Key events18m agoWhere are all the children's books?18m agoWhy isn't my favourite book on the list?12h agoWelcome to the ConversationMomDoc asks: I would like to see a division of the best 100 novels that you would read and read again. Versus the best 100 novels that you would read and know immediately that you would never want to read again because it was a little bit traumatising to read them?
double quotation markDavid: It’s interesting to think about what makes a book re-readable – and what kind of book you feel glad to have read but aren’t drawn back to again and again. You mention being traumatised, and it could certainly be that, but some books are more admirable than they are magnetic. I don’t think I’d re-read Madame Bovary, for example. Anyway, there are lots of reasons, and in our Books of my life Q&A each week, authors share the books they return to, as well as the book they’d never read again. Virginia Evans, who just won the Orange prize for fiction for her novel The Correspondent, recently told us she couldn’t go back to the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson because it was so disturbing!
Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from the Millennum series Photograph: Nordisk Film/Sportsphoto/AllstarWhere are all the children's books?Matthewrosedon asks: While it was not quite the usual suspects, when is children’s and genre fiction going to be taken seriously? Where were the Alice books, Wind in the Willows? Aren’t these great works of fiction? Where’s The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine? No Dune or Day of the Triffids. No Chandler or Hammett. No Asimov or Arthur C Clarke. If one of the purposes of such a list is to encourage reading then it helps if more of the books are actually readable.
