author/journalist · 8/10 picks in the top 100
"It bears repeating that choosing the 10 best books is a bonkers exercise on a par with choosing the 10 best people. It's always going to be an approximate assessment of the books that you find most enchanting, consoling and inspiring. I more and more think that modernism was a con-trick perpetrated on the reading public by a coalition of writers and academics so I couldn't find a place for Joyce or Woolf. The great novels, in my view, don't require special pleading or academic intervention to make you appreciate them. They grab you by your lapels and plunge you into a fictional world that supersedes the one you're in. My list reflects that feeling."
| # | Title | Author | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | #7 |
| 2 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | #1 |
| 3 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | #10 |
| 4 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | #9 |
| 5 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | #33 |
| 6 | Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell | #16 |
| 7 | Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift | |
| 8 | The Great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald | #11 |
| 9 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | #66 |
| 10 | Kim | Rudyard Kipling |
Voters with the most books in common.