As usual, I’m looking back to the best known books (by Goodreads and LibraryThing numbers) published 50, 100, 150 and 200 years ago. Unusually, I have actually read, or at least attempted, the top book on each of the four lists – I liked two of them and not the other two – so this isn’t going to inform my 2026 reading in the way that it has done in previous years. I’m also flagging up some interesting 1776 publications.

I’ve set up my habitual tables, ranking the books by the aggregate of their number of raters on Goodreads and owners on LibraryThing, with all the bias that implies. For 1976, I am listing the top 20 on that system; for 1926, the top 15; for 1876, the top 10; and for 1826 just the top 3. I’ve also noted a few works of 1776. Where I have read other books published in that year, I note them below.

How many of the below have you read? (Back in the old LJ days I would have run a poll which would have had dozens of respondents; those days are gone for ever, I think.)

Links below are to my online reviews of the books in question.

Books of 1976

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Interview with the Vampire	Anne Rice	641,460	24,652
Children of Dune	Frank Herbert	243,681	15,665
The Selfish Gene	Richard Dawkins	190,836	11,559
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry	Mildred D. Taylor	129,484	13,292
Roots: The Saga of an American Family	Alex Haley	164,212	7,339
Dragonsong	Anne McCaffrey	58,545	7,552
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues	Tom Robbins	56,943	5,398
Frog and Toad All Year	Arnold Lobel	37,706	7,221
Eaters of the Dead	Michael Crichton	46,162	5,446
Sleeping Murder	Agatha Christie	51,656	4,818
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction	William Zinsser	30,542	7,546
Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.	44,330	4,974
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction	Michel Foucault	25,297	6,213
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories	Norman Maclean	30,054	3,464
Raise the Titanic!	Clive Cussler	29,840	3,422
Gnomes	Wil Huygen and Ren Poortvliet	37,016	2575
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less	Jeffrey Archer	44,868	2072
Letters from Father Christmas	J.R.R. Tolkien	26,722	3477
The Boys from Brazil	Ira Levin	40,489	2217
The Omen	David Seltzer	69,524	1169

I described Interview with the Vampire as “the most utter tosh” when I read it in 2008. Apart from Letters from Father Christmas, I am sure that I have also read Roots and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, and fairly sure that I have read Children of Dune, The Selfish Gene, Dragonsong, Sleeping Murder, Raise the Titanic! and Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (though all the Jeffrey Archers kind of merge into one in my mind).

The Hugo Award for Best Novel that year went to Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm, and the Nebula to Man Plus, by Frederik Pohl.

Other 1976 books that I know I have read: The Complete Saki, by H.H. Munro; The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, by Bruno Ernst; Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy; Ordinary People, by Judith Guest; The Alteration, by Kingsley Amis; Mindbridge, by Joe Haldeman; The Hand of Oberon, by Roger Zelazny; Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny; The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston; The Malacia Tapestry, by Brian W. Aldiss; Power of Three, by Diana Wynne Jones; A Wreath of Stars, by Bob Shaw; The Borribles, by Michael de Larrabeiti; and King and Joker, by Peter Dickinson.

Of the lot, I’d say that my favourite is Roots, which I read when I was unsuitably young but which left a strong impression.

The best-selling book of 1976 in the USA, according to Publisher’s Weekly, was Trinity, by Leon Uris, an Irish-set saga that just missed my cutoff, followed by Sleeping Murder.

I’m not going to go back and re-read Interview with the Vampire, but I might give Children of Dune another go some time.

Books of 1926

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	488,194	24,755
Winnie-the-Pooh	A.A. Milne	392,330	15,233
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	337,213	11,365
The Richest Man in Babylon	George S. Clason	238,206	4,384
The Castle	Franz Kafka	73,897	9,066
The Blue Castle	L.M. Montgomery	54,434	3,353
Art Through the Ages	Helen Gardner	44,740	2,539
Clouds of Witness	Dorothy L. Sayers	25,220	3,923
Dream Story	Arthur Schnitzler	20,611	2,000
Lolly Willowes	Sylvia Townsend Warner	12,873	1,782
Oil!	Upton Sinclair	7,261	1,495
Mary	Vladimir Nabokov	8,817	1,160
Microbe Hunters	Paul de Kruif	4,407	1,158
You Can’t Win	Jack Black	4,774	723
The Mad Toy	Roberto Arlt	7,358	392

Apart from The Sun Also Rises, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Castle, I have also read Winnie-the-Pooh and Clouds of Witness.

Other books published in 1926 that I have read and enjoyed: Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence; Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees; The Casuarina Tree, by Somerset Maugham; and for Ulster interest, Apostate, by Forrest Reid.

None of the above features on the Publishers’ Weekly list of best-selling books of the year, which is topped by two books published in 1925: The Private Life of Helen of Troy, by John Erskine, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos.

I’m willing to admit that The Sun Also Rises is a great work of literature, and Winnie-the-Pooh has certainly demonstrated staying power, but I have had very few reading experiences like the shock I got from Agatha Christie at the end of Roger Ackroyd.

Books of 1876

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain	1,013,297	37,046
Daniel Deronda	George Eliot	26,812	4,080
Rose in Bloom	Louisa May Alcott	24,142	2,968
L’Assommoir	Émile Zola	19,253	2,610
The Gentle Spirit	Fyodor Dostoevsky	28,980	773
Miguel Strogoff	Jules Verne	10,787	2,028
The Prime Minister	Anthony Trollope	3,205	1,378
The Hand of Ethelberta	Thomas Hardy	3,746	583
Doña Perfecta	Benito Pérez Galdós	3,727	416
Helena	Machado de Assis	3,813	323

Well ahead of any other book mentioned in this post, including Hemingway and Rice, 1876’s winner is definitely Tom Sawyer, and I have to say that although I admire George Eliot for Daniel Deronda, Mark Twain is much more fun. I have not read any of the others, or, I think, any other book published in 1876. The Prime Minister sounds intriguing, The Hand of Ethelberta also sounds entertaining, and Adam Roberts has piqued my interest with an essay on L’Assommoir.

Books of 1826

There are three books published in 1826 which have shown anything resembling staying power: The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper; The Last Man, by Mary Shelley; and Life of a Good-for-Nothing, by Joseph von Eichendorff. The Last of the Mohicans is far ahead of the other two on both LT and GR, but I could not get into it when I tried many years ago. The Last Man on the other hand is great.

Books of 1776

Four non-fiction works of 1776:

• (published in January, though dated February 14): Common Sense, by Thomas Paine
• (published in February): Volume 1 of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• (published in March): The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
• (approved by Congress and printed on 4 July): The Declaration of Independence, mostly by Thomas Jefferson.

So that’s it for this year – plenty of food for thought.