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htmlThe 10 Greatest Books of All Time By Lev Grossman inShare 52 Read Later Frank Micelotta / Getty Author Tom Wolfe Email Print Share Reprints Follow @TIME Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over. But what if just for argument's sake you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Le them, King, 125 of them and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greates t books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fi ction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fi sh-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers to gether, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list. (See the 100 best novels of all time.) Yes, it would probably still be an obscenity. But it would be a pretty interesti ng obscenity. And that's what we have in J. Peder Zane's The Top 10 (Norton; 352 pages). Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the internation al canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Laby rinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that u p with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scara mouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of int ellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing. There's plenty of canon fodder on the lists. Zane, who's the books editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, has done a statistical breakdown of the results, so we know, for example, that Shakespeare is the most-represented author (followed by Faulkner, who ties with Henry James; they're followed by a five-way tie, which you can read about for yourself). But I'm more interested in the dark horses, th e statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of th e literati. Douglas Coupland puts Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers at number one, blowing right by Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. Jonathan F ranzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a s harp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and anothe r at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially Americ an Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman Mailer revives John Dos Passos's out-of-fashion U.S.A. trilogy for his #6 (and shows un characteristic forebearance by leaving his own works off the list). And so on. ( At times one reads in the knowledge that one is being messed with. There's an ou tside, screwball chance that David Foster Wallace really reveres C.S. Lewis's Th e Screwtape Letters above all other books, but I feel comfortable asserting having read Infinite Jesttwice that Wallace does not feel that way about Stephen King's Monday, Jan. 15, 2007

The Stand (at #2) or The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy (#10).) (See the top 10 books you were forced to read in school.) There are several lifetimes' worth of promising literary leads here 544 books in a ll. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mention ed is worth the price of admission all on its own. But to get you started, here, in all its glory, is the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the t op 10 lists of 125 of the world's most celebrated writers combined. Read it and w ell, just read it. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Hamlet by William Shakespeare The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov Middlemarch by George Eliot See TIME's Pictures of the Week. Read more: The 10 Greatest Books of All Time - TIME http://content.time.com/time /arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html#ixzz2uSnPQURO