These are a few of my favourite things

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.

Snookered by the black

I watched the fourteenth frame of the World Snooker Championship semi final between Northern Irish player Mark Allen and Chinese youngster Wu Yize yesterday teatime.

The black ball ended up hanging over the bottom right corner pocket with eight reds clustered around it. Normally the players would agree to a rerack and start the frame again, but with a thirty point lead on the scoreboard Allen declined to do so, and the referee was apparently unable to force him to, so for almost an hour the players clipped the reds or played off touching balls, sending the cue ball back to the baulk end of the table without potting anything. Eventually Allen knocked in the black with a deliberate foul shot and Wu went on to win the frame which lasted an hour and forty minutes, a record since the World Championship moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1977. 

It reminded me of the bit in the Patrick Hamilton novel The Plains of Cement where a young boy drives the barmaid in a London pub who's looking after him to distraction by showing her how to play endless cannons in billiards.

There have unsurprisingly been calls for the rules to be changed so that such a frame can never happen again, but the audience who witnessed it live seemed to enjoy the spectacle, as did I watching it on TV, and it's not the only sport where things can technically go on indefinitely: baseball and tennis don't have a clock, and penalty shootouts in football are unlimited too. If it happened all the time it might become a problem, but every few years just adds to the variety of the game.