u/Gay_For_Gary_Oldman

For the last few years I did this self-made list of [100 influential (Western) novels to read](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/s/oCWp18Nrij). In doing so, I read more modernist and postmodernist and "serious" literature than I ever had in my life.

I still don't mind a short, fun horror book. Or scifi built around a cool notion. But I only got to 70% of the way through Perdido Street Station before giving up.

I had Perdido on my to-read list for years, being that it has such a high reputation for intricately built, imaginative out of the box ideas, genre defying combinations. I also loved Mieville's The City and The City, and the themes of "otherness" and of looking past what you don't want to see.

I should have really loved this novel. I was long-awaiting reading it. I enjoy the prose. But I've spent the last 400-some pages coming to the steady realization that I just don't care about mind-eating moths, and the other book which has been calling to me has been Don DeLillo's Underworld. And even though its a novel without a clear plot, just meanders through themes of the time between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, I do at least feel like every line is trying to say something more than "if we use robots to fight the moths..."

I have absolutely no doubt there'll be other genre fiction novels I enjoy, and I doubt I'll be bothered by something in the 300-400p mark. But larger than that, and I just begin to feel like it's a too-large load of nothing, of distraction, of frivolity. And I feel a bit sad, like I'm losing the ability to read purely and only for entertainment.

(Note: original post deleted, now re-edited for more content). In 2020, when Covid lockdowns started happening, I decided to curate my own list of "100 Most Influential Novels to Read". Note that this doesn't say "Best" or even "Greatest", but my goal was to take the challenge to curate a list of novels which have most broadly influenced culture from the standpoint of a White Anglophone Millennial.

I don't consider this or any list perfect; part of the fun is setting the limitation of 100 novels and then trying to cover as much as you can without omission or redundancy. Blood Meridian or Lonesome Dove? Invisible Man or Their Eyes Were Watching God? Pedro Paramo or 100 years of Solitude? t should go without saying that this is not a list of the ONLY books worth reading, and many entries on this list have "hidden" entries behind them; ie before reading tom Jones, I'd read Moll Flanders and Pamela in order to follow the development of the novel. Before reading Udolpho, I'd read Otranto.

My biggest takeaway was seeing how certain tropes develop and branch off. The “virtuous damsel” trope obviously dates back to before Pamela, but putting it against the “brusquely-spoken unlikable man” eventually developed into both Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre, but also the kidnapping and threats spun off into Gothic fiction via Mysteries of Udolpho. Likewise, the first half of Gone With the Wind is just a straight rip off of Vanity Fair, beat for beat. But VF's Becky Sharpe wouldnt exist without Defoe's Moll Flanders.

Favourites: Wuthering Heights, Blood Meridian, Moby Dick, Les Mis, Doctor Zhivago. Some of the entries on this list, maybe 10 or so, I had already read and were longstanding favourites, such as Lord of the Rings and 1984.

I struggled most of all with Tristram Shandy. The first quarter was fun, with the naming mixup around his birth, Old Yorrick, the introduction of Uncle Toby. But after the first volume things spun off into senseless meanderings, which I understand was the point, but I never managed to get back into enjoying the novel.

2025 was the year I dedicated to the “big honkers”: Don Quixote, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Ulysses, and whilst some chapters were more opaque than others, it contained some of the most memorable reading experiences I’ve ever had, particularly the chapter following the evolution of the English language. Likewise, Infinite Jest was way more enjoyable than I expected, though I still have not come to terms with the non-ending existing outside the scope of the novel. Gravity’s Rainbow was my fifth Pynchon and I’m sad to say it’s the only Pynchon I’ve not yet enjoyed.

The very last book which I read, finishing it on Sunday, was Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which I read after a run of Beowulf, Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, The Pilgrim's Progress, Moll Flanders, and Pamela, in order to follow the evolution of English literature, as Tom Jones is widely considered, if not the first English Novel, at least a benchmark culmination of that literary form.

Disclaimers:

