Erica Jong's Top 100 20th Century Novels by Women -- LIST

Erica Jong's Top 100 20th Century Novels by Women

At the turn of the Millennium, there was a flurry of "Top 100" book lists. The Modern Library’s list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, started the craze (and led to this blog). Erica Jong wrote an article for The Nation criticizing the Modern Library’s list for including relatively few books by women.

She titled her article "I've Got a Little List" and included her own list of the Top 100 20th Century Novels by Women. Jong explained that she had compiled the list from votes cast by those “250 or so distinguished women writers and critics” and “about thirty male novelists, critics and poets” whom she solicited directly, as well as participants in “the rather lively writers’ forum” on Jong’s website. The list is in order of the number of votes received. 

Jong's method for creating the list was not scientific. But the results provide excellent reading. 

Here is Jong's list. I've noted if I've read a book, if it's on my TBR shelf, or if it is available as an audiobook from my library. 

See any favorites?

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell FINISHED

Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice ON OVERDRIVE

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf FINISHED

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf FINISHED

The Waves by Virginia Woolf TBR SHELF

Orlando by Virginia Woolf FINISHED

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes TBR SHELF

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton FINISHED

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton FINISHED

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton FINISHED

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall ON OVERDRIVE

Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer TBR SHELF

The Dollmaker by Harriette Simpson Arnow

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood FINISHED

My Ántonia by Willa Cather FINISHED

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (reviewed here) FINISHED

Fanny by Erica Jong 

Obasan by Joy Kogawa FINISHED

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing FINISHED

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing TBR SHELF

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee FINISHED

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy ON OVERDRIVE

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley FINISHED

Her First American by Lore Segal FINISHED

The Color Purple by Alice Walker FINISHED

The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley FINISHED

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark FINISHED

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark FINISHED

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison FINISHED

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reviewed here) FINISHED

Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer TBR SHELF

Trust by Cynthia Ozick TBR SHELF

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan FINISHED

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan FINISHED

Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie TBR SHELF

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston FINISHED

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion TBR SHELF

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion (reviewed here) FINISHED

The Group by Mary McCarthy FINISHED

The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy FINISHED

The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley TBR SHELF

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath FINISHED

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers FINISHED
 
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen FINISHED

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor FINISHED

Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson TBR SHELF

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison FINISHED

Beloved by Toni Morrison FINISHED

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (reviewed here) FINISHED

Mr. Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner TBR SHELF

Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter FINISHED

Progress of Stories by Laura Riding

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Booker winner) FINISHED

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald FINISHED

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende FINISHED

Possession by A.S. Byatt FINISHED

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker TBR SHELF

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown ON OVERDRIVE

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner FINISHED

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter TBR SHELF

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (reviewed here) FINISHED

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn DNF

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (reviewed here) FINISHED

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym FINISHED

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko TBR SHELF
 
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler FINISHED

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler FINISHED

Things Invisible to See by Nancy Willard (reviewed here) FINISHED

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson FINISHED

Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz TBR SHELF

Civil Wars by Rosellen Brown TBR SHELF

Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr TBR SHELF

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford TBR SHELF

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx FINISHED

The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein 

The Children of Men by P.D. James FINISHED

Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi FINISHED

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon FINISHED

Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield TBR SHELF

Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis TBR SHELF

The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich TBR SHELF

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

The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O'Brien TBR SHELF

Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble TBR SHELF

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble FINISHED

The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell

The Women's Room by Marilyn French

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty FINISHED

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields FINISHED

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid TBR SHELF

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen TBR SHELF

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein FINISHED

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch FINISHED

Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai TBR SHELF

The Drowning Season by Alice Hoffman FINISHED

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend ON OVERDRIVE

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer TBR SHELF


NOTE

Updated July 3, 2025.

This is a repost of a list I first posted in 2009. So far, I've read 57 of the 100 and gave up on two others, so I have 41 to go. Of those that I read because they were on this list, my favorites are Play It as It Lays, Things Invisible to See, and The Children of Men. 

The College Board's List of 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers -- BOOK LIST

THE COLLEGE BOARD'S LIST OF 101 GREAT BOOKS RECOMMENDED FOR COLLEGE-BOUND READERS

Back around the turn of the Millennium, when Top 100 book lists were all the rage, thanks in large part to the popularity of the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century List, the College Board came up with a list of "101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers." 

