Top Tens

So have you sent your list of top ten favourite reads in to the Star? You only have a couple more days to go, y'know.

I've tossed and turned at night over my choices ... many of them read so long ago that I wonder if I would still love the titles as much as I did back then. What did I choose? I'll tell you in another post after the results of the StarMag poll are out. (Mel posted her list on her blog.)

Lists of best reads make compulsive reading. Critic Robert McCrum puts it nicely:

Obviously, in the whirling blizzard of new prose and amid the disorienting static of mass communications, a list provides a signpost, a welcome simplification of confusing data and, perhaps, a still small voice of clarity. Next, especially for bookish blokes whose reading must be susceptible to notions of rank and consequence, a list posts a valuation on a vivid but meaningless literary Footsie. Finally, a list is simultaneously an aide-memoire, a reproach and a provocation.

Last month I impulse bought The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favourite Books edited by J. Peder Zane from Kinokuniya. (I'm a sucker for books about books and naughty Kino had a whole table covered in them!)

You pretty much know the contents of the book from the title alone. In fact Zane asked 125 top British and American authors of various fiction genres for their lists, among them, Stephen King, Alice Hoffman, (my patron saint) Annie Proulx, Alexander McCall Smith, Ann Patchett, Sue Monk Kidd, Michael Cunningham ... (Scott Esposito of the Conversational Reading blog delights in the quirkinesses of the lists.)

The writers between them nominate 544 titles, which Zane then provides a guide to in the second part of the book. This is a formidable master reading list and perhaps a great place for the reader who wants to go straight for the best or the wannabe writer setting out to fill gaps in their reading education.

And then Zane then correlates all the lists to draw out with a single Top 10 of all time according to authors. And this, my dears, is it:

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