Top 10 Books of All Time

Yes, lists are shameful, but irresistible. But let's play a little: the last battle of authors, a transgression of genres (fiction, journal, poetry), even of styles (modern, classic). The result can be interesting.

In addition, it is a kind of parlor game that adapts perfectly at global narcissism that floods the Internet every day. The exercise has been applied and J. Peder Zane has written book, The Top Ten, published in 2007. The author took 125 great names of literature and came up with a sentence. Here are the best books, in his view:

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. 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. Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Cekhov,

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

(you can find all these books on Amazon)

It is an American point of view, because Zane has applied a survey among Americans that can be said to have a certain insight regarding literature. Maybe that explains why Asians are missing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Murakami or South Americans, Allende, Llosa, Marquez.

There are no women in this top. There is no Muriel Spark, no Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch. There is no Kundera, Musil and Mann. And you should consider ontemporary authors that are not detected by radars of our whimsicaltimes, but that will dominate the literary space in a century from now.

Is there a finality for the game above? It's just a taste of test guidance, reading. For that, we can rest assured that we live in the golden age of reading (never before have so many books been available), but we are tortured by the need to choose. What book to read? Where to start? Zane thinks that modern reader works on coordinates described by opportunity and confusion.

The irony is that dedicated readers does not have an apetit for force reading. Libraries are build out of passion, not according to some lists. Reading a book of our choice may be the last freedom we have.