Leave it to the creator of the PSAT, the SAT, etc. to come up with a list of books guaranteed to make  every reader feel humble. I'm a fan of classics and do not have a problem with the idea of a "canon" to provide a solid grounding in Western literature. But to suggest that students should read all "101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers" while they are still in high school is setting some pretty high standards! Maybe that's why the list has completely disappeared from the College Board's website. 

I can now, in my 50s, look at this list and say that I've read most of them, 86 of the 101. But I read 66 of those when I was in college -- as an English Lit major -- or after college. I only read 20 of these when I was in high school, and I was a complete nerd. The idea that I would have read all of them in high school is enough to trigger that nightmare where I am back in school as an adult, trying to take an exam for a class I never attended!

Here is the list, with notes about whether I have read the book and when, if it is still on my TBR shelf, or if it is available as an audiobook from my library. 

Beowulf  FINISHED (college and adult)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe FINISHED (adult)

A Death in the Family by James Agee FINISHED (adult)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen FINISHED (college)

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin FINISHED (adult)

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett FINISHED (college)

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte FINISHED (high school)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte FINISHED (high school)

The Stranger by Albert Camus FINISHED (adult)

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather FINISHED (adult)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes TBR SHELF

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer FINISHED (college)

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov TBR SHELF

The Awakening by Kate Chopin FINISHED (college)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad FINISHED (high school)

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper ON OVERDRIVE

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane FINISHED (adult)

Inferno by Dante FINISHED (college)

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe FINISHED (adult)

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens FINISHED (high school and adult)

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky FINISHED (adult)

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass FINISHED (college)

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser FINISHED (adult)

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas FINISHED (adult)

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot FINISHED (adult)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison FINISHED (adult)

Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson FINISHED (high school)

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner FINISHED (college)

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding FINISHED (adult)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald FINISHED (high school and adult)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert FINISHED (adult)

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford FINISHED (adult)

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe FINISHED (college)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding FINISHED (adult)

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy FINISHED (college)

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne FINISHED (high school)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller FINISHED (adult)

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway FINISHED (adult)

The Iliad by Homer FINISHED (college)

The Odyssey by Homer FINISHED (college)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo TBR SHELF

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston FINISHED (college and adult)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley FINISHED (high school)

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen TBR SHELF

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James FINISHED (adult)

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James FINISHED (adult)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka FINISHED (high school)

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston TBR SHELF

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee FINISHED (adult)

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis FINISHED (adult)

The Call of the Wild by Jack London FINISHED (adult)

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann TBR SHELF

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez FINISHED (adult)

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville FINISHED (high school)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

The Crucible by Arthur Miller FINISHED (high school)

Beloved by Toni Morrison FINISHED (college)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor FINISHED (adult)

Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill TBR SHELF

Animal Farm by George Orwell FINISHED (adult)

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath FINISHED (adult)

Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe FINISHED (high school)

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust TBR SHELF

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon FINISHED (college)

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque FINISHED (adult)

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

Call it Sleep by Henry Roth FINISHED

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger FINISHED (high school)

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw TBR SHELF

Hamlet by William Shakespeare FINISHED (high school)

Macbeth by William Shakespeare FINISHED (college)

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare FINISHED (college)

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare FINISHED (high school)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley FINISHED (college)

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko TBR SHELF

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn TBR SHELF

Antigone by Sophocles FINISHED (high school)

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles FINISHED (high school)

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck FINISHED (high school)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson FINISHED (adult)

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift FINISHED (college)

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray FINISHED (adult)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau FINISHED (adult)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy FINISHED (adult)

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev FINISHED (high school)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain FINISHED (high school and adult)

Candide by Voltaire FINISHED (adult)

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut FINISHED (adult) (reviewed here)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker FINISHED (college)

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton FINISHED (adult)

Collected Stories by Eudora Welty TBR SHELF

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman TBR SHELF (reading now)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde FINISHED (high school)

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams FINISHED (high school)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf FINISHED (college)

Native Son by Richard Wright FINISHED (adult)

NOTES

Updated July 3, 2025. 

This is a reposting of a list I first posted in 2009. The links needed refreshing, particularly the link to the College Board because the book list itself is no longer available on the College Board's website. 

The wonderful book blogger and book reviewer, Rebecca Reid at Rebecca Reads, is also working on this list. 

