SOURCE: "100 Books that Made a Century," in Manchester Guardian Weekly, January 20, 1997, p. 3.

[In the following essay, Foden comments on the Waterstone Bookstore's publishers list, addressing questions of the reading public's tastes versus criteria determined by literary academics.]

As long ago as 1592, second-rate poet Robert Greene was complaining about Shakespeare's rise to the top of the list. In the modern age, writers as diverse as Cyril Connolly and John Cowper Powys have produced lists of great books.

Now Waterstone's booksellers, in conjunction with Channel 4's Book Choice, has polled more than 25,000 people on their books of the century.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (written 1954–5) came first, receiving just over 5,000 votes. Some distance behind, George Orwell secured second and third place with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922, France, 1936, UK) and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) being the others in the top five. Irvine Welsh's...