What do you think is the best fiction book of all time?

Gone with the Wind. I am a southern girl, and I love to read about the lifestyles and loves of those bygone days. I am a reader, will read anything and everything. But will usually read a book only once. Gone with the Wind, however, I have read over and over again, since I was 14 years old. It truly draws you into the story, makes you believe that you were right there, experiencing it right along with the great Scarlet O'Hara.

Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" is the novel that, more than any other I have read, enscapsulates the traumas of being a human being on the planet in the twentieth century. Roth achieves this by examining the century in a country where those problems have found their sharpest expression: the US, at a time when they were last at their most explosive: the 1960s.

I've never been to America and I wasn't even born when this novel is set, but I think anyone of any age can relate to it, and that's really the first criterion for a great and powerful novel.

I think it meets the other criteria as well. These are best summarised by my favourite art critic, David Walsh of the wsws. He writes mostly about film, and I've always thought it a shame he didn't have more opportunity to write about literature.

The qualities I look for and which I think are exemplified in "American Pastoral":

Seriousness about human affairs

Compassion and a kind of intellectual or moral rigor

It must move and delight

It must reveal something about social reality in an original and perhaps disturbing manner

More than mere beauty, it must have an incandescence to it. It must provide inspired moments at which the pettiness and routine of everyday life fall away and the reader is able to grasp in mind and body some grains of absolute truth about the human condition.

These factors are important because this sort of art, besides being beautiful and moving, contributes to the cause of social progress.

I would have to say Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Of course you may be thinking everyone was going to put that. But if you think about it, when it comes to writing a series, an author has to make the first book so damn good that it grasp the attention of the readers and makes them want to come back for more.

If it wasn't for the first HP book being so great, the others would have taken much longer to get the attention they deserve. For instance The Lord of The Rings took years after Tolkin's death to get the much deserved attention that it is now getting.

Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner. It's completely unique in terms of style. It deals with the darkest parts of human nature and does not gloss over the evils of racial prejudice in the American South. The clues and details are revealed at exactly the right moments. It's a piece of fiction that could not have been crafted by any other author, living or dead, with such mastery. The prose is difficult, frustrating, and labyrinthine, but this is a novel that truly matters.

I could also make an impassioned argument for RPW's "All the King's Men," but you said we had to pick just one.

Mallius Malifaricum...or the Witches Hammer...it started the Inquisition. This book informed people how to question and torture and kill Witches...we know what follows...the chain of events which funded Columbus voyage to find a spice route and caused the extermination of millions in the new world...yea I think that book is probably the best fiction book of all time because its ripples continue to have effect. And after all isn't that what good literature does...cause effect

Harry Potter Series

Best is a fairly subjective decision. I think I'll suggest a book that has been around, has staying power and that I still enjoy - The Count of Monte Cristo. May not be the best written, but it's a darn fine read.

Huckleberry Finn (you should read it every 10 years)

Paradise Lost (though it can be like drinking molasses right out of the bottle)

Red Storm Rising (any book by Tom Clancy, really)

Rikki Tikki tavi

My name should give this one away - Still Life With Woodpecker - Tom Robbins - Philosophy's, humor, sex..all in one book.