Key events
ZodKneelsFirst asks: Does “listened to an unabridged audiobook” count as “read”? I would say it does – but there are probably a few books where it doesn’t. I’m thinking of ones written in a heightened style, where the language itself is meticulously constructed and demands careful parsing.
David: Ha! This is a good question. As a keen audiobook listener, I would have to agree with you. But you’re right that not every book lends itself to the audio treatment. I’m not sure about the meticulously constructed aspect – I think things can fall apart a bit when there’s a lot of formal experimentation in the novel. I once tried Lincoln in the Bardo on audiobook and the multiple voices made it very confusing – even though they were performed by a cast of actors. I find traditional novels much easier to follow as they tend to proceed in a fairly conventional manner, with the scenes carefully set, dialogue easy to follow etc. So I find it’s a good way to consume classics.
Why so much Virginia Woolf while Catch-22 so low?
Namdam asks: Four Virginia Woolf novels in the top hundred of all time defies some belief. There are 98 novels better than Catch-22? I dispute that. I personally don’t think there are any. It caught me as a teenager and supplied a lifetime of pleasure from reading. I am surely not alone. I guess the greatest story ever told doesn’t qualify as a novel. Fair enough. So no Iliad. Or Odyssey.
Speaking of adventures that take forever (although not quite 10 years): War and Peace, Anna Karenina, À la recherchu and Ulysses all in the top seven? I guess there is no requirement to be choate … but I feel therefore that this is signifying the achievement rather than enjoyment.
Liese: You’re in good company loving Catch-22 which was voted one of the top 100 novels of all time by our fiction editor Justine Jordan. Interestingly it was catapulted up the list by readers who put it at (joint) number 8 on their top 100 … and yes the Iliad and the Odyssey didn’t qualify as they’re epic poems.
I voted for Mrs Dalloway but was also surprised by Woolf’s strong showing – but that’s how the votes fell! There are definitely some challenging reads in the top 10 but I think many of the critics and authors who voted for them would argue that as well as reflecting some dazzling literary achievements they are also books that reward the (quite significant) work of reading … Something readers seem to agree with as Ulysses and Anna Karenina also placed pretty highly in the readers’ top 100, just outside the top 10. At our Guardian Live event novelist Guy Gunaratne said that having struggled to take it on solo he really enjoyed reading Ulysses as part of an online group. I think there are a few places that do read-alongs around Boomsday, but he recommends the Friends of Shakespeare and co. podcast.
Photograph: HA/THA/Shutterstock
What first reads led you to a lifelong love of literature?
Sevensisters asks: What were your first books as a very, very young reader that drew you to a lifelong love of reading? I have to say here it was Enid Blyton.
David: So many to choose from! Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning was an early one, with its magic spells and the idea of the enchanted version of reality that only the child protagonist has access to. A little later on Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy introduced me to the darker elements of storytelling. I also remember being a bit obsessed by Leon Garfield’s historical fiction for children, including The Pleasure Garden and The Sound of Coaches. But probably the strongest very early influences were the Moomin books, particularly Comet in Moominland which my mum read to me at bedtime. That was probably the first time I remember being desperate to know what happened next – a very basic lesson in the power of narrative.
Should we take re-readability into account?
MomDoc asks: I would like to see a division of the best 100 novels that you would read and read again. Versus the best 100 novels that you would read and know immediately that you would never want to read again because it was a little bit traumatising to read them?
David: It’s interesting to think about what makes a book re-readable – and what kind of book you feel glad to have read but aren’t drawn back to again and again. You mention being traumatised, and it could certainly be that, but some books are more admirable than they are magnetic. I don’t think I’d re-read Madame Bovary, for example. Anyway, there are lots of reasons, and in our Books of my life Q&A each week, authors share the books they return to, as well as the book they’d never read again. Virginia Evans, who just won the Orange prize for fiction for her novel The Correspondent, recently told us she couldn’t go back to the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson because it was so disturbing!
Where are all the children’s books?
Matthewrosedon asks: While it was not quite the usual suspects, when is children’s and genre fiction going to be taken seriously? Where were the Alice books, Wind in the Willows? Aren’t these great works of fiction? Where’s The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine? No Dune or Day of the Triffids. No Chandler or Hammett. No Asimov or Arthur C Clarke. If one of the purposes of such a list is to encourage reading then it helps if more of the books are actually readable.
Liese: I think there are many children’s books that are great works of fiction and some of our voters did select them in their top 10s. Novelist Katherine Rundell, for example, put Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at number six on her list while regretting that she did not have space for Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, The Wizard of Earthsea and Pippi Longstocking. But when the votes were tallied up they did not get enough to make the final top 100.
As for genre, it was interesting to see a few more in our readers’ top 100 with Dune making the cut along with Stephen King’s The Stand. Ultimately it’s subjective as to what makes a novel one of the “greatest of all time”. I put Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban on my list which is a brilliant SF novel – partly because I loved his book The Mouse and His Child as a kid – but that too failed to make the final list!
Photograph: National Media Museum/SSPL/Getty
Why isn’t my favourite book on the list?
Greencorn asks: Why is Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night not on there?
Liese: Not enough votes!
Welcome to the Conversation
Hello and welcome to the latest Guardian Conversation, a new series of Q&As with our journalists. At 12pm BST we will be joined by Liese Spencer and David Shariatmadari who are ready to take your questions about all things bookish, including our huge recent project to rank the 100 greatest novels of all time – and last weekend’s corresponding list of readers’ favourites.
The books team have also been working hard to prepare their annual list of top reads for the (northern hemisphere) summer which is published tomorrow. (David is also the inventor of the Guardian’s Wordiply game should you wish to ask him about that).
Comments are open now (please sign up for a Guardian account below to join in) and, in the meantime, here’s some of the best of the 100 novels project.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2026/jun/12/reader-qa-books-team-100-novels
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