The list. The list of, we say with full confidence and conviction, the best 100 books of all time. How did this list come about, you might ask? We started by painstakingly examining many many other lists, which were one by one considered and then rejected as lacking. Some were too 20th-century, some too Western, some were missing crucial tomes that we knew in our heart of hearts HAD to be on the list, and some were just plain terrible. Having rejected every list we could find, we decided to compile our own. So this list, our list, takes a little something from each of those other best-100 lists, with a dash of our own strongly-held-opinion thrown in too. Is it the best? We think so, but… check back about 100 books from now. And without further ado, and in no particular order, the list:

1. Ulysses; James Joyce
2. Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad
3. East of Eden; John Steinbeck
4. 1984; George Orwell
5. Sophie’s Choice; William Styron
6. The Sheltering Sky; Paul Bowles
7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Ken Kesey
8. At-Swim-Two-Birds; Flann O’Brien
9. A Clockwork Orange; Anthony Burgess
10. Housekeeping; Marilynne Robinson
11. Finnegan’s Wake; James Joyce
12. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; James Joyce
13. On The Road; Jack Kerouac
14. Catcher in the Rye; J.D. Salinger
15. Great Gatsby; F. Scott Fitzgerald
16. Catch-22; Joseph Heller
17. War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy
18. Anna Karenina; Leo Tolstoy
19. Slaughter-House 5; Kurt Vonnegut
20. Sometimes a Great Notion; Ken Kesey
21. All the Kings Men; Robert Penn Warren
22. Brideshead Revisted, Evelyn Waugh
23. God of Small Things; Arundhati Roy
24. Portnoy’s Complaint, Phillip Roth
25. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
26. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
27. Brave New World; Aldous Huxley
28. Pale Fire; Vladimir Nabokov
29. Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov
30. Grapes of Wrath; John Steinbeck
31. To Kill A Mockingbird; Harper Lee
32. Sound and the Fury; William Faulkner
33. A Light in August, William Faulkner
34. A Farewell to Arms; Ernest Hemingway
35. The Sun Also Rises; Ernest Hemingway
36. Don Quixote; Miguel de Cervantes
37. Middlemarch; George Eliot
38. Moby Dick; Herman Melville
39. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
40. The Fountainhead; Ayn Rand
41. Of Human Bondage; W. Somerset Maugham
42. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
43. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
44. Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison
45. To the Lighthouse; Virginia Woolf
46. Things Fall Apart; Chinua Achebe
47. Mrs. Dalloway; Virginia Woolf
48. 100 Years of Solitude; Gabriel Garcia Lorca
49. Sons and Lovers; D.H. Lawrence
50. Rabbit, Run; John Updike
51. The Bell Jar; Sylvia Plath
52. A Tale of Two Cities; Charles Dickens
53. The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit; J.R.R. Tolkien
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Mark Twain
55. Dream of the Red Chamber; Tsao Hseuh Chin
56. The Yacoubian Building; Alaa Al Aswany
57. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
58. Remembrance of Things Past; Marcel Proust
59. Jane Eyre; Charlotte Bronte
60. A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi Wa Thingo
61. The Picture of Dorian Gray; Oscar Wilde
62. Pride and Prejudice; Jane Austen
63. Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoevsky
64. The Things They Carried; Tim O’Brien
65. The Death of the Heart; Elizabeth Bowen
66. Gone with the Wind; Margaret Mitchell
67. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
68. Their Eyes Were Watching God; Zora Neale Huston
69. Farenheit 451; Ray Bradbury
70. World’s Fair; E.L. Doctoro
71. Wide Sargasso Sea; Jean Rhys
72. A Passage to India; E.M. Forster
73. Kim; Rudyard Kipling
74. Lord of the Flies; William Golding
75. Portrait of a Lady; Henry James
76. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Carson McCullers
77. Les Miserables; Victor Hugo
78. Beloved; Toni Morrison
79. The Devil to Pay In The Backlands; Joao Guimaraes
80. The Color Purple; Alice Walker
81. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Muriel Spark
82. Darkness at Noon; Arthur Kostler
83. The President; Miguel Angel Asturias
84. The Adventures of Augie March; Saul Bellow
85. Blindness; Jose Saramago
86. The Parade’s End; Ford Maddox Ford
87. The Lost World; H.G. Wells
88. Sister Carrie; Theodore Dreisser
89. The War of the End of the World; Mario Vargas Llosa
90. Graham Greene; The Quiet American
91. A Dance to the Music of Time; Anthony Powell
92. The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton
93. The Naked and the Dead; Norman Mailer
94. From Here to Eternity; James Jones
95. An American Trajedy; Theodore Dreiser
96. Tropic of Cancer; Henry Miller
97. Madame Bovary; Gustave Flaubert
98. Nine Stories; J.D. Salinger
99. A Room With A View; E.M. Forster
100. The Day of the Locust; Nathanael West