1. This is not a list of "Best" novels, but Important and Influential, and formative for the "Zeitgeist", as I understand it. Many of them are therefore very good books. There are a few novels on this list I detested.
2. As an Anglophone, this list is rooted in the Western Canon. You should obviously read more widely than this. A few influential non Western books are included but you could probably create an entire list just with Japanese or Latin American books.
3. Further to point 2, the Western Canon is itself reflective of a history of patriarchy, chauvinism, colonialism, and prejudice. There is no real way my list can be 50% women and appropriately racially diverse, because Western history is not.
4. One entry per author - I attempted to select a compromise between their most popular, most revered, or most representative. For Dickens and Tolstoy this was a challenge, YMMV.
5. This is a list of 100 novels. Whilst the definition of a novel is debatable, epic poems, religious allegory, conduct literature, mythic retellings etc do not typically qualify. Don Quixote is widely dubbed the first modern novel, but even it is a satire of existing chivalric romances.
6. The list arbitrarily terminates before the 21st century. The rise of the internet, the demise of the monoculture, the proliferation of home media and prestige television has fundamentally altered the reading landscape. There are many worthy books published after the year 2000, but it's hard to picture any with the kind of impact of the rest of the list without ending it on Twilight, Fifty Shades, or The DaVinci Code.
7. Influence is a difficult thing to measure. Ann Radcliffe was foundational to the Gothic genre, but also an influence to Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, though she is not a household name today. Were the Sherlock Holmes novels influential, or mainly the collected short stories? Were the James Bond novels influential without the movies? At the very least, I wanted to investigate the origins of these widely known characters.
8. I tried to shy away from series and rely on standalone novels, but the distinction is often blurred. Don Quixote includes its own sequel 10 years later. Monte Cristo was moreso a serial publication than a single novel. A Game of Thrones is enormously influential but is just one in an unfinished series.
9. Literary fiction and genre fiction often blur, but I've tried to maintain a 60/40 split. Similarly, I've wrestled with the inclusion of children's literature. Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Narnia, and Harry Potter are all as influential as any entry on this list. Their omission is very debatable.
10. Finally, this is my list, for my own fun and a personal challenge and intellectual exercise to curate. It's reflective of my own reading preferences and goals. But I'd love to see what essential books I've missed.

1             1605     Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote

2             1719     Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe

3             1726     Jonathan Swift  -   Gulliver’s Travels

4             1749     Henry Fielding  -   Tom Jones

5             1767     Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy

6             1787     Johann W Goethe  - The Sorrows of Young Werther

7             1794     Ann Radcliffe - The Mysteries of Udolpho

8             1813     Jane Austen  -   Pride and Prejudice

9             1818     Mary Shelley  -   Frankenstein

10           1819     Walter Scott  -   Ivanhoe

11           1826     James F. Cooper  -   Last of the Mohicans

12           1844     Alexandre Dumas  -   The Count of Monte Cristo

13           1846     Emily Bronte  -   Wuthering Heights

14           1847     Charlotte Bronte  -    Jane Eyre

15           1848     William Thackeray  -   Vanity Fair

16           1850     Nathaniel Hawthorne  -   The Scarlet Letter

17           1851     Herman Melville  -   Moby Dick

18           1852     Harriet Beecher Stowe   -   Uncle Tom's Cabin

19           1856     Gustave Flaubert  -   Madame Bovary

20           1859     Wilkie Collins  -   The Woman in White

21           1861     Charles Dickens  -   Great Expectations

22           1862     Victor Hugo  -   Les Miserables

23           1866     Fyodor Dostoyevsky  -   Crime and Punishment

24           1869     Leo Tolstoy  -   War and Peace

25           1869     Louisa M Alcott  -  Little Women

26           1870     Jules Verne  -   20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

