--- description: Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of... title: The 10 Greatest Books of All Time image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blted43baa066bba02d/698a4a969d83e8814bb98d4b/360_wolfe_0112.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # The 10 Greatest Books of All Time by [Lev Grossman](/author/lev-grossman/) Jan 15, 2007 5:00 AM CUT  Author Tom Wolfe Author Tom WolfeFrank Micelotta / Getty by [Lev Grossman](/author/lev-grossman/) Jan 15, 2007 5:00 AM CUT Let’s not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There’s something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over. But what if—just for argument’s sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We’re talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything’s fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list. [(See the 100 best novels of all time.)](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1951793,00.html "undefined") Yes, it would probably still be an obscenity. But it would be a pretty interesting obscenity. And that’s what we have in J. Peder Zane’s [The Top 10](https://www.toptenbooks.net "undefined") (Norton; 352 pages). Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon’s. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges’s _Labyrinths_. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer’s writer.) He follows that up with by _Pale Fire_ by Nabokov at #2\. (Hm. Does he really think it’s better than _Lolita_? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: _Scaramouche_, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing. There’s plenty of canon fodder on the lists. Zane, who’s the books editor at the Raleigh _News & Observer_, has done a statistical breakdown of the results, so we know, for example, that Shakespeare is the most-represented author (followed by Faulkner, who ties with Henry James; they’re followed by a five-way tie, which you can read about for yourself). But I’m more interested in the dark horses, the statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of the literati. Douglas Coupland puts Capote’s unfinished _Answered Prayers_ at number one, blowing right by _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ and _In Cold Blood_, too. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with _The Brothers Karamazov_, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with _The Man Who Loved Children_ by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with _Independent People_ by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman Mailer revives John Dos Passos’s out-of-fashion _U.S.A._ trilogy for his #6 (and shows uncharacteristic forebearance by leaving his own works off the list). And so on. (At times one reads in the knowledge that one is being messed with. There’s an outside, screwball chance that David Foster Wallace really reveres C.S. Lewis’s _The Screwtape Letters_ above all other books, but I feel comfortable asserting—having read _Infinite Jest_twice—that Wallace does not feel that way about Stephen King’s _The Stand_ (at #2) or _The Sum of All Fears_, by Tom Clancy (#10).) [(See the top 10 books you were forced to read in school.)](https://entertainment.time.com/2010/07/09/top-10-books-you-were-forced-to-read-in-school/ "undefined") There are several lifetimes’ worth of promising literary leads here—544 books in all. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mentioned is worth the price of admission all on its own. But to get you started, here, in all its glory, is the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the top 10 lists of 125 of the world’s most celebrated writers combined. Read it and— well, just read it. 1. _Anna Karenina_ by Leo Tolstoy 2. _Madame Bovary_ by Gustave Flaubert 3. _War and Peace_ by Leo Tolstoy 4. _Lolita_ by Vladimir Nabokov 5. _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ by Mark Twain 6. _Hamlet_ by William Shakespeare 7. _The Great Gatsby_ F. Scott Fitzgerald 8. _In Search of Lost Time_ by Marcel Proust 9. _The Stories of Anton Chekhov_ by Anton Chekhov 10. _Middlemarch_ by George Eliot [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](https://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek "undefined") [See TIME’s 140 best Twitter feeds.](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2058946,00.html "undefined") ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908091/the-10-greatest-books-of-all-time/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908091/the-10-greatest-books-of-all-time/"},"headline":"The 10 Greatest Books of All Time","datePublished":"2007-01-15T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:18:55.561Z","description":"Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. 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