This weekend s Guardian had a list of the best hundred novels, compiled from top tens submitted by writers and critics (I've read thirty eight of them).
I thought I'd compile my own top ten. It was much harder than I expected, and I could easily have added another ten novels to the list. Those that failed to make this most difficult of cuts will have to be summarised by the name of their authors, in no particular order: Albert Camus, George Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Graham Greene.
So anyway, here's my top ten.
1. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
2. Günter Grass, Dog Years
3. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
4. Franz Kafka, The Castle
5. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge
6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
8. Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell
9. Hermann Hesse, The Prodigy
10. Saul Bellow, Herzog
I'm aware that the list is heavily slanted towards twentieth century European literature, and at the top end especially towards magical realism.
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