125 Authors Pick the Top 10 Great Books of All Time

I am willing to bet that most heavy readers (say...50-100 books per year, something in that range) are fascinated by book lists.  Those lists can be about anything from the various year-end Top Tens, to highest paid authors, to most popular book club choices, you name it, we love them.

I'm that way, too, and there's a little book I picked up in 2007 called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books that I still dip in and out of seven years after I first discovered it.  The lists are based on 125 author surveys edited by J. Peder Zane.  

What may be the most meaningful list in the entire book is the compilation of all books mentioned (there were 544 of them in total) so that an overall Top Ten could be produced.  

And, for the curious, here's that list - based on the number of mentions each book received and, more importantly, how high on the lists they were mentioned.  Thus, each first place vote earned a book ten points, each second place vote earned nine points, and so on:

1.  Anna Karenina (1877) - Leo Tolstoy (171 points)
2.  Madame Bovary (1857) - Gustave Flaubert (160 points)
3.  War and Peace (1869) - Leo Tolstoy (150 points)
4.  Lolita (1955) - Vladimir Nabokov (131 points)
5.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) - Mark Twain (126 points)
6.  Hamlet (1600) - William Shakespeare (111 points)
7.  The Great Gatsby (1925) - F. Scott Fitzgerald (110 points)
8.  In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) - Marcel Proust (107 points)
9.  The Stories of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) - (105 points)
10.  Middlemarch ((1871-72) - George Eliot (100 points)

I'm not a bit surprised that I've only read five of the ten books listed since I haven't read much from the great Russian writers.  I hope you did better...