the 20 best novels
the best ones I've read, to celebrate 20K
I can’t believe it.
Two things: The Guardian released a list of the 100 best novels, and it sucks. That part is not surprising — how else will you get clicks from people furiously disagreeing / counting how many they’ve read — but Mansfield Park being on there is. I’m a pretty big Austen fan but even I am ready to call it on that one getting lost to time.
And two: I just hit 20,000 Substack subscribers.
It’s been just over a year on here, and nearly 6 months of having doubled my weekly posts, and I can’t imagine having more fun. What a relief that there are people out there (somehow, impossibly, twenty thousand of them) who find some value in reading my unhinged strategies for recommending my favorite books over and over, because I’m enjoying myself too much to stop.
Anyway. Those events occurring in the same week can only mean one thing.
I have to list my personal favorite novels.
Here are my criteria:
I read it.
I thought it was worth the classic-of-the-canon-required-reading-for-all-time banner.
I personally loved it. And I mean loved it — not just “this was pretty good for a school assignment” pleasant surprise, but that AND an enjoyable reading experience AND a connection through time and space that made me wonder how a dead Russian guy could portray exactly how I feel scrolling in 2026.
Explanation complete. This is my list:
20. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
I think this book has staying power, as a family saga, as a time capsule from our era, and as an explanation for how we could end up where we are. It captures both the everyday nature of our lives and the immense, inhuman processes working behind the scenes to keep them moving, or staying still.
19. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
It always feels like cheating to call this one of the great novels, because it’s such an unputdownable read. This is a genre-bender, with elements of thriller and mystery, the deceptively smooth and meaning-laden style of literary fiction, and the rich themes of the classics (a double meaning I double intend).
18. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
I wholeheartedly love Baldwin’s nonfiction, its layered arguments, undeniable truth, heady intellectualism, contagious rage. His fiction can be more hit or miss for me, with occasional uneven patches (not to mention the way women are written) that are hard to look past. Giovanni’s Room is tight and sharp, racing to a conclusion that you equally dread and await. It also contains one of my favorite passages ever.
17. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
I know this will come as a shock, that I had the wherewithal to criticize the Guardian’s weird but undeniably distinguished list and then throw a broadly maligned millennial author immediately in my ranking. We all have our lots in life, and my duty is to defend Rooney. Of the thousands of books I’ve read, none rival hers in the injustices and disappointments and hopes of being alive when we are.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
16. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
It feels like Jane has gone out of style lately. Left to her own devices, she has all the lively charm and vivaciousness of the cousin-loving ward from Mansfield Park — and yet life will not just let her hang out with those dang devices. Even some of the criticisms (the afterthought romance, the way Mr. Rochester plainly sucks) add to what makes this book so great: it is unapologetically Jane’s story, and boy does she live it.
15. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Throughout history, across space, for all time, our fates have come down to one minor detail: where we were born. But for the place we happen to be from, our lives could be anything, and the lucky among us have fortune we’ve done nothing to earn. In the age of the internet, routine means reading the worst thing you can imagine, and then sending an email, shopping for groceries, making dinner. These everyday hauntings are what this book is about.
14. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
This may not be Austen’s best novel, but it’s better than 99% of them. It deserves its reputation as potentially the greatest romance of all time, could earn the Original Rom-Com title, and is as valuable as a historic text as it is funny and swoon-worthy. Not a list of credentials to scoff at.
13. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The fact that this is the perfect book to universally assign to high school sophomores — those obvious themes! the oft-repeated motifs! — obscures the equal truth that it’s incredibly good. What a gift, that we can all have references as beautiful as “and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
12. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I am both on a never-ending quest to attain the title “well-read” and, shamefully, a big fan of the crisp, clean writing style perpetuated by men in the 20th century. Those two traits mean I have read a lot of fiction about war. This is by far the best of all of it.
11. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Of course my favorite book was going to make an appearance on this list. I’m not some kind of intellectual saint.
You can argue with the wall about whether children’s books count as novels. I’ll be over here enjoying a reading experience that’s whimsical and entertaining AND thematically layered.
10. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Even the most cold-hearted, walls-up, frequent-flyer readers will not be able to steel their psycho selves against the sheer emotional power of this book. I know because I tried. And I proudly hold all of those titles. This is excellent historical fiction, and also touching, and also populated with unforgettable characters.
