aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

All Novels

Explore rankings, reviews, and reader lists for every book in the catalog.

Deliverance

Deliverance

James Dickey

3.5 (2)

Before: It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north.

#294
RANK
1,973
POINTS
Genoa

Genoa

Paul Metcalf

5.0 (1)

#598
RANK
303
POINTS
Snow Falling on Cedars

Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson

4.17 (6)

The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendant's table - the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial.

#204
RANK
3,543
POINTS
Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

3.67 (3)

"Well, Piotr, not in sight yet?" was the question asked on May the 20th, 1859, by a gentleman of a little over forty, in a dusty coat and checked trousers, who came out without his hat on to the low steps of the posting station at S-.

#337
RANK
1,651
POINTS
A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase

Haruki Murakami

4.0 (5)

It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.

#433
RANK
971
POINTS
Point Counter Point

Point Counter Point

Aldous Huxley

3.33 (3)

'You won't be late?'

#449
RANK
890
POINTS
Babbitt

Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis

4.0 (1)

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

#327
RANK
1,704
POINTS
The Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk

W. E. B. Du Bois

4.5 (2)

#429
RANK
994
POINTS
The Thirty-Nine Steps

The Thirty-Nine Steps

John Buchan

4.0 (3)

I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.

#266
RANK
2,287
POINTS
The Jungle

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair

4.0 (3)

#167
RANK
4,563
POINTS