10 best books ever written

IN Australia, our national TV and radio broadcaster asked viewers and/or listeners to name their favourite book.

I am sure many of you would have been invited to frolic in a similar exercise in your own countries.

It is chewing on a piece of gum for the mind, because

a. popular books will fare better than the classics and
b. more recent books will fare better than the classics and
c. most viewers have not read the classics or, if they have, it was long ago.

Academics like to make lists and they love to be considered smart so, they too, are sometimes invited to compile their 10 best books ever written.

It takes the fun out of it, if you cite criteria for what is a great book, but it would be interesting to see what the general public would nominate as their favourite 10 books if they could not list a book written in the last 50 years.

Of course, your 10 favourite books are not necessarily the 10 books you consider the best ever written. Sherlock Holmes books are fun but not fantastic as imaginative fiction

Go to it. Name the 10 best books ever, not including any of the past 50 years.

The real buzz about a compilation like this is reading someone else's might prompt you to discover a gem or re-evaluate something you have read.

The downside is you cannot imediately remember all the books you loved.
I will start the list with this proviso, if you asked me next week, it might be different.

1. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Cervantes
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
3. The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad
4. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (Could be just my associating because Lawrence and Huxley were mates.)
7. The Trial by Franz Kafka
8. A James Joyce novel though I have never got past the first five pages of any.
9. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos because Joyce preferred to have that read to him, when he was near blind in his old age.
10. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett because a book can be play.

Won't you return the ball: what's your 10 best?

Spread the Word
Bernie