My Fifty Favorite Novels

It's taken me nearly 5 and a half years, but I now finally find myself comfortable creating a top 50 novels of all-time list. When compiling this list, I tried to limit myself to only one entry per author, but in some cases it was unavoidable that an author might appear on it more than once. Along with novels, I also considered short novels to be proper candidates for the list (hence the appearance of Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness"). Also, in the name of impartiality, and with the exception of Dennis Cooper, no books written by my friends appear on this list, though I can certainly think of many novels written by people I know that could appear on this list had I gone down that route. No doubt this list will change as the years go by and I read new books. In any event, here then is my top 50 favorite novels, arranged in the order of author's last name:

My Top 50 Novels

 

1. The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard)
2. Nightwood (Djuna Barnes)
3. Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)
4. The Place of Dead Roads (William S. Burroughs)
5. Midnight Sun (Ramsey Campbell)
6. The Plague (Albert Camus)
7. Other Voices, Other Rooms (Truman Capote)
8. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Angela Carter)
9. The George Miles Cycle (Dennis Cooper) *
10. No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai)
11. Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delany)
12. Valis (Philip K. Dick)
13. Play It as It Lays (Joan Didion)
14. The Man Who Fought Alone (Stephen R. Donaldson)
15. The Gap Cycle (Stephen R. Donaldson) **
16. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
17. The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
18. American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
19. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
20. The Recognitions (William Gaddis)
21. Omensetter’s Luck (William H. Gass)
22. Our Lady of the Flowers (Jean Genet)
23. Neuromancer (William Gibson)
24. The White Plague (Frank Herbert)
25. Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)
26. Against Nature (J.K. Huysmans)
27. Là-Bas (J.K. Huysmans)
28. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
29. The Ceremonies (T.E.D. Klein)
30. Maldoror (Comte de Lautréamont)
31. Briefing For a Descent Into Hell (Doris Lessing)
32. At the Mountains of Madness (H.P. Lovecraft)
33. The Hill of Dreams (Arthur Machen)
34.The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
35. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy)
36. Mawrdew Czgowchwz (James McCourt)
37. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
38. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (Steven Millhauser)
39. Confessions of a Mask (Yukio Mishima)
40. Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
41. Nineteen Eighty Three (David Peace)
42. The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson)
43. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
44. Against the Day (Thomas Pynchon)
45. Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon)
46. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
47. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
48. In Youth is Pleasure (Denton Welch)
49. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
50. The Waves (Virginia Woolf)

Honorable Mentions:

 

Blood and Guts in High School (Kathy Acker)

The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
Story of the Eye (Georges Bataille)
Drawing Blood (Poppy Z. Brite)
The Fall (Albert Camus)
The Hearing Trumpet (Leonora Carrington)
Moravagine (Blaise Cendras)
God Jr. (Dennis Cooper)
Dark Reflections (Samuel R. Delany)
Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
The Rules of Attraction (Bret Easton Ellis)
Glamorama (Bret Easton Ellis)
The Magus (John Fowles)
The Miracle of the Rose (Jean Genet)
Hannibal Rising (Thomas Harris)
En Route (J. K. Huysmans)
IT (Stephen King)
Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)
Reflections in a Golden Eye (Carson McCullers)
Perdido Street Station (China Mieville)
My Work is Not Yet Done (Thomas Ligotti)
Nineteen Eighty (David Peace)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
The Witching Hour (Anne Rice)
Nausea (Jean-Paul Sartre)
The Street of Crocodiles (Bruno Schulz)
Battle Royale (Koushun Takami)
The Mind Parasites (Colin Wilson)
Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust (Nathanel West)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)  
Orlando (Virginia Woolf)

addendum:

*= technically five books, but I've decided to lump them in as one here. If I had to pick a favorite from the George Miles Cycle, it would most probably be Guide.

**= again, technically a five book series, but seeing as how Donaldson considered it to be one giant work split into five parts for publication purposes, I here consider it as one book. If I had to choose one of the five, it would be This Day All Gods Die.