This is a manually maintained list of every book David J. Peterson has reviewed ranked exactly (i.e. books within a grade are ranked crucially with respect to one another). Click on a book’s title to read its review, or click on the name of an author to view all the reviews of books by that author.
1984
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto
- The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki
- The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en
- Sundiata by D. T. Niane
- Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
- House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
- Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
- The Kalevala by Traditional
- This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
- Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
- The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhuí by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
- Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis
- Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
- Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
- Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Amerika by Franz Kafka
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
- Cane by Jean Toomer
- The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- The Silver Stallion by James B. Cabell
- Nohow On by Samuel Beckett
- Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
- The Castle by Franz Kafka
- True Grit by Charles Portis
- The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
- Something Happened by Joseph Heller
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
- Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Tower of Myriad Mirrors by Tung Yueh
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Touch the Earth by Various
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Fall by Albert Camus
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson
- Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
- Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson
- The Nibelungenlied by Anonymous
- Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The American by Henry James
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighiere
- The Satyricon by Petronius
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
- Forest of a Thousand Daemons by Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa
- First Love by Ivan Turgenev
- If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
- Narative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass
- The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Great American Novel by Philip Roth
- Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt
- The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
- Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Bostonians by Henry James
- Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
- Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
- Closing Time by Joseph Heller
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
- Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare
- Matilda by Roald Dahl
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
- The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- God Knows by Joseph Heller
- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
- The Song of Roland by Anonymous
- Glory by Vladimir Nabokov
- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
- A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
- Watt by Samuel Beckett
- That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
- The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
- Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
- Old New York by Edith Wharton
- Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Swindler by Francisco de Quevedo
- Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
- Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- Time Stops for No Mouse by Michael Hoeye
- The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
- Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Murphy by Samuel Beckett
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- The Ambassadors by Henry James
- Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
- Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau
- Perelandra by C. S. Lewis
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Beowulf by Anonymous
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous
- Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Smoke by Ivan Turgenev
- The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
- Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- El Conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel
- Lazarillo de Tormes by Anonymous
- The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
- A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
- Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl
- Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleischman
- Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger, Jr.
- Struggling Upward by Horatio Alger, Jr.
- Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt
- Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
- The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- Sanctuary by William Faulkner
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
- Donald Duk by Frank Chin
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell
- The Cat Who Went to Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth
- The Quiet American by Graham Greene
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
- The Crow by James O’Barr
- The Theogony by Hesiod
- The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
- Silas Marner by George Eliot
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Malone Trilogy by Samuel Beckett
- The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
- A Vision by William Butler Yeats
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
- The Golovlovs by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- Summer by Edith Wharton
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Ordinary People by Judith Guest
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
- Into the Dark by Nicholas Wilde
- Paradise by Toni Morrison
- The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells
- The Pearl by John Steinbeck
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini
- Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons by Rose Estes
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
- Shapechangers by Jennifer Roberson
- A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin
- The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs
- To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck
- Disclosure by Michael Crichton
- Rising Sun by Michael Crichton
- The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton
- Congo by Michael Crichton
- It by Stephen King
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Illyrian Adventure by Lloyd Alexander
- The Client by John Grisham
- Coma by Robin Cook
- Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
- The Funhouse by Dean Koontz
- Blaster Master by F. X. Nine
- Wizards & Warriors by Ellen Miles
- How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
- Ninja Gaiden by A. L. Singer
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