Scratching the surface: A field guide to 100 essential novels

If you’re not a member, then probably someone you know or love is: that shrinking, but still substantial guild of book-balancers who build towers of paperbacks on their nightstands.

Few things are as enjoyable as finishing a good book, except perhaps starting a new one, and because the latter is easier than the former, the job is never done. Hence that precipitously perched tower of books.

Being a book-lover is an exercise in mild frustration. You can finish a book, but you can’t finish books. This poster is here to help — not only by offering a finite list, also because it has borrowed the concept of gamification from the digital realm.

You see, this is a scratch-off chart of 100 Essential Novels. Hidden beneath a thin layer of foil are as many hand-drawn book covers waiting to be revealed. Read the book, scratch the foil, and watch as Gatsby’s eyes emerge from the metallic mist or Ahab’s white whale dives in all its glory.

The poster is not just a reading list; it’s also a progress bar, wall art with a built-in dopamine hit. But exactly which itch are you being asked to scratch here?

Before you get out your scratching coin, let’s reach for the magnifying glass instead. These 100 novels are an opinionated cross-section of more than four centuries of what the French call les belles lettres: high literature that explores deep themes through beautiful language.

The poster presents a chronological collection of novels, from Don Quixote (1605) at the top left to James (2024) at the bottom right. But like any qualitative selection, it can be quibbled over.

The list skews heavily towards the Anglosphere, with only five works originally written in another language — two each in Russian and Spanish, plus one in German. About 60% come from the U.S., and of the remainder, most are from the U.K. or Ireland. Only one in four of the works are credited to women. And 16 of the 100 books are from the 1950s alone; that’s more than the whole of the 21st century so far. Oh, and Ulysses (1922) is not on the list.

James Joyce is represented by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), but not the 1922 doorstop that is regularly ranked as the best novel of the 20th century. It’s an interesting choice, and one with some merit: Ulysses, with its hundreds of pages of stream-of-consciousness narration, is famously difficult to read (I’m currently on my fifth attempt, and I’ve been stuck with Leopold Bloom in Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession for several weeks now).

Can a novel be “essential” if it’s borderline unreadable?

No, says this overview, with admirable nerve. Nevertheless, if you cross-reference these books with those on other best-of rankings, you’ll find a hard, stable core consisting of a number of undisputed classics, including The Great Gatsby (1925), Mrs Dalloway (1925), 1984 (1949), Lolita (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Beloved (1987).

Around that core, which survives every panel, every decade and every editorial fashion, the lists diverge wildly. This poster lets The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) through the velvet rope, while plenty of “serious” lists do not. The differences underscore an interesting question: Do rankings assembled by critics in a particular decade measure absolute literary greatness, temporary fashion trends, or personal preference?

The honest answer is, of course: all of the above. So why do we keep making these imperfect lists and keep arguing about them? Well, at least partly because the argument is the point. The vague assertion that “the classics are important” gives you nothing to contest. A list, however ephemeral, creates discussion, fights, fireworks. And great literature deserves the spark of argument.

Ultimately, though, good books deserve more: They deserve to be read. Surveying the shelves of unread books behind me — the Japanese word for it is tsundoku — I realize I’ll never close the gap between the volume of books I love to buy and the ones I manage to read. But this poster presents me with an achievable challenge. All the more so because I can already scratch off a fair number: Heart of Darkness (1899). Check. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Check. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). Check.

I’m hopeful I can complete this list and find a sense of closure that the Jenga stack of books next to my bed can’t provide. But only if I make it through Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s 1996 attempt to be even denser than Joyce. (The book’s footnotes have footnotes of their own.)

Fortunately, not all classics are as daunting. Take the very first book on the list: Don Quixote has a reputation problem because of its age and length (four centuries, 900 pages). But if you actually crack it open, you get something closer to a modern sitcom: a delusional retiree in second-hand armor, dragging his skeptical, proverb-spouting sidekick from one slapstick disaster to the next. It is, by wide critical agreement, laugh-out-loud funny. In parts, at least.

To be fair, conquering Cervantes or plowing through the 800-odd pages of Middlemarch (1872) — another contender for the title of best English-language novel ever — can be hard work, and perhaps increasingly so in our age of shrinking attention spans. Recent research shows that the share of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped by nearly half since the early 2000s.

But hard work comes with rewards, which is why the people who still read are now reading more than they used to, not less. Even as the casual periphery drifts off toward shorter-form everything, literature offers the singular satisfaction of sustained intellectual engagement with a work of art.

Part of that satisfaction is metatextual. Take, for example, the conversation across 140 years between two works of American literature, both featured on this poster. Mark Twain launched the most famous river raft in fiction when he wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). That book is narrated entirely in Huck’s voice. Jim, the fugitive slave who accompanies Huck, is rendered mostly through Huck’s limited understanding of him. But in James (2024), Percival Everett retells the same story, now in the voice of Jim himself — educated and ironic in ways that Huck (or Twain) never allowed him to be.

Many other titles on this poster tell meta-stories of their own. Herman Melville died in 1891 with Moby-Dick (1851) out of print. His obituary mentioned his literary career almost in passing. Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work after his death. Had Max done so, we would never have had The Metamorphosis (1915). In both cases, the works survived because they told humanity something important and transcendent about itself.

That is the actual argument for this poster of 100 Essential Novels: not that the ranking is beyond dispute — it isn’t — but that every one of these foil rectangles covers a book that reveals, in its own unique way, a fundamental truth about the world, changing how we look at it.

Now scratch it off, and on to the next one.

This article is featured on Big Think.