He also commented on purposeful exclusions owing to his personal preference, such as books by Elizabeth Gaskell, Norman Mailer, Kingsley Amis, John Fowles, Walter Scott and Iris Murdoch, the latter of which had caused a surge of controversy in the disclusion of The Black Prince.
He aroused controversy again, however, in, at the end of this article, including a list of his opinion of the ten greatest novels of all: Emma, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, The Rainbow, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and The Great Gatsby.
Many complained of there being only nine books- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759), The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891); Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897), Ulysses by James Joyce (1922), Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938), At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939), The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948) and Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990).
Claire Armistead compiled complaints of no works by these authors: Edna O'Brien, William Trevor, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, David Lodge, Maria Edgeworth, J. G. Farrell and Sheridan le Fanu.
The fourth was Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, fifth, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, then Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, followed by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, then Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, nine with J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, concluding the top ten with Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer, eleventh being J.K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, twelfth, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books, thirteenth, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein, penultimately Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and finally, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.