The Top 5 Best Novels Ever Written
Since the publication of what many historians consider to be the world’s first iteration of the art form (Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji) 1,000 years ago, the novel has become the primary mode of artistic expression in literature. Fiction from every modern civilization has been studied and analyzed, with hundreds of different books in all manner of different languages being considered by various scholars and critics to represent the pinnacle of the art form? So how could one possibly determine what the five greatest novels of all time are? Very easily, it turns out: just by taking a look at Ranker’s list of The Best Novels Ever Written (358K votes).
Most of us first learn about great works of literature from teachers or professors, but academics aren’t the only arbiters of taste. This list gives us an excellent sense of which novels the average bookworm online prefers. To celebrate World Book Day on April 24, we’re breaking down the Top 5 novels according to Ranker voters and examining the tastes and preferences that seem to define fans of each book. We also look at each audience’s taste in movies to gauge just how ripe each novel is for a new Hollywood adaptation.
Photo: Signet Classics
#1: 1984
At the top of the list is the world-famous dystopian novel by George Orwell about a totalitarian regime that persecutes individuals suspected of free-thinking, ruled by the seemingly omniscient leader “Big Brother.” Written by a self-described socialist but depicting a society controlled by a political system called “English Socialism,” the novel’s riveting story and unique world often take a backseat to its perceived political leanings. 1984 is used by people on both sides of the political spectrum to warn people about what will happen if the other side gets its way — a quality the novel shares with tons of other books its fans tend to love.
1984 fans are 8X more likely than the average Ranker voter to love Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, 7X more likely to love Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 6X more likely to love William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and 5X more likely to love Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. All these novels are referenced nearly as much in political conversations as they are in discussions of literature, which explains why they seem to attract the same readership. The book appears to be particularly popular with millennials, the only generation to have voted the novel to #1 (judging from the overall results of the list, they’ve done so in very high numbers!).
A film adaptation of 1984 with John Hurt and Richard Burton was released in the mid-1980s (guess the year!), but it isn’t particularly popular with fans of the novel, who are 3X more likely to prefer the 2006 comic book adaptation V for Vendetta (also with John Hurt). That said, there’s no reason to believe that an updated remake in the flashy style of V for Vendetta wouldn’t be successful among Orwell’s audience.
Photo: Houghton-Mifflin
#2: The Lord of the Rings
The #2 book on the list might more properly be called a series of novels, though it was originally intended by its author to be a single volume. At this point, Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films is as or even more closely identified with The Lord of the Rings as the original novels, but that hasn’t stopped literature fans from voting J.R.R. Tolkien’s work to near the top of this highly competitive list. What’s more, Tolkien appears twice on the list’s Top 10, with The Hobbit ranking at #9.
The audience for Lord of the Rings closely resembles that of 1984: both audiences are between 5X and 6X more likely to love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dune, and War of the Worlds. Fans of Tolkien’s fantasy series are 4X more likely to also love Orwell’s dystopian classic. That’s a little surprising, but not shocking, since both books belong to the sometimes uncomfortably broad category of “fantasy/sci-fi.” The more dyed-in-the-wool exemplar of its genre, Lord of the Rings is also 5X more likely to share fans with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Lord of the Rings is slightly more popular among women than among men, as the latter put the fantasy novels at #3.
Unlike with 1984, fans of the books and movies are closely aligned when it comes to LOTR. Readers of the novels are a whopping 9X more likely to love 2003’s Return of the King, and 5X more likely to enjoy the 1978 animated adaptation (improbably enough, also starring John Hurt!). Outside of the LOTR film canon, the movies fans of this fantasy series are most likely to love are part of the Star Wars saga — they’re 3X more likely to love The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. When it comes to television, Lord of the Rings fans are 2X more likely to love Game of Thrones. We’ll have to check back in the fall of 2022 to see how they feel about Amazon Prime’s upcoming LOTR series.
Photo: Rakuten Kobo
#3: Crime and Punishment
The top-ranked non-English book featured on this list, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, is also the first book on the list that is firmly outside the genres of science fiction and fantasy. A dense psychological meditation on the factors that drive people toward violent crime, this Russian novel first published in 1866 seeks answers to questions still highly relevant to readers today.
The tastes of Crime and Punishment fans reveal an audience that’s quite different from those of the other two books we’ve covered so far. The books that Crime and Punishment fans have the strongest affinities with aren’t other crime novels, but rather great works of modern European literature, including Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. That said, fans of Dostoevsky’s book aren’t averse to great American novels like William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which they are respectively 7X, 6X, 5X, and 4X more likely to love. Crime and Punishment is more popular among voters from the Northeast on this list than any other US region.
Though it’s been largely forgotten by time, there was a relatively recent Hollywood adaptation of Crime and Punishment in 2002 starring Crispin Glover and John Hurt (we’re starting to freak ourselves out now). It doesn’t seem to be a favorite of the novel’s audience, however, which appears to prefer crime and mystery when it comes to film. The movies most likely to be beloved by Crime and Punishment fans are Orson Welles’s The Third Man, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Martin Scorsese’s classic Taxi Driver. If a movie studio were to try again with Dostoevsky’s material, it might consider something that verges closer to these dark, gritty thrillers than the Masterpiece Theater-like drama that Hurt starred in.
Photo: Sterling Unabridged Classics
#4: Frankenstein
The first novel on this list written by a woman, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is regarded by many as the first modern horror novel, combining science fiction with supernatural elements to create a thrilling, frightening story. We often hear about the distance that exists between popular portrayals of the Frankenstein story and the original novel (yes, we all know “Frankenstein” is the scientist and not the monster), but the book’s popularity indicates that the average reader knows the book isn’t about a nonverbal zombie with bolts in his neck.
Fans of Frankenstein are clearly drawn to Shelley’s novel by a love of horror: they’re 9X more likely to also love Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They’re also 7X more likely to think positively about H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (Frankenstein is the first book so far on this list with fans who prefer Wells’s Invisible Man to Ellison’s), 5X more likely to love Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and 4X more likely to be enthusiastic readers of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Frankenstein is particularly beloved by baby boomers.
With the possible exception of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, no horror story has been adapted into movies more frequently than Frankenstein. From the 1931 version starring Boris Karloff, to the 1974 Mel Brooks satire Young Frankenstein, to the time-travel fraught 1990 flop Frankenstein Unbound (starring John Hurt), to Kenneth Branagh’s more faithful 1994 adaptation starring Robert De Niro as the monster, there are endless retellings of this story on film. The 1931 classic appeals most to fans of the novel, who generally gravitate toward Hollywood “Golden Age” horrors like the Bela Lugosi Dracula, German Expressionist masterwork The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and F.W. Murnau-directed Nosferatu. Their taste for old movies is so pronounced, in fact, that it’s hard to see how any new adaptation could appeal to them: they don’t seem to care for 2014’s I, Frankenstein, 2015’s Victor Frankenstein, or even 2017’s Mary Shelley.
Photo: Penguin Classics
