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Globe Books' year-long foray into the Quixotic venture of choosing the 50 greatest books of all time came to an end Dec. 20 with Colm Toibin writing on Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. Now, three of the distinguished panel of four judges, Charlotte Gray, A. L. Kennedy and André Alexis, describe their experiences.

BY ANDRÉ ALEXIS

My first, and last, thought is that it is, strictly speaking, impossible to decide what the 50 greatest books have been. What criteria do you use? If it's influence, then the Bible (or maybe Newton's Principia Mathematica) wins hands down. If it's beauty ... well, I'd go for Dante or Proust or Yasunari Kawabata. The value of these exercises, if they have value, is in generating discussion. Also, although the books chosen will be old (you can't begin to know a book's worth until 100 years after its publication, I think), there is always the possibility you will send someone to a book that will stay with him or her forever.

This jury experience was almost entirely without conflict. We jurors were never in a room together, so there was no infighting. (The down side: I wouldn't know A. L. Kennedy if she bit me. Not that she would.) Nor were there many books I couldn't stand, though I had objections to a few. For the record: I think Lolita is too young for inclusion (not to mention Written to within an inch of its life), as are Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (great book), Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (ditto), Borges's Ficciones (one of my favourites on the list) and Kafka's Collected Stories (ditto). Also for the record, here are the books I haven't read on our list: Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, The Koran, Principia Mathematica, half of Freud's entertaining but (to me) interminable Interpretation of Dreams, half of Galileo's Starry Messenger and Other Dialogues, and most of Wollenstonecraft's Vindication (dreary beyond measure). I trusted the opinions of the other jurors or knew, having read some history, the extent of the influence of work by, say, Newton or Galileo.

There are a number of books I might have chosen (or that I pushed for) that did not make the list: Samuel Beckett's Trilogy ( Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable); Voltaire's Candide; Spinoza's Ethics; Lao Tze's Tao Te Ching; Aeschylus's Oresteia (I still remember a line spoken by one of the furies: "the reek of human blood … it's laughter to my heart."); Kawabata's Snow Country (despite its youth); Hemingway's Collected Stories (ditto); Descartes's Discourse on Method; Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations; Stendhal's The Red and the Black.

And then there are Canadian books. We're such a young country and so little of our great writing has been around for a hundred years, the only thing to do is list books one thinks might still be around (i.e., still the subject of interested conversation) in a century. Here are, in no particular order, a few I might choose for a short list, most of them published in my lifetime: Hubert Aquin's Prochaine Episode; Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel; Leonard Cohen's Stranger Music; Michael Ondaatje's Billy the Kid and Running in the Family; David Adams Richards (one of the early novels, we'd have to argue about which); Christian Bök's Eunoia; Michel Temblay's Les Belle Soeurs; Margaret Avison's Dumbfounding/Winter Sun; Russell Smith's Muriella Pent; Alice Munro's Collected Stories; Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (a difficult read, only slightly less dull than The Gutenberg Galaxy, but of a cultural moment); Northrop Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism; Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (but unavoidable for what it says about 20th century politics and, when you think of it, the book most likely to cause arguments for some time to come and so: the only Canadian book about whose future I feel utterly certain).

Maybe the biggest disappointment about these lists is in the dealing with registers. You can't (or I can't) in good faith compare The Three Musketeers to Homer, nor Poe to Shakespeare. Dumas and Poe are not good enough as writers. Their characterizations are two-dimensional, stock. Their storytelling is all melodrama and surprise. But the pleasure I've had as a reader, part of the sheer magic of reading, come from "impure" sources.

So here are 10 "flawed" or "minor" works I could not or would not live without, for the pleasure they've given me: Fermina Marquez, by Valery Larbaud; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K Dick; The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas; The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler; Red Harvest, by Dashiel Hammet; The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham; The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov; Destination: Moon (A Tintin book), by Hergé; Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons; Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan.

There. And, if such a thing is ever attempted, I'd gladly sit on a jury to choose the 50 worst books ever written. The arguments would keep you happy and upset for months.

BY CHARLOTTE GRAY

I was flattered to be asked to join the panel, but immediately besieged by doubts. What does "Great" mean? Is this "Great" as in influential ( Das Kapital) or "Great" as in literary value ( Pride and Prejudice)? Our choices would reflect our personal tastes, just as judges' choices for literary awards do, but did I have the depth of reading, let alone character, required for such a task?

The first challenge was to compile my list of 50 great books, the second to write a commentary on one book. A year ago, I stared at a blank screen for a while, then Googled "Great Books." Over 42-million sites popped up, but I reminded myself this was Great Books, not Great Sites. After ignoring sites with names like "Great Books to Build Your Character" and glancing at a couple of university curricula suggestions, I drew up my list. It included both important texts, and also books that had had a profound impact on me.

