25 Best Books of All Time

You need to brace yourself for how many great books will not be found below. This is a rather reckless endeavor, to try to rank just 25 of the best books ever published, since there are great works of literature that are centuries old, at this point. Some authors of great books lived and died so long ago that they couldn’t have processed the idea of such books becoming movies, because cinema wasn’t a thing yet. Some legendary authors lived, wrote, and died before they could ever be photographed.

The point is, the novel, as an art form, goes back a wildly long time. There are probably more books to choose from, for a ranking like this, than most other art forms. So, please don’t be too alarmed. There was no attempt to please anyone here 100%, and instead, an attempt was made to highlight some classic staples, a few modern books that are on their way to becoming classics, a handful of pulpier novels that might not be “high art,” but they are entertaining, and then a few personal (maybe even selfish) picks from the person currently yapping, just because it keeps things interesting, and because a top 25 filled exclusively with the books you’d expect might be a little boring. Brace yourself. Snubs are coming.

25

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949)

Image via Simon & Schuster

Kicking things off with something that’s a bit of a downer, here’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is an undeniably essential read. It feels like some people think just knowing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is enough, and it is, admittedly, iconic enough that a good many things in it are knowable without reading it in full… but you are missing out if you don’t tackle the whole thing.

George Orwell really did write one of the greatest dystopian stories of all time here, and its influence on pretty much all the dystopia-related novels, movies, and games (plus other things) made after 1949 can’t be denied. It’s mostly about a desperate/probably futile attempt to stand up against – and stand out in – a world that’s been pretty much ruined by a totalitarian superstate. It remains relevant, sad as that might be to admit, and really does feel so ahead of its time in so many ways.

24

‘Dracula’ (1897)

Image via Penguin Classics

Jumping back another half a century now (and don’t worry; it’s not going to be the only book from the 1800s here), here’s Dracula, which is quintessential as far as the horror genre is concerned, much like how Nineteen Eighty-Four is incredibly important within the bounds of dystopian fiction. Dracula is an epistolary novel about the titular count, a vampire, causing chaos, and a collection of characters who want to hunt down and kill him.

It’s simple in terms of its premise, but the style here does make it feel like something a little more special. Dracula also can’t be overlooked for how important it was for the century or so of horror to come, following its publication, and there isn’t really a story about a vampire – or vampires – that comes close, for sheer influence and importance. Even if you might feel uneasy about reading books that are more than a century old, Dracula is still worth taking on and devoting your time to.

23

‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847)

Image via Chartwell

This might seem like it’s establishing a pattern of jumping back 50 years with every new entry, but that’s not the case (promise). Wuthering Heights is a real classic, since it’s not far off being 200 years old, which is wild to think about. It would’ve been very out there for its time, one would imagine, in terms of how dark and angst-filled it’s willing to get as a story about love… kind of? But not really a love story, being more centered on obsession and a dangerous kind of passion.

You get a very strong feeling in your gut from reading Wuthering Heights, and such an experience has proven hard to translate and capture on screen, though that hasn’t stopped various people from trying. With Wuthering Heights, you do just have to read it, or maybe listen to it in full, and then it’s pretty easy to see what all the hype (a hype that has persisted for nearly two centuries) is about.

22

‘Empire of Pain’ (2021)

Image via Doubleday

Yes, Empire of Pain is a work of non-fiction, and there is going to be one other non-fiction book below, but they’re still books. Documentary movies are still movies, with filmmaking skills needed to make a good one, and you do have to be a good writer to craft a genuinely interesting non-fiction book. Thankfully, Patrick Radden Keefe is a phenomenal non-fiction writer, and Empire of Pain might well be the best demonstration of his writing skills to date.

He condenses a lot of information into a coherent and surprisingly epic narrative, with the focus being on the Sackler family and what it did throughout the 20th century to bring about the opioid epidemic, which has, for the most part, been a 21st-century problem. There’s more drama and dread here than you get in a good many works of heavy-going fiction, and Empire of Pain also well and truly feels like one of the most important books published in the last decade or so.

21

‘Lolita’ (1955)

Image via Olympia Press

When writing Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov just went for it in a way few writers had before, and also very few writers have since. He tackled some of the most challenging subject matter a work of literature has ever tried to tackle, since Lolita is about a sexual predator who becomes infatuated with his 12-year-old stepdaughter, nicknaming her Lolita and doing little else but manipulating her – and those around her – so that he can get closer to her, and abuse her.

