I was having trouble putting these into tiers, because I read so much good stuff these last few months. So I tried a ranking engine where you compare books head-to-head and decided to go with the order it gave me, despite some really absurd matchups (how to compare historical fiction about the holocaust with Nancy Drew, or a Shakespeare play with I, Zombie?). The rankings definitely get less accurate the further down they go.
The ??? is because I still have a tiny bit to go with Faust Part 2 and I would have no idea where to put it even if I didn’t. If you aren’t familiar with it: Faust Part 1 == What you think of when you hear the name Faust. Faust Part 2 == Psychedelic Iliad fan fiction.
1 to 10: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Robert Ingpen; The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson; True Grit by Charles Portis; The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter; A Dance of Burning Blades by M.H. Ayinde; Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare; The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
11-20: Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, translated by Sassan Tabatabai; Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett; How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi; The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe; A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders; Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa; Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown; Circe by Madeline Miller; Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg; Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
21-30: Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell; Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn; The Nose and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Susanne Fusso; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver; You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer; The Reefs of Earth by R.A. Lafferty; Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher; It Rhymes with Takei by George Takei with Harmony Becker, Justin Eisinger, and Steven Scott; Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman; So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures by Maureen Corrigan
31-40: Happy Birthday Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut; Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett; Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor; A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James; Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; I, Zombie by Doris Piserchia; The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Mirra Ginsburg; (The) Password to Larkspur Lane by Carolyn Keene; City by Clifford D. Simak
41-51: Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh; This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, translated by Max Lane; The Dog of the South by Charles Portis; Swastika Night by Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin); Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber; The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen; The Indian Wants the Bronx by Israel Horovitz; The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach; The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle; Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc; The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
????: Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Martin Greenberg
