The books we never forget

The Lord of the Rings takes first place, while one grid separates second and third place: East of Eden and The Brothers Karamazov are almost tied. The rest of the nine ranges from the social world of Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice to the violence of Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian.

Six of the nine are nineteenth-century novels. The three twentieth-century books belong to very different worlds: Tolkien’s imagined history, Steinbeck’s California and McCarthy’s borderlands. Yet all three give their stories the scale of older epics or family chronicles. The list has room for fantasy, social comedy and Gothic fiction, but it repeatedly returns to books that build a substantial world around their characters.

The smaller social world of Pride and Prejudice makes room for another kind of difficulty: learning to recognise a mistaken judgment. Elizabeth’s intelligence does not make her immune to getting someone wrong. Across the list, the memorable conflict often reaches inside the character as well as out into the world. A monster, a war or a hostile society can drive the plot, while self-knowledge remains unfinished work.

Some books come to mind together. A shared concern, a familiar voice or a very different treatment of the same question can make one a natural companion to another. Looking at the books chosen in the same mosaic gives us a starting point for those comparisons.

Melville’s presence is concentrated in Moby-Dick; Tolkien’s is spread more widely. One novel accounts for almost all Melville’s mosaics. Tolkien’s readers reach much further into his work, so his place in the author list depends on more than The Lord of the Rings.

King, Orwell and Lewis reach the author top nine without a book in the title top nine. Their presence is spread across several titles.

The two lists also give a different place to women. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley each have a book in the top nine, while Austen is the only woman in the author top nine. Brontë and Shelley’s leading novels secure a place in the book list; Austen also returns through other books. The comparison draws attention to how strongly a writer’s presence can be concentrated in one title.

As a reading list, these nine authors would move between very different voices. Austen’s social comedy sits alongside King’s horror; Orwell’s political fiction alongside the imagined worlds of Tolkien and Lewis. Their neighbours in the ranking need not be neighbours in style. An author list gives room to those differences in a way that a single book pairing cannot.

Each author counts once per mosaic, even when several of their books are chosen. That puts McCarthy just above Austen, with 1,051 mosaics against 1,044, although Austen has slightly more book mentions: 1,119 against 1,117. The ranking follows how many mosaics an author reaches, while the second count shows how many of their books those selections contain.

The entries chosen once put a different kind of significance beside popularity. A single appearance can still mean a great deal to the person who chose the book. It gives the title little weight in a collective ranking, but it has already survived that reader’s decision about which nine to keep.

The shared favourites and the rarely repeated choices belong in the same portrait. A familiar novel can sit beside a book that almost nobody else includes. The ranking offers common reference points; the rest of the collection is where each selection can take a less familiar direction.

All nine leading books are fiction. Imagined stories give this selection its most visible common ground, while the non-fiction books below turn to belief, daily conduct and the freedom to write.

The non-fiction entries give the selection another strand of self-examination. Confessions, Meditations and A Room of One’s Own approach the life of the mind from different directions: a person looking back over his life and belief, someone working through the discipline of living, and a writer examining the material conditions needed to write.

An unforgettable book can be an argument as well as a story. These three works bring ideas close to an individual life. They ask how a person understands themselves, how they act, or what freedom they have to do their work. Their smaller counts give them less space in the overall ranking, but they add a different way for a book to become personally important.