Finding Comfort in the Classics

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Editors and writers on the Books desk — along with colleagues from the newsroom — recommend some time-tested books that offer escape from the present moment. This list came out during COVID

who voted:
Trade sources differ: a C-SPAN–based 2015 blog post tallied roughly 16 New York Times Book Review staffers, while a 2023 Publishers Weekly profile said the desk now has “more than 20 editors, critics and reporters” To keep our rankings conservative, we therefore credit each NYT list to 10 voters.

This list was originally published in 2020 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
189	The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	1898	American	English
2836	How to Cook a Wolf	M. F. K. Fisher	1942	American	English
941	Collected Essays of George Orwell	George Orwell	1968	British	English
718	Possession	A. S. Byatt	1990	British	English
194	Oblomov	Ivan Goncharov	1859	Russian	Russian
349	The Death of Ivan Ilyich	Leo Tolstoy	1886	Russian	Russian
522	The Phantom Tollbooth	Norton Juster	1961	American	English
2519	The American Way of Death	Jessica Mitford	1963	American	English
2012	The Habit of Being	Flannery O'Connor	1979	American	English
1506	Selected Stories	William Trevor	1992	Irish	English
49	Beloved	Toni Morrison	1987	American	English
120	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	1939	American	English
39	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1818	British	English
102	Charlotte's Web	E. B. White	1952	American	English
126	If This Is a Man	Primo Levi	1947	Italian	Italian
5	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	1967	Colombian	Spanish
27	To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf	1927	British	English
83	Emma	Jane Austen	1815	British	English
44	The Little Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	1943	French	French
139	The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	1860	British	English
358	The Mayor of Casterbridge	Thomas Hardy	1886	British	English