As an antidote to many of those rather tedious and predictable critics lists of best books that we are seeing with increasing regularity this year, I thought I might reproduce five of the choices by writers in Antonia Fraser's excellent 'The Pleasure of Reading', published in 1992. I'm not sure if the lists themselves are copyright, but I imagine the authors would not be averse to seeing their favourites recommended in this way to anyone who happens to glance at this page.

J G Ballard

1. The Day of the Locust - Nathanial West
2. Collected Short Stories - Ernest Hemingway
3. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
4. The Annotated Alice - ed Martin Gardner
5. The World Through Blunted Sight - Patrick Trevor-Roper
6. The Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
7. The Black Box - ed Malcolm MacPherson
8. Los Angeles Yellow Pages
9. America - Jean Baudrillard
10. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - Salvador Dali

A S Byatt

1. The Collected Poems - Wallace Stevens
2. The Collected Poems - Emily Dickinson
3. The Collected Poems - Robert Browning
4. Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
5. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Birth of Tragedy - Friedrich Nietzsche
7. The Notebooks - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
8. Asgard and the Gods - adapted from Wagner by M W MacDowell
9. The London Book of English Verse - ed Bonamy Dobree
10. The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien

Doris Lessing

1. The Overcoat - Gogol
2. Fathers and Sons - Turgenev
3. The Devils - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. The Red and the Black - Stendahl
5. The Iliad - Homer
6. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
7. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
8. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
9. Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
10. The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney - Henry Handel Richardson

Brian Moore

1. A Personal Anthology - Jorge Luis Borges
2. Ulysses - James Joyce
3. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
4. At-Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien
5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
6. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
7. Memoire d'Outre Tombe - Cahteaubriand
8. Collected Poems - T S Eliot
9. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
10. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Jan Morris

1. Arabia Deserta - Charles Doughty
2. Ulysses - James Joyce
3. Eothen - Alexander Kinglake
4. The Collected Jeeves - P G Wodehouse
5. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
6. The Nigger of the Narcissus - Joseph Conrad
7. Kim - Rudyard Kipling
8. Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
9. The New Testament in Scots - William Laughton Lorimer
10. Collected Poems - Dafydd ap Gwilym