The Big List of Book Lists
A curated collection of worthwhile book lists. I try to keep this page up to date, so if you spot any broken links - or want to recommend a list - please send me an email or let me know on Bluesky. (Details on home page.)
Caveat lector: by creating or reading book lists, you risk making our culture worse. Who knows how many infant authors you have smothered in their beds simply by loading this page.
Resources
Project Gutenberg - The world's oldest digital library, with some 70 000 public domain books available to anyone, anywhere, for nothing.
Standard Ebooks - Free, properly formatted and typeset books in the public domain.
Delphi Classics - Inexpensive, professionally-formatted complete sets of authors in the public domain.
Neglected Books - Vast and entertaining resource for discovering "thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste." If you've never heard of it, Brad's probably read it!
Read a Little Poetry - An ever-expanding collection of poetry.
Comic Book+ - Huge repository of public domain comics, fanzines, radio serials, etc.
Horror and the supernatural
Famous Writers’ Favorite Stories of the Supernatural, Dark Fantasy and Horror - A collection of lists from some of the heavy hitters in horror and supernatural fiction.
Horror: 200 Best Books - Combined checklist of the books featured in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books (1988) and its sequel, Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005), arranged chronologically.
Twilight Zone Magazine's Five-Foot Bookshelf - TZM published ten lists of recommended reading in 1983; so far I have managed to find four. This site offers two lists by Thomas M. Disch, one by R.S. Hadji, and one by Karl Edward Wagner. This site takes a more detailed look at two of the above lists.
SF and fantasy
Nina Allan's 100 Novels That Shaped My World - Not limited to SF/fantasy, or indeed to novels. I love Nina's introduction to the list, in which she describes her selection process and insists on the "value in individual response, in laying bare our personal proclivities and blind spots, the ragged and digressive path of our creative development".
Michael Moorcock says that "I only have about ten SF novels I really like", so it's just as well The Guardian only asked him for a top ten.
China Miéville's Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. One of the more interesting selections out there. By the way, you're allowed to read the books even if you're not a socialist. Nobody will ever know.
J.G. Keely's Suggested Readings in Fantasy
Pornokitsch's 50 Essential Epic Fantasies part one; part two Don't hesitate to click: the site is SFW.
Pornokitsch's 50 Essential Science Fiction Novels part one; part two
The SF Mistressworks List - Author and critic Ian Sales lists 100 science fiction and fantasy books by women authors. Ian has also posted a selection of 100 books that shaped his world.
Jeff VanderMeer's 64 Favorite Fictions. Plus: Exhaustive Extensive Fantasy Lists; and if that's not enough check out The Big-Ass Fantasy List. That hyphen is doing important work.
Crime, espionage and adventure
Best 250 Adventures of the 20th Century - Adventure fiction in its many guises. Scroll to footer for even more lists.
John Le Carré recommends: part one; part two; part three; part four
Spybrary's Top 120 Spy Authors. That's a lot of spy authors! Plus: spy authors that didn't make the main list.
Classics and the canon
Tales of the Unexpected - Henry Eliot, author of The Penguin Classics Book selects ten lesser known titles from the series.
The Best Early Novels You've Never Heard Of - Various experts in world literature recommend under-appreciated books (not just novels) from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Forgotten Novels of the 19th Century - For once, forgotten means forgotten. The 19th century novels on this list - all of which are available on the Internet Archive - had clocked up zero readers on Goodreads as of mid-2021: "it’s likely that some of them have not been read by anyone for over a century". How do we know if any of them are worth rediscovering? Only one way to find out.
The Best 100 Novels. Compiled in 1898 by journalist Clement K. Shorter. A reminder of the ephemeral nature of literary fame.
Fifty Works of British and American Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne part one; part two. Excerpts from the now virtually unknown trio's 1967 work of pre-internet trolling.
Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best In English Since 1939 from Anthony Burgess's 1984 book of that name.
Greater Books - Links to a whopping forty-seven lists of "great books" from a diverse range of publications and authors.
The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction - College professor Larry McCaffery's response to the 1998 Modern Library's unadventurous 100 Greatest English Language Novels.
The Odd, The Bad & The Ugly
Lists of supposedly "overrated" literature tend to tread the same dull ground again and again. (You hate Moby Dick and Jonathan Franzen? How precious!) Give me lists of the strange, outmoded, and plain silly books that, whether we like it or not, constitute the vast the majority of humanity's collective literary output.
Kitsch, Corny and Irresistibly Bad - John Sutherland's twenty best-worst 20th century bestsellers. "Few categories of book are less readable than those which, as recently as 10 years ago, everyone was reading."
Robin Ince's Top Ten Truly Bad Books - An impressive selection of unappealing titles, including John Major's brother's autobiography, and a book that asks "What should you do if you are a Christian in love with your gynaecologist?"