Though a student of history, I also love great fiction. Back in 2013, Entertainment Weekly published its list of the 100 Greatest Novels Ever. In August of that same year, I dedicated myself to reading all 100 books on the list. Two children, a move from Colorado to Minneapolis, and multiple job changes have slowed me down at times, but I continue to press on. I am inspired by the goal because with each novel I learn something new.   With each novel, I learn where people struggle and where people make mistakes. With each novel, I learn timeless lessons that are applicable in all walks of life.

Business books therefore aren’t the only insightful works on business — historical fiction, outlining personal motivations, psychology, and culture sometimes are even better windows into why people and companies make the decisions they make.

Below is the full list, as well as my progress and ratings of the books I have read thus far. I hope you enjoy and are inspired to read some of the same works that have inspired me. Some might even make great birthday gifts or stocking stuffers too. I am a big believer in the value of an at home library stocked with real books.

Keep in mind too — this is a best of the best list.  So even a 1 out 5 star rating is still a really good book!

Total novels read thus far:

81 out of 100

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald  (*** stars)
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (*** stars)
4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (***** stars)
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (** stars)
6. My Antonia by Willa Cather (**** stars)
7. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
8. The Rabbit Quartet by John Updike
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison (**** stars)
10. Charlotte’s Web by E.B.White (***** stars)
11. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (** stars)
12. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner  (* star)
13. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (***** stars)
14. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (**** stars)
15. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (**** stars)
16. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (** stars)
17. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (** stars)
18. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
19. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (*** stars)
20. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
21. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (***** stars)
22. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte (*** stars)
23. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (** stars)
25. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (** stars)
26. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (*** stars)
27. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (*** stars)
28. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
29. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (**** stars)
30. Native Son by Richard Wright (**** stars)
31. Blindness by Jose Saramago (***** stars)
32. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (** stars)
33. Maus by Art Spiegelman (***** stars)
34. The World According to Garp by John Irving (**** stars)
35. A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe (***** stars)
36. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
37. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (* star)
38. The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker
39. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (***** stars)
40. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
41. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (** stars)
42. The Stand by Stephen King (***** stars)
43. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
44. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
45. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (***** stars)
46. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (**** stars)
47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (***** stars)
48. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (* star)
49. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (** stars)
50. Snow by Orhan Pamuk (**** stars)
51. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (*** stars)
52. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (**** stars)
53. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (***** stars)
54. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (* star)
55. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
56. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (*****stars)
57. The Children of Men by P.D. James (*** stars)
58. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (**** stars)
59. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1st half ***** stars, 2nd half no stars)
60. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (***** stars)
61. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (*****stars — #1 in my opinion)
62. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (* star)
63. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (*** stars)
64. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
65. Herzog by Saul Bellow (*** stars)
66. Howard’s End by E.M. Forster (**** stars)
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (**** stars)
68. Middlemarch by George Eliot
69. Money by Martin Amis (**** stars)
70. Neuromancer by William Gibson (* star)
71. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (* star)
72. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (**** stars)
73. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre (**** stars)
74. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (**** stars)
75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (**** stars)
76. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (***** stars)
77. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
78. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul (** stars)
79. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (** stars)
80. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
81. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (*** stars)
82. Disgrace by J.M. Coetze (*** stars)
83. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (*** stars)
84. Clockers by Richard Price (**** stars)
85. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (* star)
86. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (***** stars)
87. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (***** stars)
88. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe  (**** stars)
89. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
90. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (*** stars)
91. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (** stars)
92. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
93. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (**** stars)
94. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (*** stars)
95. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (**** stars)
96. If on a Night a Winter’s Travler by Italo Calvino (**** stars)
97. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (**** stars)
98. Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (** stars)
99. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (** stars)
100. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (**** stars)