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  Click here for the list of the best 100 books

  In Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë created the best lovers in all literature, don’t you agree? Or perhaps you prefer E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Or Byron’s Don Juan. OK, that’s a tricky one. How about the best villains? Dostoyevsky or Conrad? Or Ian Fleming? Or what about the best laughs? Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers or Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim? These debates are set to rage across dinner tables now that Penguin Classics has compiled a list of the 100 best books yet written.

  The iconic little black books are 60 years old. In the 1930s E. V. Rieu, an educational publisher who spent his evenings translating Homer for his own amusement, suggested to Allen Lane, founder of the new Penguin imprint, that he publish his translation of The Odyssey. Lane, against the counsel of colleagues, agreed and in 1946 Rieu’s version became the first Penguin Classic. It has sold five million copies and the classics list, including modern classics (books written since the Second World World) runs to some 1,400 titles. Tens of millions have been sold.

  We love a classic. Publishing classics is a booming and cut-throat business. Adam Freudenheim, publisher of Penguin Classics, says that with a market flooded with 17,000 new titles each month “people are looking for books they can rely on for a good read”. New classics are added every year, usually works that have never appeared in English. A classic, says Freudenheim, “has stood the test of time and has literary merit. There has to be that something special”.

  It’s a subjective list. There will be howls of outrage at missing favourites. There is no Shakespeare because Penguin has a separate imprint for the Bard and in any case how could the rest of the literary canon compete?

  Thirty seven of the authors on the list are British, 20 American, nine French and six Russian. Dickens, with four novels, appears more than anyone else. Abridged passages from books in eight of the categories appear here. Now, start counting how many you have read — and let the arguments commence . . .

  EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOKS SELECTED BY THE TIMES

  THE BEST LOVERS

  Wuthering Heights
  Emily Brontë

  (Heathcliff visits Catherine as she lies seriously ill)

  He neither spoke, nor loosed his hold, for some five minutes, during which period he bestowed more kisses than ever he gave in his life before, I dare say; but then my mistress had kissed him first, and I plainly saw that he could hardly bear, for downright agony, to look into her face! The same conviction had stricken him as me, from the instant he beheld her, that there was no prospect of ultimate recovery there — she was fated, sure to die.

  “Oh, Cathy! Oh my life! how can I bear it?” was the first sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise his despair. And now he stared at her so earnestly that I thought the very intensity of his gaze would bring tears into his eyes; but they burned with anguish, they did not melt . . .

  “I wish I could hold you,” she continued, bitterly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shoudn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me — will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, ‘That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since — my children are dearer to me than she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them!’ Will you say so Heathcliff?”

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