What Other Writers Read

Posted on February 5, 2007

What authors do authors like to read? Post-Gazette book editor Bob Hoover reports on a recent book which collects all the favorite books by 125 top authors, such as Michael Chabon, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx and Jonathan Franzen. The lists were then distilled into a meta-list which represents the consensus of the favorite fiction writers of major authors. The book has many lists compiled, but also concludes this interesting consensus list of top fiction:

1. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.

2. Madame Bovary by Flaubert.

3. War and Peace by Tolstoy.

4. Lolita by Nabokov.

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain.

6. Hamlet by Shakespeare.

7. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald.

8. In Search of Lost Time by Proust.

9. The stories of Chekhov.

10.Middlemarch by Eliot.

Frankly, we couldn't care less what Jonathan Franzen likes to read, but we do respect the opinions of many of the other authors polled. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, Edited by J. Peder Zane (Norton) is available at bookstores nationwide.