The Ultimate Reading List

Title - Author (#of books on list), Awards/Lists

Number in parenthesis beside author’s name indicates number of author's books on list.
An asterisk* beside the author’s name indicates Nobel Prize winner.

G. - John Berger(2) 7

George Mills - Stanley Elkin(2) 4

Gathering, The - Anne Enright 7

Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike(6) 13

Ghost Road, The - Pat Barker 7

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson 1, 4, 13

Ginger Man, The - J.P. Donleavy 8

Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin(3) 8, 9, 12

God of Small Things, The - Arunhati Roy 7

Godfather, The - Mario Puzo 10

Going After Cacciato - Tim O'Brien(2) 2, 12

Golden Bowl, The - Henry James(5) 8, 10

Golden Notebook, The - Doris Lessing 10

Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell 1, 9, 10

Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck 1, 10

Good Soldier, The - Madox Ford(2) 8, 10

Goodbye Columbus - Philip Roth(8) 2

Grapes of Wrath, The - John Steinbeck(4) 1,8, 9, 10, 12

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon(3) 2

Great Gatsby, The - F. Scott Fitzgerald(4) 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Great Fire - Shirley Hazzard 2

Guard of Honor - James Gould Cozzens 1

Gypsy Ballads - Federico Garcia Lorca 11

Hair of Harold Roux, The - Thomas Williams 2

Half Broke Horses - Jeanette Walls 13

Hamlet - William Shakespeare(2) 12

Handmaid's Tale, The - Margaret Atwood(2) 5, 10

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, etc. - Alice Munro(3) 13

Headlong - Michael Frayn 13

Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The - Carson McCullers 8, 10

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad(4) 8, 9, 10, 12

Heart of the Country, The - Fay Weldon 5

Heart of the Matter, The - Graham Greene(2) 8

Heat and Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 7

Henderson The Rain King - Saul Bellow(5) 8

Herzog - Saul Bellow(5) 2

His Family - Ernest Poole 1

Historian, The: A Novel - Elizabeth Kostova 6

Hobbit, The - J.R.R. Tolkien(2) 10

Homage To Catalonia - George Orwell(3) 12

Home - Marilynne Robinson 5

Honey in the Horn - Harold Davis 1

Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner 7

Hound of the Baskervilles, The - A. Conan Doyle -10

Hours, The - Michael Cunningham 1, 3

House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday 1

House of Mirth, The - Edith Wharton(3) 8

House Of Spirits, The - Isabel Allende 10       

How German Is It? - Walter Abish 3

How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman 7

Howard's End - EM Forster(4) 8, 9

Human Stain, The - Philip Roth(8) 3, 13

Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow(5) 1

I, Claudius - Robert Graves 8, 10

If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino(2) 12

In a Free State - V.S. Naipaul*(3) 7

In America  - Susan Sontag 2

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote 9

In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway(4) 9

In the Rogue Blood - James Carlos Blake 5

In This Our Life - Ellen Glasgow 1 

Independence Day - Richard Ford 1, 3

Inheritance of Loss, The - Kiran Desai 4, 7

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri 1

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Ironweed - William Kennedy(2) 1, 4, 8, 10

1-Pulitzer Prize
2-National Book Award
3-Pen/Faulkner Award
4-National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction
5-Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
6-Book Sense Book Award
7-Man Booker Prize
8-American Library’s Top 100 Novels
9-Modern Library 100 Best Books
10-Library Journal’s Most Influential Fiction of the 20th Century
11-New York Library’s Books of the Century
12-Harvard Bookstore’s 100 Best Books
13-New York Times Editor’s Choice