9. Persuasion by Jane Austen
Sorry to all the hype that’s being funneled directly to Pride & Prejudice, including by me because I got carried away, but: this is an even better love story (that letter!), and an even better encapsulation of society at the time (that old maid status!), and an even more mature and complete novel from Austen.
8. Native Son by Richard Wright
I read this book over the course of a month as part of my long classics project, and it haunted me the entire time. I could not escape Bigger and his fate, who stayed with me every moment. Foolishly I thought once I finished the book I would move on, but this story has not left my mind. Complex and unforgettable.
7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
This book is what Gatsby had me training for. Everything about Pecola’s story, and the symbols that draw us through it, is a thoughtful and considered choice, creating fully fleshed depictions of race, beauty, the cruelty of society, the way we carry past wounds with us, the attempt to love selflessly.
6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
This is a beautifully written, brilliantly characterized, and consuming read. In its story of one woman’s life it depicts so many of the experiences that make up all of ours: happiness and disappointment, dreams lived and dashed. I was assigned to read it in school and did not do that, and I am sorry to this day for the lost years.
5. Sula by Toni Morrison
The second Toni Morrison in the top 10. Who’s surprised. (Silence reverberates through the world.)
Morrison's writing is up in the clouds, filled with turns of phrase and plot that in any other narrative would be nonsensical, and yet it is unceasingly, unmercifully, constantly grounded in reality. The ways in which it moves toward the fantastical serve only to tell us in full detail of the pain of life — the selfish foolishness of people, the cruel machinations of an unequal society, the moving target of contentment.
4. Emma by Jane Austen
Even without taking name-based vanity into account, this is both my favorite and what I consider the best of Austen’s works. The spine of steel it must have taken to write this bratty, spoiled charmer of a protagonist and deliver her only growth and forgiveness and happiness. Unlikable female characters are still a jailable offense in 2026.
3. Middlemarch by George Eliot
I have read a lot of classics at this point. I’ve been reading at least one per month for over four years, and usually tackling the longest and most intimidating on purpose. This is the book that started that effort, and I still blame it.
This is so readable and charming, on top of being edifying and complex. I have no personal sights set on authorship, but for those who do, I’d say this is required reading. And trying not to cry knowing you’ll never read, let alone write, anything like it is a rite of passage. (Write of passage? Is that anything?)
2. Beloved by Toni Morrison
This was my first ever Morrison (and the third in the top ten of this list) but that’s only one of the many reasons behind my undying love for it.
It’s beautifully written, cleverly constructed, filled with unforgettable moments and characters. It takes a true and tragic scene, one flattened by prejudice and history, and somehow through making it surreal makes it more real. Beloved is required reading.
1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Whatever insane, optimistic public high school teacher put this tome on the summer reading list for rising sophomores in the 2010s: thank you. You changed me.
I’m so glad this book has found a wave of popularity in the last year or two, because somehow a lengthy biblical retelling by a dead white guy is the truest, kindest, most life-affirming and life-altering novel I have ever read. And the very best.
Honorable Mentions
I have, as I mentioned/bragged about/bemoaned several times in this list, read many classics (and even more contemporary literary fiction).
These books didn’t have the same level of personal connection to me that I require for my favorite books, but they are all masterpieces:
The Count of Monte Cristo
One Hundred Years of Solitude
War and Peace
Don Quixote
Anna Karenina
To the Lighthouse
Invisible Man
The Catcher in the Rye
Things Fall Apart
Les Miserables
Frankenstein
Play It As It Lays
The Trial
Dracula
The Underground Railroad
The Sellout
Lolita
Now the fun part.
What did I miss? Where do you agree with me? Where do you disagree?
Also, how many books on the Guardian’s list have you read? I’m at 51.
Definitely not my list (neither is the Guardian 100) but still some bangers on there! I feel like Native Son and East of Eden are both incredibly underrated. The fact that they left Steinbeck off the Guardian list is criminal.
The Master and Margarita would be on my list, and the Brothers Karamazov. I love the Russians. Hard agree on Steinbeck, though Grapes of Wrath is my East of Eden. As for the Grauniad? 🙄