If anyone else adopts this list, please let me know in a comment and I will add your link.

The National Book Award for Fiction -- LIST

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

The National Book Foundation has awarded the National Book Awards to American writers since 1950. The Awards currently honor authors in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People's Literature. There have been other categories in the past.

I am not going to keep updating the winners after 2021. My enthusiasm for prize-winners is waning with the 2020s. I plan to focus my efforts on reading the winners up to 2020 then declare victory and move on to other bookish projects.

I am working my way through the Fiction winners. So far, I've read 46 of the winners. The winners through 2021 are listed below, with notes about whether I've finished a book, it is on my TBR shelf, or it is available as an audiobook from the library on Overdrive.

How many of these have you read? See any favorites?

2021 Hell of a Book by Jason Mott FINISHED

2020 Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu FINISHED

2019 Trust Exercise by Susan Choi ON OVERDRIVE

2018 The Friend by Sigrid Nunez FINISHED

2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward FINISHED

2016 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead FINISHED

2015 Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson ON OVERDRIVE

2014 Redeployment by Phil Klay ON OVERDRIVE

2013 The Good Lord Bird by James McBride ON OVERDRIVE

2012 The Round House by Louise Erdrich ON OVERDRIVE

2011 Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward FINISHED

2010 Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (reviewed here) FINISHED

2009 Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (reviewed here) FINISHED

2008 Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen TBR SHELF

2007 Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson FINISHED

2006 The Echo Maker by Richard Powers FINISHED

2005 Europe Central by William T. Vollmann TBR SHELF

2004 The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck TBR SHELF

2003 The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard FINISHED

2002 Three Junes by Julia Glass FINISHED

2001 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen FINISHED

2000 In America by Susan Sontag TBR SHELF

1999 Waiting by Ha Jin FINISHED

1998 Charming Billy by Alice McDermott FINISHED

1997 Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (reviewed here) FINISHED

1996 Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett FINISHED

1995 Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth FINISHED

1994 A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

1993 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx FINISHED

1992 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (reviewed here) FINISHED

1991 Mating by Norman Rush FINISHED

1990 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (reviewed here) FINISHED

1989 Spartina by John Casey FINISHED

1988 Paris Trout by Pete Dexter FINISHED

1987 Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann ON OVERDRIVE

1986 World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow TBR SHELF

1985 White Noise by Don Delillo ON OVERDRIVE

1984 Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist TBR SHELF

1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker FINISHED

1982 Rabbit is Rich by John Updike FINISHED

1981 Plains Song by Wright Morris TBR SHELF

1980 Sophie's Choice by William Styron (reviewed here) FINISHED

1979 Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien FINISHED

1978 Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle FINISHED

1977 The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (reviewed here) FINISHED

1976 JR by William Gaddis

1975 The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams (reviewed here) FINISHED

1975 Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone FINISHED

1974 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon ON OVERDRIVE

1974 A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer TBR SHELF

1973 Augustus by John Williams ON OVERDRIVE

1973 Chimera by John Barth TBR SHELF

1972 The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor TBR SHELF

1971 Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (reviewed here) FINISHED

1970 Them by Joyce Carol Oates TBR SHELF

1969 Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

1968 The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder ON OVERDRIVE

1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here) FINISHED

1966 The Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter TBR SHELF

1965 Herzog by Saul Bellow FINISHED

1964 The Centaur by John Updike (reviewed here) FINISHED

1963 Morte d'Urban by J.F. Powers FINISHED

1962 The Moviegoer by Walker Percy FINISHED

1961 The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

1960 Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth (reviewed here) FINISHED

1959 The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud FINISHED

1958 Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever FINISHED

1957 The Field of Vision by Wright Morris TBR SHELF

1956 Ten North Frederick by John O'Hara FINISHED

1955 A Fable by William Faulkner

1954 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (reviewed here) FINISHED

1953 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison FINISHED

1952 From Here to Eternity by James Jones FINISHED

1951 The Collected Stories by William Faulkner ON OVERDRIVE

1950 The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (reviewed here) FINISHED


NOTES

Updated October 26, 2023. This is a redo of the list I first posted in 2009. 

Hidden gems for me are Lord of Misrule, The Hair of Harold Roux, and Blood Tie.

RELATED POSTS

If you would like your related posts to be listed here, please leave a comment with links to your reviews of these books or the like and I will add them here.