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
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
Saturday, December 3, 2011
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.
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.
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. 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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