27           1872     George Eliot  -   Middlemarch

28           1883     Robert L. Stevenson  -   Treasure Island

29           1884     Mark Twain  -   Adventures Of Hucklberry Finn

30           1885     H Riger Haggard  -    King Solomon's Mines

31           1887     Arthur Conan Doyle  -   A Study in Scarlet

32           1890     Oscar Wilde  -   The Picture of Dorian Gray

33           1891     Thomas Hardy  -   Tess of the D'Urbervilles

34           1897     Bram Stoker  -   Dracula

35           1897     H.G. Wells  -   The War of the Worlds

36           1899     Joseph Conrad  -   Heart of Darkness

37           1903     Jack London  -   The Call of the Wild

38           1906     Upton Sinclair   -   The Jungle

39           1912     Edgar Rice Burroughs  -   Tarzan of the Apes

40           1913     Marcel Proust  -   The Way by Swann's

41           1915     Franz Kafka  -   The Trial

42           1920     Edith Wharton  -   The Age of Innocence

43           1921     Yevgeny Zamyatin  -   We

44           1922     James Joyce  -   Ulysses

45           1922     Hermann Hess  -   Siddhartha

46           1924     E.M. Forster  -   A Passage to India

47           1925     F. Scott Fitzgerald  -   The Great Gatsby

48           1925     Virginia Woolf  -   Mrs Dalloway

49           1929     Ernest Hemingway  -   A Farewell to Arms

50           1929     Erich Maria Remarque  -   All Quiet on the Western Front

51           1930     William Faulkner  -   As I Lay Dying

52           1931     H.P. Lovecraft  -   At the Mountains of Madness

53           1932     Aldous Huxley  -   Brave New World

54           1933     James Hilton  -  Lost Horizons

55           1934     Henry Miller  -  Tropic of Cancer

56           1936     Margaret Mitchell  -   Gone with the Wind

57           1938     Daphne du Maurier  -   Rebecca

58           1939     John Steinbeck  -  The Grapes of Wrath

59           1939     Agatha Christie  -   And Then There Were None

60           1942     Albert Camus  -   The Stranger

61           1949     George Orwell  -   Nineteen Eighty-Four

62           1951     Isaac Asimov  -   Foundation

63           1951     J.D. Salinger  -   Catcher in the Rye

64           1952     Ralph Ellison  -   Invisible Man

65           1953     Ray Bradbury  -   Fahrenheit 451

66           1953     Ian Fleming  -  Casino Royale

67           1954     Richard Matheson  -   I Am Legend

68           1954     William Golding  -   Lord of the Flies

69           1955     JRR Tolkien  -   The Lord of the Rings

70           1955     Graham Greene  -   The Quiet American

71           1955     Vladimir Nabokov  -   Lolita

72           1957     Boris Pasternak  -   Doctor Zhivago

73           1957     Jack Kerouac  -   On the Road

74           1957     Ayn Rand   -  Atlas Shrugged

75           1958     Chinua Achebe  -   Things Fall Apart

76           1958     T.H. White  -   The Once And Future King

77           1959     Shirley Jackson  -   The Haunting of Hill House

78           1960     Harper Lee  -   To Kill a Mockingbird

79           1961     Joseph Heller  -   Catch-22

80           1961     Robert Heinlein  -  Stranger in a Strange Land

81           1962     Anthony Burgess  -   A Clockwork Orange

82           1962     Ken Kesey  -   One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

83           1963     Sylvia Plath  -  The Bell Jar

84           1965     Frank Herbert  -  Dune

85           1967     Gabriel Garcia Marquez  -   One Hundred Years of Solitude

86           1968     Philip K Dick  -   Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

87           1968     Arthur C Clarke  -   2001: A Space Odyssey

88           1969     Kurt Vonnegut -  Slaughterhouse 5

89           1969     Philip Roth  -   Portnoy's Complaint

90           1971     William Peter Blatty  -   The Exorcist

91           1973     Thomas Pynchon  -   Gravity's Rainbow

92           1976     Anne Rice  -   Interview with the Vampire

93           1977     Stephen King   -  The Shining

94           1981     Salman Rushdie  -   Midnight's Children

95           1984     William Gibson  -   Neuromancer

96           1985     Margaret Atwood  -   The Handmaid’s Tale

97           1985     Cormac McCarthy  -   Blood Meridian

98           1987     Toni Morrison  -   Beloved

99           1991     Brett Easton Ellis   -  American Psycho

100         1996     David Foster Wallace  -   Infinite Jest

In 2020, when Covid lockdowns started happening, I decided to curate my own list of "100 Most Influential Novels to Read". Note that this doesn't say "Best" or even "Greatest", but my goal was to take the challenge to curate a list of novels which have most broadly influenced culure, not merely literature culture, from the standpoint of a Whilte Anglophone Millennial.

I don't consider this or any list perfect; part of the fun is setting the limitation of 100 novels and then trying to cover as much as you can without omission or redundancy. Blood Meridian or Lonesome Dove? Invisible Man or Their Eyes Were Watching God? Pedro Paramo or 100 years of Solitude?

It should go without saying that this is not a list of the ONLY books worth reading, and many entries on this list have "hidden" entries behind them; ie before reading tom Jones, I'd read Moll Flanders and Pamela in order to follow the development of the novel. Before reading Udolpho, I'd read Otranto. I'll post a list of disclaimers in the top comment.

1             1605     Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote

2             1719     Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe

3             1726     Jonathan Swift  -   Gulliver’s Travels

4             1749     Henry Fielding  -   Tom Jones

5             1767     Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy

6             1787     Johann W Goethe  - The Sorrows of Young Werther

7             1794     Ann Radcliffe - The Mysteries of Udolpho

8             1813     Jane Austen  -   Pride and Prejudice

9             1818     Mary Shelley  -   Frankenstein

10           1819     Walter Scott  -   Ivanhoe

11           1826     James F. Cooper  -   Last of the Mohicans

12           1844     Alexandre Dumas  -   The Count of Monte Cristo

13           1846     Emily Bronte  -   Wuthering Heights

14           1847     Charlotte Bronte  -    Jane Eyre

15           1848     William Thackeray  -   Vanity Fair

16           1850     Nathaniel Hawthorne  -   The Scarlet Letter

17           1851     Herman Melville  -   Moby Dick

18           1852     Harriet Beecher Stowe   -   Uncle Tom's Cabin

19           1856     Gustave Flaubert  -   Madame Bovary

20           1859     Wilkie Collins  -   The Woman in White

21           1861     Charles Dickens  -   Great Expectations

22           1862     Victor Hugo  -   Les Miserables

23           1866     Fyodor Dostoyevsky  -   Crime and Punishment

24           1869     Leo Tolstoy  -   War and Peace

25           1869     Louisa M Alcott  -  Little Women

26           1870     Jules Verne  -   20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

