author/academic · 4/10 picks in the top 100
"I think the relationship one has with their favourite novels is a bit like a romance: life becomes charged, sweeter – more meaningful as a result of spending time with them. There’s an electricity between the prose and the reader that suffuses ordinary time. To a writer, one’s favourite books are also often those you wish you’d written, and which bring out pangs of longing and jealousy as a result. My experiences, and perhaps more importantly, my memories of the experiences of reading these novels have a kind of erotics attached to them. In the way of all good romances, they’ve altered some fundamental part of me."
| # | Title | Author | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | #6 |
| 2 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | #4 |
| 3 | Lolly Willowes, Or, the Loving Huntsman | Sylvia Townsend Warner | |
| 4 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | #50 |
| 5 | The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny | Kiran Desai | |
| 6 | Transit | Rachel Cusk | |
| 7 | The Millstone | Margaret Drabble | |
| 8 | The Bloater | Rosemary Tonks | |
| 9 | Passing | Nella Larsen | |
| 10 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | #25 |
Voters with the most books in common.