Great to see The Master and Margarita there, one of my all time favorites

As folks are talking about it, the game which strikes me is - what one book do you add and what one book do you remove?

The entire list has been released and I am unsurprised to see Middlemarch at #1.

I mixed up some of the titles with the names of hair metal albums and asked my high school students to distinguish between them; unsurprisingly, they found it difficult.

Lots of good ones here (I'm at about 40/100), but I also need to say that as much as I believe everyone that Woolf is so important, I really do not enjoy reading her. I've tried! Shopping for flowers and phallic lighthouses, snore. (Maybe Orlando is more fun? The film is lots of fun.)

The Guardian list is great when you drill down to specific voters though.

I liked this list so much I made a map (and timeline) of it (sorry it's so janky on mobile) https://vcj.github.io/100bestnovels/

The methodology means that in theory a book only appearing on 172 lists has a chance of making the final list. Limiting voters to 10 items risk tempting voters to over-rank an outlier in hopes of getting it on the final list and thus more public attention. For a sense of how this list stacks up to other best books, see https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/1150. This is helpful to identify outliers on the Guardian’s list. Assume an outlier is a book that ranks outside of the top 500 in thegreatestbbooks.org aggregated list of 624 separate best books list. A Fine Balance (530th), The Transit of Venus (1060th), The Rings of Saturn (774th), Half of a Yellow Sun (1122nd), Nervous Conditions (723rd), The Vegetarian (786th), The Line of Beauty (699th), Jacob’s Room (3847th), The Known World (557th), and The Go-Between (577th). On the other hand, The Guardian omits the following books, all on the Top 100 critical consensus list over at thegreatestbooks.org: Huckleberry Finn, The Odyssey, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, The Divine Comedy, The Scarlet Letter, Candide, Slaughterhouse-Five, A Passage to India, All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22, The Little Prince, Little Women, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Bell Jar, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. For all of these “greatest books of time” to me the missing piece of information is how well-read the voters are. A reader who has read 500 or 1000 novels, and reads novels regularly, has a much bigger pool of possibilities to weigh, and is likely to create a more considered and useful ranking than someone less well-read.There’s no way short of asking voters just how many novels they’ve actually read to know, and even then people are likely to inflate their answers.