27           1872     George Eliot  -   Middlemarch

28           1883     Robert L. Stevenson  -   Treasure Island

29           1884     Mark Twain  -   Adventures Of Hucklberry Finn

30           1885     H Riger Haggard  -    King Solomon's Mines

31           1887     Arthur Conan Doyle  -   A Study in Scarlet

32           1890     Oscar Wilde  -   The Picture of Dorian Gray

33           1891     Thomas Hardy  -   Tess of the D'Urbervilles

34           1897     Bram Stoker  -   Dracula

35           1897     H.G. Wells  -   The War of the Worlds

36           1899     Joseph Conrad  -   Heart of Darkness

37           1903     Jack London  -   The Call of the Wild

38           1906     Upton Sinclair   -   The Jungle

39           1912     Edgar Rice Burroughs  -   Tarzan of the Apes

40           1913     Marcel Proust  -   The Way by Swann's

41           1915     Franz Kafka  -   The Trial

42           1920     Edith Wharton  -   The Age of Innocence

43           1921     Yevgeny Zamyatin  -   We

44           1922     James Joyce  -   Ulysses

45           1922     Hermann Hess  -   Siddhartha

46           1924     E.M. Forster  -   A Passage to India

47           1925     F. Scott Fitzgerald  -   The Great Gatsby

48           1925     Virginia Woolf  -   Mrs Dalloway

49           1929     Ernest Hemingway  -   A Farewell to Arms

50           1929     Erich Maria Remarque  -   All Quiet on the Western Front

51           1930     William Faulkner  -   As I Lay Dying

52           1931     H.P. Lovecraft  -   At the Mountains of Madness

53           1932     Aldous Huxley  -   Brave New World

54           1933     James Hilton  -  Lost Horizons

55           1934     Henry Miller  -  Tropic of Cancer

56           1936     Margaret Mitchell  -   Gone with the Wind

57           1938     Daphne du Maurier  -   Rebecca

58           1939     John Steinbeck  -  The Grapes of Wrath

59           1939     Agatha Christie  -   And Then There Were None

60           1942     Albert Camus  -   The Stranger

61           1949     George Orwell  -   Nineteen Eighty-Four

62           1951     Isaac Asimov  -   Foundation

63           1951     J.D. Salinger  -   Catcher in the Rye

64           1952     Ralph Ellison  -   Invisible Man

65           1953     Ray Bradbury  -   Fahrenheit 451

66           1953     Ian Fleming  -  Casino Royale

67           1954     Richard Matheson  -   I Am Legend

68           1954     William Golding  -   Lord of the Flies

69           1955     JRR Tolkien  -   The Lord of the Rings

70           1955     Graham Greene  -   The Quiet American

71           1955     Vladimir Nabokov  -   Lolita

72           1957     Boris Pasternak  -   Doctor Zhivago

73           1957     Jack Kerouac  -   On the Road

74           1957     Ayn Rand   -  Atlas Shrugged

75           1958     Chinua Achebe  -   Things Fall Apart

76           1958     T.H. White  -   The Once And Future King

77           1959     Shirley Jackson  -   The Haunting of Hill House

78           1960     Harper Lee  -   To Kill a Mockingbird

79           1961     Joseph Heller  -   Catch-22

80           1961     Robert Heinlein  -  Stranger in a Strange Land

81           1962     Anthony Burgess  -   A Clockwork Orange

82           1962     Ken Kesey  -   One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

83           1963     Sylvia Plath  -  The Bell Jar

84           1965     Frank Herbert  -  Dune

85           1967     Gabriel Garcia Marquez  -   One Hundred Years of Solitude

86           1968     Philip K Dick  -   Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

