In the eyes of the great voting public, Terry Pratchett ranks alongside Charles Dickens in terms of the number of favourite books he has written. But before Harry Potter fans begin beating their quidditch sticks, they should note that, as a proportion of output, JK Rowling has outstripped everyone.

Apart from the one-book wonders, such as Harper Lee (whose To Kill a Mockingbird is duly nominated), no other author has arrived in the top 100 flanked by their entire oeuvre.

It is all in the way you cut it. Pratchett embodies three principles of this latest list: he is English; he is prolific - his Discworld series alone, to which four of his five nominations belong, numbers nearly 30 titles; and he has that sought-after crossover appeal. Though Discworld is not specifically marketed to children, it appeals to teenagers as much as it does to adults.

This, of course, is not the only list to appear in the last week. The Orange top 50 novels by women, also assembled through public vote, was published on Monday. Some duplicates are predictable - Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Louisa May Alcott - but, whereas for Orange purposes, it paid to be dead and sparing in output, the Big Read's voters generally like their authors to be alive and churning them out.

Children's authors do particularly well: Jacqueline Wilson might not be as fine a prose stylist at Philip Pullman, but she has a devoted voting public of girls: her four nominations put her one ahead of Pullman, whose His Dark Materials is, strictly speaking, three books.

Whereas the Orange 50 was dominated by reading group choices and set texts, this is a Watch With Mother list: nostalgic, populist, and with a very English eccentricity. What other institution could place Ken Follett next to Fyodor Dostoevsky? The answer, sadly, is: a library near you.

· Claire Armitstead is the Guardian's literary editor