The question I dread the most — along with “What football team do you support?” and “You didn’t put my new lamb’s-wool jumper in the wash, did you?” — is “What’s your favourite book?”

My mind immediately goes blank. I stall for time. “What’s yours?” I ask, hoping my interrogator will launch into a long, discursive soliloquy. And if that doesn’t work, a desperate diversion: “Oh my God, is that Lily Allen /Dominic West/the singer from Chumbawamba?”

Choosing one favourite is a nearimpossible task. So it’s admirable that Times readers have responded to the NovelList challenge with such courage and conviction: to mark the 60th birthday of The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, they have voted online, in their hundreds, for their most-loved novel of the past 60 years — the only other criterion being that it has to be published in English.

The Top 20 is a fascinating snapshot of modern fiction. Two days after the Booker prize has been won by a 650-page novel about a Tudor statesman (Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall), we are reminded that our passions for both historical fiction — The Leopard, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Atonement, Birdsong — and doorstoppingly hefty novels — The Lord of the Rings, The Secret History, A Prayer for Owen Meany — are not new. Often the two combine, as in the grand, Russian civil war-set romance of Dr Zhivago; the 1,500-page A Suitable Boy, a survey of post-independence India; and The Pillars of the Earth, an intricate story woven around the building of a cathedral in the 12th century.

“Historical fiction” is not the firmest genre: as Hilary Mantel was quick to point out, by the time any novel goes to press, it has become historical. But most “classic” historical fiction shares a rich, immersive quality. Like fantasy (represented on our list by Tolkien and Rowling), it is about “world-building” — presenting the reader with a wholly convincing alternative universe, another age that they can inhabit.

The Pillars of the Earth, a surprising No 2, has that addictive, lived-in quality. The NovelList voter Eileen Shapiro calls it: “The most engaging novel I’ve ever read . . . When I finished it, I went through withdrawal! I kept wanting to know what the characters were doing now.”

There are undisputed classics on the list, including school-syllabus stalwarts To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22 and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The first two have a head start: they hook us in as children or teenagers, when we’re amazed to read something that captures our tangled feelings about growing up. Rereading them now, do they speak to you as urgently? I’m not sure. Voter Carole Cuthbertson, though, is: “I never tire of Mockingbird: it teaches us so many things about human nature, childhood, parenting, justice and prejudice.” The Deep South of the 1930s might be unrecognisable but, she argues, Lee’s themes are just as applicable now.

The oldest book on the list — Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949 — is ironically also the most prescient. Both Orwell and Joseph Heller, in their tales of struggle against unthinking, inhuman bureaucracy, seem particularly apposite in our box-ticking, ID-card-bearing society.

Oddly, we have old books (1949-68) and new books (1989-2009) but only two (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969, and Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988) in the middle 20 years. What happened in the Seventies and Eighties? Was there a dearth of great fiction? Just outside the Top 20, we have votes for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty (1990) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). And there were plenty of other major writers at work.

So why don’t they feature on the list? Perhaps it’s that we’re happy to give older authors “classic” status, and we’re still in love with recent novels such as The Time Traveller’s Wife and The Road. Books from 20 or 30 years ago, being neither one thing nor the other, end up in a no man’s land.

Translated fiction is also in short supply, but given that only 3 per cent of books published in the UK are in translation (it’s closer to 30 per cent in mainland Europe), 4 out of 20 on our list is pretty good.

Dan Brown’s Law states that we value story over style, but actually our top 20 show that both play their part. There are great narratives, many of which have had blockbuster movie adaptations. But there are also tricky, postmodern ones, including those by Márquez, John Fowles and Audrey Niffenegger. And then there are novels such as Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye, where plot is secondary to the voice of the narrator, who seems to spring, fully formed, off the page and into your head.

However you align these books, they offer different pleasures: the mountains of Mordor; the streets of Maycomb; Humbert’s nymphets; Holden’s phonies. I, for one, am too greedy to choose. I want them all.

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