I HAVE JUST FINISHED reading Restless by William Boyd because a friend of mine bought it for me on-line and had it sent to my house. That's an extreme example of how most people choose the books they read: advertising and reviews make little impact on what we buy; by far the strongest influence is the personal recommendation of a friend.

So when Waterstone's asked if I would pick 40 books for them to display in their shops for a month, I thought this was better than just another marketing scheme; this seemed to reproduce, on a large but efficient scale, the way we go about making this important everyday choice.

I sat down with a piece of paper and, on a principle of natural self-selection, wrote the first names that came into my head. Then I had to cut back the 80 or so titles to the required 40. Although it was tempting to show off, I first whittled away some of those Bolivian experimentalists. The other lure - to be a crowd-pleaser - was harder to resist, because many of the books I wanted were not in print; so some mainstream choices were promoted just because they are available. Here, I tried to pick books that are not just classics but which offer something different on each reading. Hence The Catcher in the Rye over Gatsby; the latter is always good, but the former is always surprising.

I didn't try to be comprehensive or to represent all types of book. I didn't think “we ought to have some Latin”, so shall we go for Horace or Ovid, because if I had, then we ought to have had Chinese, too, and something about finance, and what about geography? The only area in which I did think I should try to get a presence for its own sake was children's books, because I hope that the table will encourage young as well as old.

The list of the chosen 40 can be found in the panel on the left hand side of this page and on display in Waterstone's branches, but here are an unlucky 13 that didn't make it, because they are out of print or available in too small a number. This is a salon des refusés for which I have a special fondness:

Le Feu by Henri Barbusse (1916). The first prose account to tell what the First World War was really like. Called Under Fire in English.

No Cloak, No Dagger (1960) by Benjamin Cowburn. The best of memoirs by a Special Operations Executive agent. Tough, laconic, humbling.

The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (1948) by Jim Corbett. Children's/teenage book with the best-ever title. Talk about tethered goats...

The House on Moon Lake (1987) by Francesca Duranti. A quite wonderful Italian novel. Calvino meets Penelope Fitzgerald.

The Rack (1958) by A.E. Ellis. Moving novel set in a TB sanatorium.

A Child Possessed (1964) by R.C.Hutchinson. Hutchinson's Russian-influenced novels attempted to be full-scale 19th-century masterpieces. This comes as near as any.

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) by Julian Jaynes. Argues that all humans heard voices before they became fully conscious. Almost certainly wrong, but dazzling, erudite, life-changing. You will never see Homer, the Bible or the Koran in the same light again.

Vichy France (1972) by Robert Paxton. A model of how to write history from original documents, published when no French historian would touch this subject. For that reason, the bibliography is non-existent. There was literally nothing else.

Endless Love (1979) by Scott Spencer. Teenage love in Chicago, 1967. And oddball novel, florid, but undeniably powerful.

Self-Consciousness (1989) by John Updike. Do you sometimes find the novels a bit wordy? These essays have all the tenderness and love of life, but a concentrated pathos and depth.

Marcel Proust (1959) by George Painter. The literary biography for people who don't like lit biog. Works because, for once, the subject's novel was “based on real life”, and because Painter's glorious style is Proust's own.

Why Freud Was Wrong (1995) by Richard Webster. Patient, logical, lucid, exhaustive, and - as far as early “hysterical” Freud at least is concerned - conclusive.

Collected Short Stories (2001) by Richard Yates. There is about to be a Yates bonanza in films, so make sure you read the stories first. There is a world in each one.

PS There was a children's book I wanted to include, but I didn't know the title. It was about an Arab man and his camel, published in about 1959, called something like The Twelve Miracles of Abu Hamid. The 13th miracle was that the camel spoke. If anyone can tell me what it was called, please send an e-mail to my website: info@sebastianfaulks.com.

Sebastian Faulks's most recent novel Engleby has just been published in Vintage paperback

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