Help me read my way through the history of the novel.

CBL #96 | A short essay followed by a very long list

Since I’m trying to fit huge novels into a very busy life, here is a huge novel with evidence of a very busy life behind it.

One of my favorite pastimes is browsing “best of” book lists. But after years of collecting them, I’ve decided to stop browsing and start building my own ambitious, living canon of the novel.

My life is a balancing act. I’m developing an AI tool to help secondhand booksellers identify rare books. I'm also a writer, a professor, and a consultant. Between a busy social life and a loving family, finding focused time for reading can be a challenge. Yet, every part of my life benefits from great books.

To make progress, my philosophy moving forward is simple: "one classic and one curiosity."

This means I will finally tackle the classics to shore up my knowledge, but I'll also leave room for randomness and my own idiosyncratic tastes. The "curiosity" part is easy: I just read what I find interesting. But defining "the classics" is harder than it seems.

My Reading Psychology

To create this list, I had to be honest with myself. I distinguish between books I want to read, books I have to read, and books I want to have read. Since leaving school, I rarely "have to" read anything. If I truly want to read a book, I find a way to do it. The challenge lies with that third category: the books I want to have read.

When I find myself avoiding one of those books, I ask why. If the motivation is external (like wanting to seem impressive), I usually drop it. But if it's internal—if I know a book will level me up or grant me new insight, but I'm avoiding it because it takes work to get into—then I know it's a candidate for the list.

The second half of a challenging book is one of my favorite places in the world. But I’m so busy and frazzled that starting them is tough. My solution is to schedule time to get invested, which is what this project is all about.

For that reason, one constraint was obvious: stick to novels. The non-fiction I pick up is usually easy to start because its value is obvious. A great novel, however, takes longer to reveal its power. I've gained more from them, so I need to start them more often.

How I Created This List

I compiled titles from dozens of lists, then iterated with the help of friends and AI to keep it under 500 books. I organized it into "Modules" grouped by genre, time, and sometimes geography or cultural movements.

The perspective is that of an American who wants to learn the story of the novel. I've tried to include international works where possible, but I'm certainly missing some. Plus, the list inevitably narrows as we approach the present day, where microgenres make a comprehensive map nearly impossible.

I would love your feedback. If you have notes on important books, movements, or genres I’ve left out, please let me know in the comments. And if you'd be interested in reading along, I'd love to hear that, too. I might structure something specifically for this.

A Note on Behemoths (📚): Some books on this list are exceptionally long, dense, or challenging. I have marked these with a 📚 symbol. I will likely have to give these novels extra time.

---

Checkpoint 1: The Invention of the Novel

Module 1: Don Quixote & the Proto-Novel

1. 📚 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Module 2: The Neoclassical Novel & Satire

1. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

2. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

3. Candide by Voltaire

Module 3: The Sentimental & Domestic Novel

1. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

2. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3. 📚 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Module 4: Gothic Fiction

1. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

2. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Module 5: Romanticism & The Historical Novel

1. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

2. 📚 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

3. 📚 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

6. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

Module 6: French Realism

1. The Red and the Black by Stendhal

2. 📚 Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

3. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

4. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant

Module 7: The American Renaissance

1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

2. 📚 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

3. 📚 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Module 8: English Victorian Realism

1. 📚 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

2. 📚 Bleak House by Charles Dickens

3. 📚 Middlemarch by George Eliot

4. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Module 9: The Russian Masters

1. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. 📚 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

4. 📚 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

5. 📚 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

---

CHECKPOINT 2: The Age of Genre and Experiment

Module 10: Scientific Romance

1. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

2. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

3. Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

4. Flatland by Edwin Abbott

Module 11: Aestheticism & Decadence

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Module 12: Asian Anti-Colonial Literature

1. Noli Me Tángere by José Rizal

2. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

3. Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali

Module 13: Naturalism

1. Germinal by Émile Zola

2. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

3. McTeague by Frank Norris

4. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

5. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Module 14: Psychological Realism/Proto-Modernism

1. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

4. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

5. Hunger by Knut Hamsun

6. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Module 15: Hardboiled Detective Fiction

1. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

2. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

3. Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

4. The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 1: I,the Jury / My Gun is Quick / Vengeance is Mine! by Mickey Spillane

Module 16: The Rise of Genre Pulps

1. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Adventure / Jungle Pulp)

2. The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (High Fantasy / Mythic)

3. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Planetary Romance / Sci-Fantasy)

4. The Virginian by Owen Wister (Western Prototype)

5. Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey (Western Popularization)

6. The Daybreakers by Louis L’Amour (Mid-Century Western Reinvention)

7. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Horror)

8. Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze by Lester Dent (Science Hero)

9. The Shadow by Walter B. Gibson (as Maxwell Grant) (Pulp Vigilante / Proto-Superhero)

10. The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard (Sword & Sorcery)

Module 17: The Big House Novel/Anglo-Irish Literature

1. The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen

2. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

3. The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross

Module 18: Southern Gothic

1. 📚 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

2. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

3. Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Module 19: The Lost Generation

1. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

4. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

5. Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

Module 20: The Harlem Renaissance

1. Cane by Jean Toomer

2. Passing by Nella Larsen

3. Home to Harlem by Claude McKay

4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

5. Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes

Module 21: Négritude & African Literature

1. The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye

2. Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

Module 22: Socialist Realism

1. How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky

2. Cement by Fyodor Gladkov

3. 📚 And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov

Module 23: Social Realism & The Proletarian Novel

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

2. Native Son by Richard Wright

3. 📚 U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos

Module 24: Modernism

1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

3. The Trial by Franz Kafka

4. 📚 In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust

5. 📚 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

6. 📚 Ulysses by James Joyce

7. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

8. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

---

CHECKPOINT 3: Post-War and the Information Age

Module 25: Existentialism

1. The Stranger by Albert Camus

2. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

3. The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

4. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

5. The Plague by Albert Camus

Module 26: The Golden Age of Science Fiction

1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov

2. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

3. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

4. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

6. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Module 27: Japanese Post-War Literature

1. The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

2. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

3. The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe

4. Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

5. A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe

6. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

Module 28: High Fantasy

1. 📚 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

3. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

4. The Once and Future King by T.H. White

5. The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake

Module 29: The Theater of the Absurd (influence on the Novel)

1. Molloy by Samuel Beckett

2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

3. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

4. V. by Thomas Pynchon

Module 30: The French New Novel (Nouveau Roman)

1. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

2. The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute

Module 31: The Angry Young Men

1. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

2. Room at the Top by John Braine

Module 32: Postcolonial Literature

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

2. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

3. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

4. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

5. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

6. 📚 Palace Walk (The Cairo Trilogy, #1) by Naguib Mahfouz

Module 33: The Campus Novel

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Module 34: Speculative Black Imagination and Afrofuturism

1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

3. The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (read as a pair)

Module 35: The Beat Generation

1. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

2. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Module 36: Black Arts Movement & Black Power Novels

1. The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams (1967)

2. The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee (1969)

3. Lord of Dark Places by Hal Bennett (1970)

4. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed (1972)

Module 37: Mass Market Publishing Revolution

1. Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

2. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

3. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Module 38: New Journalism and the Non-fiction Novel

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

2. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Module 39: The Latin American Boom

1. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

2. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

3. 📚 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

4. The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

5. The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

Module 40: Oulipo

1. 📚 Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec

2. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino

3. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Module 41: Feminist Fiction/Second Wave

1. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

4. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Module 42: Postmodernism

1. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

3. 📚 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

4. White Noise by Don DeLillo

5. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

6. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

8. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Module 43: Magical Realism

1. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

2. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

3. Beloved by Toni Morrison

4. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

5. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Module 44: The New Wave of Science Fiction

1. 📚 Dune by Frank Herbert

2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

3. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

4. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Module 45: Minimalism/Dirty Realism

1. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

2. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

3. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Module 46: The Modern Horror Boom

1. The Shining by Stephen King

2. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

3. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Module 47: The Revisionist Western

1. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1971)

2. 📚 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

3. 📚 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)

Module 48: Autofiction

1. 📚 My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgård

2. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

3. 📚 My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Module 49: Chinese Literary Renaissance

1. To Live by Yu Hua

2. Red Sorghum by Mo Yan

Module 50: Trauma Literature & The Memory Boom

1. Regeneration by Pat Barker

2. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

3. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Module 51: The Indian English Literary Boom

1. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

2. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

3. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

4. 📚 A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

5. The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Module 52: Cyberpunk

1. Neuromancer by William Gibson

2. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

4. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Module 53: Transgressive Fiction

1. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

2. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

3. Crash by J.G. Ballard

Module 54: Hysterical Realism

1. 📚 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

2. White Teeth by Zadie Smith

3. 📚 Underworld by Don DeLillo

4. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

5. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

6. 📚 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

7. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Module 55: Young Adult Literature & The Crossover Phenomenon

1. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

2. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

3. The Giver by Lois Lowry

4. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

5. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Module 56: The New Sincerity/Post-Postmodernism

1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

2. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

4. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

5. Normal People by Sally Rooney

Module 57: The Neo-Slave Narrative

1. Kindred by Octavia Butler

2. The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003)

3. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

4. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

---

CHECKPOINT 4: The Digital Age

Module 57: Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi)

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

3. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

4. The Overstory by Richard Powers

Module 58: Internet & Digital-Native Fiction

1. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

2. Leave Society by Tao Lin

---

It feels funny to publish something like this before I’ve started, but it also felt strange to start this journey without a map. I’m not sure I’ll finish reading all of these—as doing so is likely a decade-long project—but I will definitely be reading through the books in the first checkpoint. (I've actually already started Don Quixote.) Once that’s done, I’ll revisit the list, make updates, and change my plans.

I know I already warmly asked for feedback earlier, but in the spirit of Cunningham’s Law—"the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer"—I’m going to go ahead and say this is the best comprehensive novel reading list that exists.