All I can say is that I hope “Catcher in the Rye” didn’t make the list. (or even the list of the 1000 best novels)
Bad news. It is #72 in this list, which the author put in date order rather than by rating.
Robert McCrum selects the definitive 100 novels written in English
http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-100-best-novels
1 – The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
2 – Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
3 - Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
4 – Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
5 – Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6 – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7 – Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
8 – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
9 – Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
10 – The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)
11 – Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
12 – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
13 – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
14 – Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
15 – David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
16 – The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
17 – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
18 – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
19 – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
20 – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
21 – Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
22 – The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
23 – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
24 – Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
25 – Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
26 – The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
27 – The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
28 – New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
29 – Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30 – The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
31 – Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
32 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
33 – Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
34 – Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
35 – The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
36 – The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
37 – Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe
38 – The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
39 – The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
40 – Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)
41 - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
42 - The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
43 - The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
44 – Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915)
45 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
46 – Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
47 – Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
48 – A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
49 – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
50 – Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
51 – The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
52 – Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
53 – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
54 – The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
55 – As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
56 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
57 – Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
58 – Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
59 - Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
60 – Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61 – Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
62 – The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
63 – Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
64 – At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)
65 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
66 – Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
67 – All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
68 – Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
69 – The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
70 – Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
71 – The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
72 – The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
73 – The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
74 – Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
75 – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
#72