I first saw this list on Bookeywookey’s blog, who found it on Pages Turned. It’s taken from the Times. I don’t necessarily agree that these are the 50 greatest and I haven’t heard of some of them. The authors I’ve read are shown in bold.

1. Philip Larkin
2. George Orwell
3. William Golding
4. Ted Hughes
5. Doris Lessing
6. J R R Tolkien
7. V S Naipaul
8. Muriel Spark
9. Kingsley Amis
10. Angela Carter
11. C S Lewis
12. Iris Murdoch
13. Salman Rushdie
14. Ian Fleming
15. Jan Morris
16. Roald Dahl
17. Anthony Burgess
18. Mervyn Peake
19. Martin Amis
20. Anthony Powell
21. Alan Sillitoe
22. John Le Carre
23. Penelope Fitzgerald
24. Phillipa Pearce
25. Barbara Pym
26. Beryl Bainbridge
27. J G Ballard
28. Alan Garner
29. Alasdair Grey
30. John Fowles
31. Derek Walcott
32. Kazuo Ishiguro
33. Anita Brookner
34. A S Byatt
35. Ian McEwan
36. Geoffrey Hill
37. Hanif Kureshi
38. Iain Banks
39. George Mackay Brown
40. A J P Taylor
41. Isaiah Berlin
42. J K Rowling
43. Philip Pullman
44. Julian Barnes
45. Colin Thubron
46. Bruce Chatwin
47. Alice Oswald
48. Benjamin Zephaniah
49. Rosemary Sutcliffe
50. Michael Moorcock

I’ve been impressed by the reading plans I’ve seen on other people’s blogs and thought I would do one too. Then I had second thoughts. I had had enough of plans when I worked in local government – plans for everything, with a “Golden Thread” running from a Corporate Plan through Service Plans, Departmental Plans, Group Plans, Team Plans to your very own Personal Development Plan. There were people who made plans of the plans. So I’m not going to do it for my reading.

I have lots of unread books. I see a book and think that looks good, so I’ll buy or borrow it or add it to an ever-growing list. So this year my “plan” is to choose books to read from the books I own, but as I know that if I did make a proper plan resistance would set in and I wouldn’t want to stick to it, I will be “flexible” (yes another buzz-word from work – you must be adaptable and change when necessary) and borrow or buy any other books if the fancy takes me.