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. 

 Man Gone Down - Thomas Black  13

Magic Barrell, The - Bernard Malamud(2) 2

Magic Mountain, The - Thomas Mann  10, 11

Magnificent Ambersons, The - Booth Tarkington(2) 1, 8

Magus, The - John Fowles(2) 8

Main Street - Sinclair Lewis(3) 8, 9

Maltese Falcon, The - Dashiell Hammett  8, 9, 10

Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The - Oscar Hijuelos 1

Man with the Golden Arm, The - Nelson Algren 2

Mao II - Don DeLillo(3) 3

March, The - E.L. Doctorow 3, 4

March - Geraline Brooks 1

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer  Steven Millhauser 1

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon(3) 13

Master, The - Colm Toibin 13

Master Tung`s Western Chamber Romance - Li Li Chen 2

Mating - Norman Rush  2

Maus II - Art Spiegelman(2)  5

Maus - Art Spiegelman(2) 12

Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 5         

Metamorphosis, The - Franz Kafka 11, 12

Middle Passage - Charles Johnson 2

Middleman and Other Stories, The - Bharati Mukherjee  4

Middlemarch - George Eliot 12

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides 1, 13

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie(3) 7, 8, 9

Mists of Avalon, The - Marlon Zimmer Bradley 10

Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively 7

Moor’s Last Sigh, The - Salman Rushdie(3)  13

Morte d'Urban - J.F. Powers  2

Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem 4

Moviegoer, The - Walker Percy(2)  2, 8, 10

Mr. Sammler's Planet - Saul Bellow(5)2

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf(3) 9, 12

Mrs. Ted Bliss - Stanley Elkin(2) 4

My Antonia - Willa Cather(4) 9, 10

Naked and the Dead, The - Norman Mailer(2) 8, 9, 10

Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs 9

Native Son - Richard Wright  8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Netherland - Joseph O’Neill  3

News From Paraguay, The - Lily Tuck 2

Next of Kin - Roger Fouts 12

Night in Question, The - Tobias Wolff(2) 12

Nightwood - Djuna Barnes 12

Nine Stories - JD Salinger(4) 12

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad (4)  8

Now in November - Josephine Winslow Johnson 1 

O Pioneers! - Willa Cather(4) 9

October Light - John Gardner 4

Odyssey, The - Homer  12

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham(2) 8, 10

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck(4) 9, 10, 12

Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald(2) 7

Old Devils, The - Kingsley Amis 7

Old Forest, The - Peter Taylor(2) 3

Old Man and the Sea, The - Ernest Hemingway(4) 1, 9, 10

Old Wive’s Tale - Arnold Bennett 8

Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout 1

On Beauty - Zadie Smith 13

On the Road - Jack Kerouac  8, 9, 10, 11

Once And Future King, The - T.H. White  10

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich                Alexander Solzhenitzyn 10, 12

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey 9, 10

One Hundred Years of  Solitude                                Gabriel Garcia Marquez(3)     10, 11, 12

One of Ours - Willa Cather(4) 1

Operation Shylock - Philip Roth(8) 3

Optimist's Daughter, The - Eudora Welty(3) 1

Ordinary People - Judith Guest 10

Orlando - Virginia Woolf(3) 9

Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey(2) 7

Out Stealing Horses - Per Pettesron  13

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