87           1968     Arthur C Clarke  -   2001: A Space Odyssey

88           1969     Kurt VonnegutvSlaughterhouse 5

89           1969     Philip Roth  -   Portnoy's Complaint

90           1971     William Peter Blatty  -   The Exorcist

91           1973     Thomas Pynchon  -   Gravity's Rainbow

92           1976     Anne Rice  -   Interview with the Vampire

93           1977     Stephen King   -  The Shining

94           1981     Salman Rushdie  -   Midnight's Children

95           1984     William Gibson  -   Neuromancer

96           1985     Margaret Atwood  -   The Handmaid’s Tale

97           1985     Cormac McCarthy  -   Blood Meridian

98           1987     Toni Morrison  -   Beloved

99           1991     Brett Easton Ellis   -  American Psycho

100         1996     David Foster Wallace  -   Infinite Jest

I'm very interested in the era of Metal music in the late 90s where bands who were formerly in styles and genres considered more underground metal, began incorporating more elements from the fringes of popular alternative (metal) styles, such as nu-metal, groove metal, gothic, industrial/electronica elements.

​

I'm considering doing a full write-up on it. I know that bands going glam (Celtic Frost) or Grunge/Rock (early 90s thrash) predated this specific era, but I'm particularly interested in the late 90s scene.

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Some of these seem today just a part of the band's natural evolution (Anathema). Some are a successful era which the band transitioned gradually into and out of (Paradise Lost, Moonspell). Some are broadly considered to be a single bad blip on the discography (Slayer, My Dying Bride) or at the very least a dip in quality (Godflesh, Theatre of Tragedy).

​

I'm not terribly interested in whether these are regarded as good, bad, successful, etc. But rather what popular influences outside of "pure" metal were introduced.

​

Obviously the real/false/pure etc terminology doesn't go over well on this sub. I'm not interested in arguing what is or is not real metal here. Citing Static-X as simplifying their songwriting between WDT and Shadow Zone is *not* what I'm talking about here. What I'm interested in are bands who were previously fully immersed in a more underground metal scene, trying to adapt more mainstream alternative sensibilties. It's obvious that Theatre of Tragedy has a different level of accessibility between Velvet Darkness They Dear and Assembly. It's equally obvious that Napalm Death was doing something different on Diatribes.

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Records which spring to mind:

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• Sepultura - Roots (debatable, was a process but was an early indicator for sure).

• Slayer - Diabolus in Muzika

• Napalm Death - Fear Emptiness Despair, Diatribes, Inside the Torn Apart

• Fear Factory - Remanufacture, Digimortal

• Godflesh - Songs of Love & Hate, Hymns

• Theatre of Tragedy - Musique, Assembly

• Moonspell - Sin/Pecado, The Butterfly Effect

• Anathema - Alternative 4

• Paradise Lost - One Second, Host

• My Dying Bride - 34.7% Complete

• Samael - Eternal

In The Fire randomly came up for me the other day (still one of my favourite guitar solos); I don't think I'd thought of this project in more than a decade. I was in highschool in 2005 and this album, along with the "underground" Disc 2's from Headbangers Ball, really introduced me to more extreme metal.

After seeing Steve DiGeorgio, James Murphy, and Mike Smith on the DVD, I spent ages digging into all those bands. I remember being impressed by how Joey Jordison had both the heaviest song on the record (Annihilation By The Hands of God still holds up) and also the "poppiest" with No Way Out with Glassjaw's singer.

I think a few of the tracks are a bit forgettable, but honestly I'm surprised there arent more projects like this as recording costs come down.

In Levin's adult life, he believed in secular and materialistic principles, rejecting faith and the church, but this did not bring him happiness, and he envied Kitty's simple, uncomplicated faith. He also found that he disagreed with all of his fellow Intellectuals in debate, found their reason led them to horrible conclusions, and that their intellectualising was futile (see the non-reaction to the publication of Sergei's book).

When his child was born, he found himself praying with conviction, and it brought him - if not a comfort - then a stability he previously lacked.

At the novel's end, he finds himself tending to suicidal thoughts whenever he overthinks his existence and morality and higher purpose. It is only when he stops thinking and just starts living, working, loving, that he finds happiness and contentedness.

He equates this with the ultimate doctrinal values of the Church: of family, charity, labour etc, and convinces himself that the key to his happiness is a surrender to faith, opposed to intellectualising himself into existential dread. Additionally, Kitty and Darya repeatedly describe him as a Christian man because his acts embody the values, regardless of his rationalising.

This characterises the overall theme of the novel: contrasting Levin and Kitty's happy ending with traditional marriage and a pastoral life, with Anna and Vronsky's rejection of traditional values and their need for city life culminating in tragedy.

I understand that this reflects Tolstoy's own conversion and therefore metatextually contains all those realistic limitations of reason. Interpreting the end of such a great novel can be tricky when the fundamental themes conflict with one's own worldview, so I wanted to check that I'm reading this correctly?