The panelists then compared lists. Fewer books cropped up on all four lists (such as The Wealth of Nations) than I had expected. I wasn't surprised that my fellow panelists nixed my suggestion of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard (included to assuage a hint of guilt.) But I was taken aback when both Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians were axed. I was unable to convince my colleagues that these books reshaped their genres, besides being more accessible than a couple of our final choices ( The Mahabharata, anyone?) Bloomsbury, I guess, now has as much traction as the Chicago School of Neo-cons.

Each Saturday, I looked forward to reading the essays, the best of which sparkled with both emotional response and cerebral reflection. Some of the pairings were inspired — Joan Thomas on Pride and Prejudice, Colm Toibin on The Portrait of a Lady. On several occasions, I found myself rediscovering a book read years ago, such as The Interpretation of Dreams. We were still negotiating the final list even as the obvious titles were being ticked off. And I still hadn't written my essay.

By week 40, I was getting antsy because so far we had featured only three women authors — George Eliot, Rachel Carson, Jane Austen. The editor had pointed out in an on-line discussion that women didn't really get into the literary act until relatively recently, and I acknowledged that many of the commentaries were by women. But the list risked being a gallery of the usual suspects — good-for-you, required-reading multi-syllabic classics ( The Decameron, Gilgamesh, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Wittgenstein's Tractatus).

And dancing round the margins were sweet little girls and helpless creatures (Bovary, Lolita, Alice… I'll admit we missed Tess and Anna K.) I sent my fellow-panelists a querulous note explaining that I wanted to write about a book penned by a woman. "I am not making this point to be politically correct, but because I do not see me and my reading tastes completely reflected in the list so far." Our Great Books looked too like the kind of history syllabus taught half a century ago — all wars and laws, chaps and maps — that had nearly put me off history for life.

I also deplored the absence of a single Canadian book on the list — nothing by Munro, Taylor, Atwood, McLuhan or Richler. These authors all have international reputations: did our disregard for them spring from the hopeless Canadian impulse towards self-effacement?

"Definite food for thought here," replied the editor, proving once again the strength of such lists: They force us to make choices. In the end, I was happy to write about A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wolstonecraft, a woman who had as much time for "self-effacement" as she had for sweet helplessness.

Looking at the final list, I can see that we chose to define "greatest" as "most influential." We included three of the world's most important religious texts, but fewer great reads than I had hoped for (where was Midnight's Children?), fewer of my sentimental favourites, such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and no surprises. We never managed to shoehorn a Canadian book into the pantheon. So perhaps The Globe's next challenge is the Fifty Greatest Canadian Books. But our list does capture 50 great examples of the world's greatest books.

BY A. L. KENNEDY

I massively enjoyed my experience of working on The Globe's list. This isn't because I'm entirely in favour of lists as a phenomenon per se — and trying to decide impossibilities such as whether Shakespeare should be represented by Hamlet or King Lear gave me something approaching a mild migraine — but through it all I was sustained by the passion of the other judges, their depth of knowledge and an opportunity to add titles to my personal list of books unread and to re-examine my own passion for reading.

Lists, prizes, competitions: They are all — at a certain level — superfluous, if not plain silly, but they can represent a moment when we get to sit down and remember the voices we have loved, the first time we met ideas that have penetrated so deeply they have helped to make us who we are. They can offer an opportunity to catch a taste of those early years when a reader discovers how magnificent it is to be inhabited by another mind, to be led into the territory of miracles, dreams, prayers, to rush towards the end of a volume, knowing how peculiarly heart-breaking it will be when we have to leave it and yet being unable to stop, unable to leave that particularly intimate company we are given by authors living, dead, long gone, translated, archaic, arcane, funny, disturbing, challenging, companionable — the marvellous din of humanity singing its own existence and then going beyond that, making something out of nothing, out of Shakespeare's airy nothings.

I remembered throwing my first anthology of Raymond Carver stories across my student bedroom because his delicacy of construction and his silences just left me delighted and bewildered. (I picked it up again immediately and still have it.) I remembered first approaching Mario Vargas Llosa and the other magic realists and learning that the imagination could go to these places, too — could acknowledge very real fantasies, very fictional realities. I remembered Muriel Spark and R. L. Stevenson making my gums hurt with their economy, humour and righteous insight. I remembered the roaring impact of the King James Bible from a Scottish pulpit. I remembered the intelligence, kindness and beauty of Chekhov's letters, the stark insights of Machiavelli, the strangeness of the Mabinogion and Gilgamesh and one long summer spent with nothing but a dog-eared copy of Hamlet to read — one of the best summers I've had.

I hope, if nothing else, that readers coming across the list can find a little of the love and joy that went into it and can compare it with their own, or start their own. Reading brings us treasures, freedoms and beauties limited only by humanity's ability to express them and — when we're at our best — that's really no limit at all.