This guy’s also the narrator, which is a wild approach to take, and it makes the whole novel challenging to read, since you have to be in his head the entire time. Further complications ensue because his way of describing his life is poetically done and sometimes even funny, so it’s hard not to feel conflicted about finding the style of the writing engaging and compelling, and all the while, the story – and what it’s dealing with thematically – is more horrifying than a good many works of actual horror. It’s a real trip of a book, to put it (far too) mildly.

20

‘A Storm of Swords’ (2000)

Image via Bantam Spectra

The highlight of the Song of Ice and Fire series to date (and it might remain the best of them, should books #6 and #7 never actually come out), A Storm of Swords is both huge and hugely satisfying. The War of the Five Kings breaks out near the end of book #1, is explored throughout book #2, and then here in book #3, escalates further, with many of the most distressing and cathartic sequences of the whole series found here.

If you know, you know. And even if you’ve not read A Song of Ice and Fire, but have seen Game of Thrones, then you also know, since the events of A Storm of Swords are largely covered throughout that show’s third and fourth seasons. It’s nice to never say never, in terms of the possibility of George R.R. Martin finishing his series, but even if he might go down in history as someone who couldn’t finish a long-running saga, his reputation for starting and then developing such a saga well (just minus an ending) will still be intact, for what that’s worth.

19

‘Infinite Jest’ (1996)

Image via Little, Brown and Company

Infinite Jest is near-infinitely dense, and it goes on and on and on in a way that’s equal parts impressive and frustrating. Actually, not equal parts. It’s more impressive than it is frustrating, since it is almost always interesting, not to mention sometimes quite entertaining, and always admirable with its scope. It’s about several different groups of characters that generally feel pretty separate from each other, though there is a film referred to as “the Entertainment” that unites all, since it has the ability to transfix anyone who watches it, ensuring their death, because it’s apparently just that entertaining.

It’s a strange book, in other words. It’s also over 1000 pages long, and those pages are more packed with text than you’d find in a more ordinarily formatted book. Infinite Jest is also somewhat infamous for all its endnotes, which are like another novel entirely when viewed on their own, so that does add further to the postmodern-ness of it all. It’s not the easiest thing to get through, by any means, but it is worth tackling, and ultimately proves very rewarding.

18

‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (1979)

Image via Pan Books

And now for something completely different, because The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a brisk read, and an overall short book, compared to the aforementioned Infinite Jest. Both are pretty funny, for what that’s worth, though The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy plays a particularly high number of things for laughs, in turn being a contender for the crown of “funniest book of all time.”

Humor in literature feels kind of rare, or at least books that are almost entirely comedic don’t feel as common as, say, movies that are 100% focused on being comedies. Though, to the further credit of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it also functions as an excellent piece of science fiction, and then if you find the whole thing too brief, for whatever reason, it thankfully kick-started a whole series, with Douglas Adams writing five Hitchhiker’s Guide books before his passing in 2001, with there being a sixth and final book, called And Another Thing…, written by Eoin Colfer and published in 2009.

17

‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ (1846)

Image via Penguin

One of the ultimate literary crowd-pleasers (or whatever you’d call the book equivalent of a crowd-pleaser), The Count of Monte Cristo also stands as one of the ultimate serial novels. It was published over a period that spanned 1844 to 1846, satisfying in the same way that the best TV dramas would more than a century later, with a good many cliffhangers found throughout to keep readers hooked.

For 180 years now, people have been able to read The Count of Monte Cristo as one complete work, and it delivers as a dramatic adventure tale about vengeance, crime, and justice all these many (many) years later. Of all the books published before 1900, The Count of Monte Cristo is up there among the easiest to read, and it’s all executed in a way that makes more than 1000 pages surprisingly digestible.

16

‘Wiseguy’ (1985)

Image via Simon & Schuster

Nyeah, this is a great book about the mafia, see? No, but for real, Wiseguy is incredible, and it’s that previously alluded to non-fiction book that deserves to be here. Maybe there should be more works of non-fiction here, beyond just Empire of Pain and Wiseguy, but to go back to that whole idea of not being able to please everyone, there might well be people who object to even two non-fiction books being here.

With Wiseguy, it tells a story you’d be familiar with, if you’ve seen Goodfellas, since it was the book that said Martin Scorsese gangster film was based on. Yet there’s also so much here that adds to what they were able to put into the movie, with Wiseguy feeling almost like the book equivalent of a Goodfellas extended/director’s cut. You get the style and narrative of the movie quite closely, just with more detail and events covered (and Henry Hill’s quoted extensively throughout Wiseguy, which mirrors the way Ray Liotta, as Hill, narrated so much of Goodfellas).