My Top Ten Great Books (just they’re enjoyable) would be:

The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers

The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper

American Gods and Good Omens by Neil Gaiman (he gets one slot otherwise he’d take all 10!)

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (OK, it’s a play, but still)

Bunnicula by Deborah Howe (Vampire bunnies, need I say more??)

Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman (the first book I ever “read”)

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (see I read him too!)

Of course if asked, I could come up with a Top Ten list of any kind of book that you wanted.

Seriously, that’s something that bugs me about the main “Top 10″ web site — it’s a sea of out-of-context lists. I don’t really learn anything from them. However, I think reading about people’s favorite books and why gives you some insight into both the people and the books.

Since I know you I didn’t personally need any context, though. I just thought, “Oh yeah, of course she put ‘A River Runs Through It’ on there!”

Jesse’s Top Ten (and only one Greek author who sounds like he could be Russian among them)

1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Books that remind you of how fragile our freedom is in the face of authority are so important. This one’s my favorite because it shows how such authority would actually be expressed in the real world: making people happy rather than miserable!

2. From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Not only is it a nail-biting page-turner but it’s a chillingly honest reflection on this patriarchy that we’ve created.

3. Immortality by Milan Kundera
This one’s exhilarating — page after page watching a woman who is trapped in the world she created for herself slowly setting herself free. And unlike most literary fiction that I can think of, it’s not boring — it’s funny, beautifully written, suspenseful.

4. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A blatant call-out — the military industrial complex has no clothes! It literally makes you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. We need more books that question our ridiculous society without being shrill. Whenever I read one of his books I say, “Thanks, Kurt.”

5. Peter Pan and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie
I know the first one was originally a play but then it was a storybook. Anyway, these introductions to Peter are so funny, engaging, and surprisingly heart-wrenching that I go back to them often and I’m amazed at how well they hold up. And Barrie was the first (and best!) user of the “self-aware British tone” that we all love today. J. K. Rowling would not exist without Barrie.

6. Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
These guys managed to write a modern prequel to Barrie’s story while keeping all the important elements intact, and amping them up. The hard lessons Peter has to learn about loss and growing up are sincerely heart-tugging, and it’s a can’t-put-down adventure as well.

7. Confederates In the Attic by Tony Horowitz
My only non-fiction pick. Horowitz manages to write a road trip memoir, investigative report, and searing analysis of post-Civil War America in one book, and he makes it funny, to boot. Amazing.

8. Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl
Hands-down the best short story writer in the English language. Each of them have O. Henry-like twists, all have real characters that spring from the most fertile imagination I’ve ever encountered, and the villains always get their clever comeuppance. However, his least-plot heavy one, “A Piece of Cake” is also my favorite and it’s still haunting years after I first read it.

9. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
No one tops Stevenson at action-adventure, and this one’s the granddaddy of them all! From the first paragraph when you meet the mysterious stranger at the inn and his odd pirate-y ways, the action doesn’t let up for a second. Also, we all want to be Jim Hawkins, always.

10. The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
It’s too bad that this one is forever sullied by the film version. If my list was ordered by importance this would be at the top — a devotional look at arguably the most influential historical figure. The story is exciting so it reads well despite (and maybe because of) the deep meditations on our physical longings vs. our spiritual journeys.

I guess you’re right, I was being too lenient. A bad story cannot be saved by even the very best language, but you can read the pretty bits (as Ms. Prose shows us in her book – she explains the stories for you while showing you the best parts) and acknowledge they are good (and essentially learn some writing tricks from them). You just wouldn’t want to read the whole book.

1. When we become overwhelmed by books that sacrifice story for some high-minded, nice-sounding prose you wind up alienating the general public from the reading experience. They want engaging, fun, relatable stories and if they can’t get them in books they’ll get them somewhere else.

2. When this stuff sells, or gets critical acclaim, writers just keep cranking out more awful stuff.

The one thing I’ll disagree with is that I don’t think a book without a story can be saved by pretty sentences. Every good piece of writing has something happen in it — some kind of change in a character, somewhere along the way — otherwise we just can’t be engaged. We can’t appreciate words for their aesthetic value alone.

I love poetry, which is arguably where one should look first in the quest for beautiful, well-used language. But the best poets are all telling some kind of story in their work. If Allen Ginsberg writes beautiful words about a sunflower that’s fine, but “Sunflower Sutra” is so lasting because of the context, the story — his journey and the moment passing the sunflower that made him stop and ponder.

And speaking of Russian writers, Vladimir Nabokov wrote perhaps the most beautiful-sounding celebration of the English language ever in Lolita but that book wouldn’t still be read today if we weren’t so completely enthralled by Lolita and Humbert Humbert.

This all reminds me of B.R. Myers’s notorious essay against literary pretension in Atlantic Monthly a few years ago. People were PISSED! But he was right.