As a follow-up to messing around with Goodreads and Project Gutenberg last week, I wondered what the top 100 list would look like with no duplicate authors, so I generated the list below, removing works by authors who have work higher on the list. What I like about the result is how dense it is with different themes, concerns, styles, etc. It’s an intriguing condensation of Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection and perhaps a better reading list for absorbing common literary reference points among works available in English.

   1 Pride and Prejudice (Austen, Jane)
   2 Jane Eyre (Brontë, Charlotte)
   3 Little Women (Alcott, Louisa May)
   4 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud))
   5 The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas, Alexandre)
   6 The Secret Garden (Burnett, Frances Hodgson)
   7 Les Misérables (Hugo, Victor)
   8 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor)
   9 The Velveteen Rabbit (Bianco, Margery Williams)
  10 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, Mark)
  11 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde, Oscar)
  12 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, Lewis)
  13 Dracula (Stoker, Bram)
  14 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir)
  15 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy, Leo, graf)
  16 Wuthering Heights (Brontë, Emily)
  17 A Christmas Carol (Dickens, Charles)
  18 The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Potter, Beatrix)
  19 Siddhartha (Hesse, Hermann)
  20 Peter Pan (Barrie, J. M. (James Matthew))
  21 Frankenstein (Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft)
  22 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, L. Frank (Lyman Frank))
  23 The Scarlet Pimpernel (Orczy, Baroness Emmuska)
  24 Black Beauty (Sewell, Anna)
  25 The Trial (Kafka, Franz)
  26 Heidi (Spyri, Johanna)
  27 The Phantom of the Opera (Leroux, Gaston)
  28 North and South (Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn)
  29 Treasure Island (Stevenson, Robert Louis)
  30 The Time Machine (Wells, H. G. (Herbert George))
  31 The Wind in the Willows (Grahame, Kenneth)
  32 A Room with a View (Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan))
  33 The Woman in White (Collins, Wilkie)
  34 The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Christie, Agatha)
  35 The Age of Innocence (Wharton, Edith)
  36 The Call of the Wild (London, Jack)
  37 The Gift of the Magi (Henry, O.)
  38 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne, Jules)
  39 Middlemarch (Eliot, George)
  40 Don Quixote (Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de)
  41 Candide (Voltaire)
  42 Dubliners (Joyce, James)
  43 Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe, Harriet Beecher)
  44 Of Human Bondage (Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset))
  45 Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss, Johann David)
  46 Just So Stories (Kipling, Rudyard)
  47 Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy, Thomas)
  48 Right Ho, Jeeves (Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville))
  49 Swann's Way (Proust, Marcel)
  50 The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman, Charlotte Perkins)
  51 Moby Dick (Melville, Herman)
  52 Dead Souls (Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich)
  53 The Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan, John)
  54 Madame Bovary (Flaubert, Gustave)
  55 Little Brother (Doctorow, Cory)
  56 The Jungle (Sinclair, Upton)
  57 Pollyanna (Porter, Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman))
  58 The Story of Doctor Dolittle (Lofting, Hugh)
  59 The Awakening (Chopin, Kate)
  60 Vanity Fair (Thackeray, William Makepeace)
  61 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne, Nathaniel)
  62 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, Daniel)
  63 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Brontë, Anne)
  64 Hunger (Hamsun, Knut)
  65 My Father's Dragon (Gannett, Ruth Stiles)
  66 A Hero of Our Time (Lermontov, Mikhail Yurevich)
  67 Daddy-Long-Legs (Webster, Jean)
  68 Anthem (Rand, Ayn)
  69 The Railway Children (Nesbit, E. (Edith))
  70 Ivanhoe (Scott, Walter, Sir)
  71 Gulliver's Travels (Swift, Jonathan)
  72 Heart of Darkness (Conrad, Joseph)
  73 Three Men in a Boat (Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka))
  74 A Girl of the Limberlost (Stratton-Porter, Gene)
  75 The Forsyte Saga (Galsworthy, John)
  76 In His Steps (Sheldon, Charles Monroe)
  77 Ben-Hur; a tale of the Christ (Wallace, Lew)
  78 Pinocchio (Collodi, Carlo)
  79 A Princess of Mars (Burroughs, Edgar Rice)
  80 Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (Sidney, Margaret)
  81 Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (Illustrated) (Abbott, Edwin Abbott)
  82 The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757 (Cooper, James Fenimore)
  83 O Pioneers! (Cather, Willa)
  84 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott))
  85 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith)
  86 Winesburg, Ohio; a group of tales of Ohio small town life (Anderson, Sherwood)
  87 The Decameron (Boccaccio, Giovanni)
  88 King Solomon's Mines (Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider))
  89 Captain Blood (Sabatini, Rafael)
  90 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce, Ambrose)
  91 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von)
  92 The Fall of the House of Usher (Poe, Edgar Allan)
  93 History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Fielding, Henry)
  94 Sister Carrie: a Novel (Dreiser, Theodore)
  95 Stepping Heavenward (Prentiss, E. (Elizabeth))
  96 The Way We Live Now (Trollope, Anthony)
  97 The Turn of the Screw (James, Henry)
  98 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert))
  99 L'Assommoir (Zola, Émile)
 100 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne, Laurence)