I love lists. I mean not as much as Rob Gordon or Amy Santiago, but still. So I was happy to find a book called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books in a second-hand store in my hometown. A whole bunch of lists. Books lists!
The book is from 2007 and features mostly writers I have not heard of, but it is still quite interesting and added quite some books to my ‘to read’ list and bumped up some that were already there.
The back of the book says:
/…/ the ultimate guide to the world’s greatest books. As writers such as Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, Margaret Drabble, Michael Chabon and Peter Carey name the ten books that have meant the most to them, you’ll be reminded of books you have always loved and introduced to works awaiting your discovery.
The Top Ten includes summaries of 544 books—each of which is considered to be among the ten greatest books ever written by at least one leading writer. /…/
Already sparking debate, The Top Ten will help readers answer the most pressing question of all: What should I read next?
The Top Ten Books
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
Me vs the Writers
I have read a whole of one book from the top 10. Most of the 25 books I have read in all are from the back of the list. In the ‘mentioned by one author’ section. Here’s a list of all the ones I have read… or rather, can remember reading.
High scorers (in brackets: place on list and number of writers listing it):
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (6th, 21)
- Great Expectations by Dickens
(13th, 11) - Dubliners by James Joyce (16th, 14)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
(33rd, 7) - Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (36th, 9)
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (46th, 4)
- Rabbit Angstrom – Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (53rd, 9)
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (58th, 5)
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (63rd, 4)
- 1984 by Orwell (96th, 3)
- David Copperfield by Dickens
(100+, 2)
And the 1-vote books:
- Howl by Allen Ginsberg
- One Flew Over the Coocoos Nest by Ken Kesey
- Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- His Dark Materials – Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The place on lists vs the number of writers that had the book on their list gives you a good understanding of the overall impact of the book. For example, The Catcher in the Rye is 46th with 4 votes, while Rabbit is just 7 places down, but with 9 votes.
But about my lists: from the first column David Copperfield would definitely be on my top 10 list, while I did not like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye much. From the second I am not sure which ones would make the list, but I think everybody should read Howl, Under the Volcano, The Bell Jar, His Dark Materials and On the Road. But I really really did not like Lord of the Flies, Tropic of Cancer and A Clockwork Orange and absolutely hated the writing style of Frankenstein.
Before we get to a bunch of more Top Tens, because my number one would probably be something not too popular, but a book that left a profound mark on me, here is the list of books that earned the top slot on one author’s list but weren’t mentioned by anyone else.
ONE-HIT WONDERS
Answered Prayers by Truman Capote; Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare; The Awakening by Kate Chopin; Bhagavadgita; The Birthday Party and The Homecoming by Harold Pinter; The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad; Casa Guidi Windows by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville; Embers by Sándor Márai; Geek Love by Katherine Dunn; I, Claudius by Robert Graves; Ill Seen, Ill Said by Samuel Beckett; JR by William Gaddis; The Golden Argosy edited by Van H. Cartmell and Charles Grayson; L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop) by Émile Zola; Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich; Nana by Émile Zola; The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis; Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence; The Outward Room by Millen Brand; Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe; The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda; The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe.
A handful of Top Ten’s
Here are some refined lists from the book that can maybe help you find your next read.
AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF WORKS SELECTED
1. William Shakespeare-11
2. William Faulkner-6
3. Henry James-6
4. Jane Austen-5
5. Charles Dickens-5
6. Fyodor Dostoevsky-5
7. Ernest Hemingway-5
8. Franz Kafka-5
(tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf-4
AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED
1. Leo Tolstoy-327
2. William Shakespeare-293
3. James Joyce-194
4. Vladimir Nabokov-190
5. Fyodor Dostoevsky-177
6. William Faulkner-173
7. Charles Dickens-168
8. Anton Chekhov-165
9. Gustave Flaubert-163
10. Jane Austen-161
WORKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. Dubliners by James Joyce
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
9. The stories of Flannery O’Connor
10. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
MYSTERIES AND THRILLERS
1. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
2. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
4. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
5. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré
6. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
7. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
8. Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
9. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
10. Everybody Pays by Andrew Vachss
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
2. The Stand by Stephen King
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
5. The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ by C. S. Lewis
6. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson
7. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
8. The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
9. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10. Dune by Frank Herbert
COMIC WORKS
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
3. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
4. Norwood by Charles Portis
5. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
6. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
7. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
8. The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty
9. Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward
10. Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
AMERICAN AUTHORS
1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
4. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
5. The stories of Flannery O’Connor
6. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
7. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
8. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison
10. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
BRITISH AUTHORS
1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. King Lear by William Shakespeare
6. Emma by Jane Austen
7. Dubliners by James Joyce
8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
9. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
And to finish this thing off, here are four lists by four authors I have read and whose taste intrigues me …
TOM WOLFE
1. L’Assommoir and Nana (tie) by Émile Zola
2. Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac
3. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
6. Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 (tie) by John O’Hara
7. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
8. Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell
9. Our Town by Thornton Wilder
10. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Tom Wolfe is a journalist (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, Hooking Up) and novelist (Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons).
STEPHEN KING
1. The Golden Argosy edited by Van H. Cartmell and Charles Grayson
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
4. McTeague by Frank Norris
5. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
7. 1984 by George Orwell
8. The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott
9. Light in August by William Faulkner
10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Stephen King‘s dozens of best-selling works include the novels Carrie, Cujo, Misery, and Cell. A resident of Maine, he received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
1. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
2. The Stand by Stephen King
3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
4. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
5. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
7. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
8. Fuzz by Ed McBain
9. Alligator by Shelley Katz
10. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy
David Foster Wallace has published novels (Infinite Jest), story collections (Oblivion), and books of essays and reportage (Consider the Lobster).
GEORGE SAUNDERS
1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
6. Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
7. The stories of Anton Chekhov
8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
9. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
10. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
George Saunders is the author of the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and most recently, In Persuasion Nation.
So there you go, I hope you found some inspiration for your next read. And I will go off pondering my top ten list, to share it here some day 😉
*Btw, here’s a fresh book about what writers read.