Still on the Quest

Bold the ones you've read, strike the ones you hated, italicize the ones you couldn't get through. Asterisks for the ones you loved - more asterisks, more love. Plus signs for the ones you own. Gacked from semyaza.

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Now this article raises an interesting question for me. If I were asked to make a list of the top ten books I'd ask straight away my top ten or the world's? Do I choose the books which have influenced my thinking the most or the ones which I reread with the most delight? Do you want "literature" or just pleasure reading. The website for the book under review doesn't help. Although it does give me a list of titles I mean to read, and incentive to go out and buy the book for the summaries.

And even if I came up with ten titles, putting them in order would be... well, difficult.

If I were to ask the question, I'd say, name ten books which you think will still be of interest to readers in fifty years...

Here are mine. Mind you, I'm restricting myself to books I've actually read!

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Even though I like Tom Sawyer better, myself.)
The Lord of the Rings (Because I can't imagine it going out of style!)
The Canterbury Tales (Because they make the middle ages real!)
The Sherlock Holmes stories. (Because a good mystery is always worth reading.)
Shakespeare. (As if I have to explain that one!)
Les Miserables (Utterly absorbing, actually, once you take the time to start reading it.)
Homer (Both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's hard to argue with that many centuries of storytelling goodness. I'd add in the Aeneid by Virgil, but I must shamefacedly admit that I haven't read it. Although the new translation by Robert Fagles has gotten the kind of reviews that tempt even a lazy soul like me.)
The Secret Garden and A Little Princess (Ah, my love of children's books overcomes me.)
The People of the Deer or Never Cry Wolf (Farley Mowat taught me to love the arctic tundra.)
A Christmas Carol (Never mind that it was meant for a bit of holiday fluff, if you ask me it's the best, tightest writing Dickens ever did.)

Mind you, that's a very different list than it would be if I'd asked myself which books I wished would still be of interest to readers in fifty years. Guadalcanal Diary anyone?

Edited to add ( Okay, great literature aside, here are twenty-one (or so) books which (if I owned them all) you would have to pry out of my cold dead fingers because I live in the certainty that it would be a stone bitch to replace most of them. Books I love to reread, or which have left me shattered or amazed and unable to forget them. )