Third Annual Personal Top 100 Update

It's not possible to convey how hard it is to maintain and update this list. It's complete nonsense. There are books that are down at the bottom of this list that have aspects that I like better than some of the books at the top. There are books at the top purely for nostalgic reasons, because of how much they meant to me when I was very young. There are books that are no longer on this list that I love very dearly. And then there's the problem of ranking all of the books I read last year, which starts off easily enough with the first five or so and then just devolves into me sliding books into place as best I can. Even though I try to avoid it, I sometimes rank the famous stuff higher just because I feel like I should. Ranking books is silly.

So, here's my third annual update of my personal Top 100 list. Of course it's harder to update every year, because it's an ever-smaller percentage of all of the books I've read in my life.

I'm also introducing a few innovations this year, the second of which is only going to make my life harder.

First off, I'm taking The Little Mermaid off of the list. I still love it, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure what gave me the idea that it was a book and not a story.

Second, I'm going to quit listing entire series as single entries. I've decided to do this because of the weaker entries of series that I enjoy that appear on this list but don't belong. I'm thinking of Jo's Boys which is nowhere near as good as Little Women or Little Men, as well as Titus Alone, a book that I forsake completely but has previously been on this list simply because of the two books that precede it in the Gormenghast trilogy. Because, as I've said before, making this list is so difficult, this is not an entirely retroactive change. It'll only show up for what I read in 2018 and 2019. For the other series, I'll just have to reread them to get a proper update I suppose. The Discworld series will be tricky to deal with for a while, certainly.

I have to confess, there was some awkwardness to deal with. Yet again, a bunch of books got hung up on the Earth's Children series entry, and that really shouldn't be happening. There was also the matter of encountering 1984 around the middle of my existing Top 100 list and not being sure whether I wanted to kick it off completely or not. (I did, and that led to me reevaluating basically everything I read last year that fell below The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. I have to be more careful about adding books just because I read them recently.) On the other hand, I knew that Bastard Out of Carolina was going to be in the top 10, it was just really hard to figure out where exactly to put it.

Fortunately for me, the penalty for getting all of this wrong is extremely low. There's room in my heart to love more than 100 books, anyway.

The books I read last year are in bold in the list below.

My Personal Top 100

1. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
   
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
   
3. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
   
4. Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison
   
5. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
   
6. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
   
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo
   
8. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
   
9. Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
   
10. The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
    
11. As for Me and My House - Sinclair Ross
    
12. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
    
13. The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
    
14. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
    
    • The Golden Compass
      
    • The Subtle Knife
      
    • The Amber Spyglass
15. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
    
16. The House on the Strand - Daphne du Maurier
    
17. The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
    
18. Bird Box - Josh Malerman
    
19. Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald
    
20. Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
    
21. A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
    
22. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë
    
23. One Hand Clapping - Anthony Burgess
    
24. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
    
25. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
    
26. The Alice books - Lewis Carroll
    
    • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
      
    • Through the Looking Glass
27. Watership Down - Richard Adams
    
28. The Anne books - Lucy Maud Montgomery
    
    • Anne of Green Gables
      
    • Anne of Avonlea
      
    • Anne of the Island
      
    • Anne of Windy Poplars
      
    • Anne’s House of Dreams
      
    • Anne of Ingleside
      
    • Rainbow Valley
      
    • Rilla of Ingleside
29. The Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling
    
    • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
      
    • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
      
    • Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban
      
    • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
      
    • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
      
    • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
      
    • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
30. Where Nests the Water Hen - Gabrielle Roy
    
31. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
    
32. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
    
33. The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield
    
34. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
    
35. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
    
36. The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
    
37. Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser
    
38. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
    
39. Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
    
40. Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
    
41. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
    
42. Mythago Wood - Robert Holdstock
    
43. A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe
    
44. Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
    
45. It - Stephen King
    
46. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
    
47. The Earth's Children series - Jean M. Auel
    
    • The Clan of the Cave Bear
      
    • The Valley of Horses
      
    • The Mammoth Hunters
      
    • The Plains of Passage
      
    • The Shelters of Stone
      
    • The Land of Painted Caves
48. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
    
49. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
    
50. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
    
51. Native Son - Richard Wright
    
52. Jo's Boys - Louisa May Alcott
    
53. The Running Man - Richard Bachman
    
54. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
    
55. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
    
56. The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect - Roger Williams
    
57. Jamaica Inn - Daphne du Maurier
    
58. Persuasion - Jane Austen
    
59. Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
    
60. The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
    
61. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
    
62. The Foundation series - Isaac Asimov
    
    • Prelude to Foundation
      
    • Foundation
      
    • Foundation and Empire
      
    • Second Foundation
63. The Orenda - Joseph Boyden
    
64. The Discworld series - Terry Pratchett
    
    • (The Colour of Magic didn't make its way onto this list)
      
    • Small Gods
      
    • ?!?!
65. My Ántonia - Willa Cather
    
66. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
    
67. Catherine, Called Birdy - Karen Cushman
    
68. Double Indemnity - James M. Cain
    
69. The Cat Who Went to Heaven - Elizabeth Coatsworth
    
70. Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
    
71. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
    
72. Plowing the Dark - Richard Powers
    
73. Calculating God - Robert J. Sawyer
    
74. Summer Sisters - Judy Blume
    
75. Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
    
76. Post Captain - Patrick O'Brian
    
77. Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian
    
78. Nightfall - Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
    
79. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - Douglas Adams
    
80. The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
    
81. His Majesty's Dragon - Naomi Novik
    
82. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
    
83. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
    
84. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
    
85. The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
    
86. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    
87. The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber
    
88. The Dream Where the Losers Go - Beth Goobie
    
89. A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
    
90. Howards End - E. M. Forster
    
91. Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
    
92. The Dark Tower series - Stephen King
    
    • The Gunslinger
      
    • The Drawing of the Three
      
    • The Waste Lands
      
    • Wizard and Glass
      
    • The Wind Through the Keyhole
      
    • Wolves of the Calla
      
    • Song of Susannah
      
    • The Dark Tower
93. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
    
94. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
    
95. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
    
96. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
    
97. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
    
98. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
    
99. The Emily books - Lucy Maud Montgomery
    
    • Emily of New Moon
      
    • Emily Climbs
      
    • Emily’s Quest
100. The Once and Future King - T. H. White
     

- - - - -

• Original Personal Top 100
• First Top 100 Update
• Second Top 100 Update