author · 6/10 picks in the top 100
"Compiling a list of ten felt like committing a minor crime - not to have Go Tell it On The Mountain and Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Wuthering Heights, Gulliver's Travels and Treasure Island, Mrs Dalloway and Jane Eyre, Moby Dick and A Room With a View, Northern Lights and Lord of the Rings, The Lady With the Dog and L'Etranger, The Wizard of Earthsea and Pippi Longstocking, Barchester Towers and Pale Fire, Three Men in a Boat and The Inimitable Jeeves: books that have given me some of the richest pleasure of my life. I'm still unsure about Ulysses, because - titanically great though it is, should a book be in your top ten if it took you ten attempts to finish it? But the ten here are the books that thrill me to think of them - books that see our failure and dread, loneliness and humiliation, and simultaneously salute human endurance, invention, comedy, skill, difference, wit, care, infinite variety and tenacity of love. I consider it an honour to follow those writers anywhere they take us. "
| # | Title | Author | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emma | Jane Austen | #13 |
| 2 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | #1 |
| 3 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | #30 |
| 4 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | #2 |
| 5 | Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | |
| 6 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | |
| 7 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | #28 |
| 8 | Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | #34 |
| 9 | Moominland Midwinter | Tove Jansson | |
| 10 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas |
Voters with the most books in common.