This page was updated 16/07/2024.
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.
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.
Five Books - Experts recommend five books to do with their field. All sorts of experts, all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction. I read this site recreationally and download Kindle samples based on the recommendations then never get around to looking at them. This is called Productivity.
A couple of meta-lists for your perusal. First, Greater Books which links to a whopping forty-seven lists of "great books" from a diverse range of publications and authors. I aim to assess these lists at some point and add the most interesting ones to this page. Nb. the James Baldwin mentioned on this page is not the James Baldwin, merely a James Baldwin.
Once you're done with Greater Books, you can graduate to The Greatest Books, a site that uses various criteria to rank (at time of writing) 313 different lists. A list of lists, in other words. I would never.
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.
For a more contemporary dose of the horrors, try Book Riot's 72 of the Best Horror Books, According to Horror Authors, with contributions from Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Gretchen Felker-Martin, and more.
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 "I only have about ten SF novels I really like", so it's just as well The Guardian only asked him for that many.
China Miéville's Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. One of the more interesting selections out there. You can probably read these books even if you're not a socialist. Who's gonna know?
The Best Sci-Fi Books - recommended reading from across the SF spectrum. Regular updates.
Blogger and author J.G. Keely's Suggested Readings in Fantasy and fantastical comics.
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 Once again, SFW!
The SF Mistressworks List - Author and critic Ian Sales lists 100 science fiction and fantasy books by women authors. Ian has also posted 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 & the Canon
Harold Bloom's Western Canon - Whatever your opinion of Bloom and the idea of a "Western Canon", this list is valuable as probably the most comprehensive of its kind aimed at a popular audience. Food for thought at the very least, and if you find Bloom's canon sufficiently intriguing you can read the book he wrote about it. (Just kidding: don't do that.)
This Is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelves - As the title suggests, the fifty books on this list (adapted from the book of that name) are a diverse, international selection. I'm not sure the presence of verified conspiracy nut and antisemite Alice Walker can be justified, but otherwise this seems like a commendable and necessary project.
Times Literary Supplement's Sixty Best Books by Women Every Man Should Read (But Could Always Ignore and Stick to Philip Roth) - Cringy title aside (not everything has to be oppositional, you know?) this is an interesting list, even if the inclusion of a handful of genre titles feels like an afterthought.
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.
100 Key Books of the Modern Movement - Influential mid-20th century critic Cyril Connolly kicks the pram in the hall down the stairs and gets on with some reading.
The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction - Larry McCaffery's response to the 1998 Modern Library's unadventurous (and frankly absurd) 100 Greatest English Language Novels. I have no idea who Larry McCaffery is when he's at home, but it's an interesting list.
Feminista!'s 100 Great 20th Century Works of Fiction by Women - another response to the maligned Modern Library list, which included a meagre nine novels by women.
Deutsche Welle's 100 German Must-Reads - Specifically, German-language books that have been translated into English, which is useful for us who talk that.
Forgotten and Neglected Books
The Best 100 Novels. Compiled in 1898 by journalist Clement K. Shorter. A reminder of the ephemeral nature of literary fame.
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.
The Modern Word's Neglected Books & Authors. An intriguing personal selection, including many books yet to be published in English. The site's well-read author offers many other lists; of particular interest is their list of best novels by women.
6 most influential women writers you've never heard of - Unless of course you have heard of them. (I've heard of 3/6 so where's my cookie? Or rather half a cookie.)
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 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?"