Were our readers right to put Lord of the Rings above Middlemarch? What was missing from our list? Has anyone read the whole 100 … ?Liese Spencer, our joint head of books, and non-fiction editor David Shariatmadari are live now to discuss the huge reaction to our 100 greatest novels list, our readers’ choices of the 100 best – and any other burning questions you may have about what to read nextNamdam asks: Four Virginia Woolf novels in the top hundred of all time defies some belief. There are 98 novels better than Catch-22? I dispute that. I personally don’t think there are any. It caught me as a teenager and supplied a lifetime of pleasure from reading. I am surely not alone. I guess the greatest story ever told doesn’t qualify as a novel. Fair enough. So no Iliad. Or Odyssey.Speaking of adventures that take forever (although not quite 10 years): War and Peace, Anna Karenina, À la recherchu and Ulysses all in the top seven? I guess there is no requirement to be choate … but I feel therefore that this is signifying the achievement rather than enjoyment.Liese: You’re in good company loving Catch-22 which was voted one of the top 100 novels of all time by our fiction editor Justine Jordan. Interestingly it was catapulted up the list by readers who put it at (joint) number 8 on their top 100 … and yes the Iliad and the Odyssey didn’t qualify as they’re epic poems.I voted for Mrs Dalloway but was also surprised by Woolf’s strong showing – but that’s how the votes fell! There are definitely some challenging reads in the top 10 but I think many of the critics and authors who voted for them would argue that as well as reflecting some dazzling literary achievements they are also books that reward the (quite significant) work of reading … Something readers seem to agree with as Ulysses and Anna Karenina also placed pretty highly in the readers’ top 100, just outside the top 10. At our Guardian Live event novelist Guy Gunaratne said that having struggled to take it on solo he really enjoyed reading Ulysses as part of an online group. I think there are a few places that do read-alongs around Boomsday, but he recommends the Friends of Shakespeare and co. podcast.David: So many to choose from! Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning was an early one, with its magic spells and the idea of the enchanted version of reality that only the child protagonist has access to. A little later on Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy introduced me to the darker elements of storytelling. I also remember being a bit obsessed by Leon Garfield’s historical fiction for children, including The Pleasure Garden and The Sound of Coaches. But probably the strongest very early influences were the Moomin books, particularly Comet in Moominland which my mum read to me at bedtime. That was probably the first time I remember being desperate to know what happened next – a very basic lesson in the power of narrative. Continue reading...