Dostoevsky, Quevedo, and Borges Dominate Best Books Lists

Dostoevsky and Quevedo Top Best Books Lists

Ask readers on a forum about the best books of their lives. You expect variety, unique tastes, rarities. You get a canon. Dostoevsky leads the pack in repeat mentions—The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov—trinc by Don Quixote, Quevedo's El Buscón, Borges, and The Divine Comedy. The paradox is subtle: the more personal the list claims to be, the more it resembles your neighbor's.

Add to this an unwritten rule. Almost no one lists "the ten best books in history." They list "the ones that most impacted me." The distinction is significant: it turns critical judgment into autobiography.

Why Personal Lists End Up Looking Alike

The consensus is almost unanimous. One reader makes it clear: the list isn't critical or objective; it's what one always recommends and returns to. Accepting that premise, the result ceases to be a podium and becomes a biography. And yet, everyone agrees.

Regarding the responses, Dostoevsky appears through three different doors, Quevedo with El Buscón through four, and Don Quixote, Borges, and The Divine Comedy make a double appearance. Those who boast of unique taste end up repeating their neighbor's. Another reader voices the underlying doubt: reading something at 12 is not the same as reading it at 50. Some lists refer to high school or college readings, and that detail contaminates any comparison.

The List That Smells of Imposture: Posturing Also Creeps In

Not everything is literary sincerity. One of the most debated selections—attributed to a public figure—starts with Lope de Vega's Sonnets and includes no other verse or title from before the 19th century. To the person who compared it, the whole thing felt off: it seemed like a list to look good, not a list of read books.

The suspicion grew upon finding a completely different previous selection by the same person: detective novels and commercial bestsellers. Hence the verdict of another reader: a "fake 17-euro bill." No one can prove what someone has read, but the detail portrays a vice of the era: culture as a showcase.

"The Novel Is Overrated": Those Who Break the Canon

Against classical consensus, a current opens fire against the genre itself. The novel, it argues, is overrated in the West, and some successful authors who have become sacred cows do not stand up to rereading. It's an explicit elitism that champions the essay, mysticism, and treatises—from Guénon to Proust—and dismisses everything else.

The counterpoint comes with names that are falling out of favor. Salinger, with The Catcher in the Rye, provokes rejection even among those who read it at the supposedly appropriate age. Houellebecq divides opinion: some defend him as essential, others dismiss him as a passing fad.

From Thermomix to Mortadelo: Humor as a Thermometer

No serious list survives without its dose of humor. The nine volumes of Mortadelo y Filemón, the Thermomix manual, and the complete works of Corin Tellado appear as candidates for the podium. The joke corrects: it reminds us that the canon is a convention and that laughing at it is the most honest way to respect it.

And a curiosity that justifies the effort. In the first English translation of Don Quixote—first part in 1612, complete in 1620, still in Cervantes's lifetime—Sancho's proverb "de noche todos los gatos son pardos" (at night all cats are grey) became and in the night Joan is as good as my lady. Proverbs, like canons, travel and become distorted.

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The uncomfortable fact remains: readers who believe they are independent repeat the same dead authors. Dostoevsky, Quevedo, Borges. If taste is so personal, why is the result so gregarious?