Despite shortening attention spans, people are “still reading novels”, said the writer Elif Shafak at a panel event on the Guardian’s list of the 100 best novels ever published in English, which was unveiled last week.
“The faster this world spins, the deeper our need to slow down,” she continued. “We are so tired of this rush, of this bombardment of information.”
The Guardian’s landmark poll – which saw more than 170 authors, critics and academics vote on the best novels of all time – aimed to find “novels that will speak to new readers” amid the reading crisis, said Guardian editor Katharine Viner.
Shafak was joined by the writers Kate Mosse, Blake Morrison and Guy Gunaratne at an event at Conway Hall in London, chaired by Guardian chief books writer Lisa Allardice.
Part of the decline in reading for pleasure comes down to “snobbery” around the genres and formats books are consumed in, said Mosse, who co-founded the Women’s prizes. For some, “listening to the story might be more powerful – it’s actually going back to the much older way of storytelling. For other people, they would read on a device. We shouldn’t be judging how people choose to read, or the books they choose to read.”
The Guardian’s list was topped by Middlemarch, and while it featured many 19th and 20th-century classics, newer novels including The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante also made the cut.
Asked why older titles are finding popularity among young people, Mosse said that such books “contain a wisdom that is not about the endless revolving door that we live in now”.
“This is a time of transition and it’s a very bewildering moment,” said Shafak. “We’re dealing with so many crises. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re focusing more on 19th-century literature unknowingly. Most of the problems that we are dealing with today are actually still the repercussions, the ramifications of the 19th century.”
Middlemarch, which is set between 1829 and 1832, is “full of rupture”, said Gunaratne – “the Reform Act, railways, the beginning of modern medicine” – but George Eliot “allows you to enter that world of crises and find some consolation”.
Asked what book they would choose if they could force all politicians to read one, Gunaratne picked the Seasonal Quartet by Ali Smith, while Shafak picked the Epic of Gilgamesh. If Trump read it, “he would call Gilgamesh a loser”, she said.
“Andy Burnham’s life was changed by reading the poet Tony Harrison,” said Morrison. “So it does sometimes happen that politicians read.”
The list features more women – 36 – than previous iterations of the project (21 in 2015 and 16 in 2003). Yet, the 2026 list still has “an enormous debt to the books that are studied” at school and university, said Mosse, who highlighted the discrepancy in books by men and women studied at school: recent data published by End Sexism in Schools showed that 5% of GCSE students studied a novel or play by a female author in 2024, with 76% studying An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley.
Shafak said that she was happy to see Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert on the list, as an example of a man writing about women’s experiences. She added that while we are living “in a world in which we’re constantly being pushed into boxes, and expected to remain in those boxes once and for all,” literature “dismantles those boxes, completely dismantles those dualities”.
