Writers pick their favourites

What do you get when 125 of today's writers are asked to nominate their best books of all time? The answer is, something like the unwieldy 544-title list included in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, on sale now. If you buy the book, you get a more detailed breakdown of who chose what, as well as some advocacy from some writers for their picks. But in the absence of an actual copy, some observations about the list itself:

• Overwhelmingly American, which is only to be expected since the writers list is, too. From a European point of view, most of the Big Names are included, but aren't they being slightly over-represented? Some of these titles are minor works. Who would put them in their all-time favourites list? Is this suspicion a reflection of my ignorance of the field of American writing? Or are American writers being either chauvinistic or provincial? Only someone more familiar with AmLit can say.
  
• Of the foreign writers listed, the French seem to me to prevail over all other combined. With only one or two exceptions, this involves classic authors: Proust, Zola, Balzac and Flaubert. I was again surprised to see dodgy listings in Flaubert's case (A Simple Heart?) and the inclusion of The Three Musketeers (I cannot imagine anyone who managed to finish this book also enjoying it). The first of those anomalies is explained by the presence on the panel of Julian Barnes. The second has no explanation: perhaps the writer who voted has had his memory affected by seeing one of the several film versions, let's hope the one with Olly Reed.
  
• So does nobody read modern literature in translation at all? There's one nod to Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk. The most recent French novel I can see is one of the Marguerites, Duras or Yourcenar. Borges and Garcia Marquez get a mention, neither of them terribly recent.
  
• A certain amount of log-rolling. This always comes up when writers nominate their favourites, and gives great pleasure every year when Private Eye magazine reveals the back-scratching that's been going on in the year-end choices. Most unscientifically, I have controlled for the fact that these are prominent contemporary writers, and must therefore be held in some regard. But really, how else do you explain the presence of two titles by John Banville, who also happens to be on the panel? Who was trying to suck up to Chuck Palahniuk, author of the execrable Fight Club? And while Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale can justifiably be described as a major novel, who in their right mind would vote for Oryx and Crake, which was just rubbish?
• There's probably a bit of national favouritism too. I was amazed to see two titles by Alisdair Gray: 1982, Janine, a very slight romance; and Lanark, an trilogy whose influence was greater than its sales, in that dead-end that was English provincial magical realism, when everyone decided they were going to do a Midnight's Children for whatever their own personal backwater was. I was also taken aback to see the far more deserving Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. There are to my knowledge two Scottish authors on the panel: Ian Rankin of the Rebus mysteries, and AL Kennedy. Mystery solved. Likewise, I'd imagine most of the French excesses are Julian Barnes' fault.
  
• I'm not sure I'm in favour of the wholesale ignoring of boundaries in this list. Novels are intertwined with poems like The Divine Comedy and Don Juan, which in turn are mixing with plays by Pinter and Shakespeare, which rub shoulders with short stories by Alice Munro, Raymond Carver and Anton Chekhov. Anthony Powell has his entire Dance to the Music of Time cycle represented in one entry, while Anthony Trollope has to make do with The Last Chronicle of Barset representing his first great cycle, and Phineas Finn the second. It simply makes no sense to separate one of the parts out from the whole.
  
• Pedantic it may be, but I would urge compilers of such lists to do a better job of proof-reading. And while typos are one thing, there's simply no excuse for getting Guy de Maupassant's name wrong. Henri was his proper first name as far as the parish register is concerned, but there's not a soul in the world who knows him by that name.

You can also post your own Top Ten, if you like, and read what others have suggested. There's no clear consensus, with Anna Karenina and War and Peace topping the charts, but not by many votes. There are also a lot of titles mentioned that the professionals didn't vote for. All of this is a Good Thing. There's no need for too much uniformity.

My own list would be a lot less adventurous, and far more provincial: one continent represented, with one exception. Two works only from the 20th century, six from the 19th, one from the 17th and one from the 16th. Pathetic.

I should say that I abhor such lists, because literature is not a beauty contest. You'll point out, quite rightly, that nor is beauty. And here's the list I drew up:

Labyrinths
Middlemarch
Great Expectations
The Barchester Chronicles
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
Thérèse Raquin
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Pride and Prejudice
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Try it yourself. A most infuriating exercise.