Alex Clark writes that The Lord of the Rings “is, strictly speaking, a trilogy” (Move over Middlemarch! Readers’ top 100 novels, 6 June). Strictly speaking, it isn’t a trilogy but a single work of fiction originally published in three volumes for practical reasons. None of the three volumes can stand alone. Compare, for example, the late David Lodge’s Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work – a proper (and still sharply entertaining) “campus” trilogy.
Prof Chris Walsh
Hawarden, Flintshire
• Critics should read Bleak House in full before condemning it as miserable: the demise of Mr Krook by spontaneous human combustion must be one of the most darkly hilarious scenes in 19th-century literature, concluding with an appropriate warning from Dickens for contemporary corrupt administrations.
Noel Kavanagh
Cambridge
• I was delighted to see my favourite author, Larry McMurtry, enter the list of your readers’ top 100 novels at No 52. I first saw Lonesome Dove on TV and felt compelled to read the book – an epic as wild and sprawling as the west itself. McMurtry is underestimated outside the US, yet displays a compassion for human frailty equal to Dickens at his best. I have since read most of his westerns. Lonesome Dove is his finest.
Sue Jackson
Neston, Cheshire
• You have been deluged by comments regarding your recent 100-greatest-novels polls, but I shall add: on either list, where is Treasure Island? Good money says most of the writers and readers surveyed owe their love of literature, and inspiration to write, in small or very large part to Robert Louis Stevenson.
Dan Thisdell
Egham, Surrey
• Last night I dreamed I went to the 1930s again. Looking at the Guardian readers’ top 100 novels of all time, I wondered if I had – just 26 books by women and no authors from Africa.
Laura Orchard
Yarnton, Oxfordshire
• Have you considered doing a top 100 books for teenagers and another for younger children. Aren’t they what the National Year of Reading 2026 is about?
Gaverne Bennett
Walthamstow, London
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