#4 Enigma by Robert Harris

Robert Harris' most famous novel may be Fatherland, an alternative history in which the Nazis won the war, but Enigma comes a close second. Written in 1992 and adapted into a film in 2001 Enigma depicts the efforts of mathematicians trying to break the German Enigma code against the backdrop of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Harris is a political journalist and it shows in his writing. His prose is relaxed yet he has an eye for exact descriptions, a few telling details which bring a character or scene to life. Enigma is told through the eyes of Tom Jericho, a brilliant young crypto-analyst worked to exhaustion in the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. He returns to find the woman he loved is missing in suspicious circumstances and that the enigma code is still unbreakable. These two obsessions come together and escalate in dramatic circumstances.

Through Jericho's eyes the reader is also quietly shown the realities of wartime Britain - the food rationing, the ill-fitting clothes, the lack of toiletries and cosmetics, the dim and overcrowded trains and the grimness of a winter with little fuel. Although the main theme of the novel is the breaking of enigma, and the toll it took on the men who worked on it, it is the evocations of grim, austere wartime Britain that lingers afterwards.

Read On: Fatherland, Archangel and The Ghost - a political thriller now made into a film starring Ewan MacGregor - all by Robert Harris.

#3 The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett writes madcap, farcical fantasy with his tongue firmly in cheek. The Discworld, a disc carried on the back of four elephants carried along on the back of a giant space turtle called Great A'Tuin is held up as a mirror to our own world and Pratchett spoofs everything from the genres of fantasy and science fiction to Australia, football, academia and Hollywood.

In The Truth, Pratchett turns his attention to journalism. William de Worde is a young man who, along with a eclectic cast of dwarfs, tramps and an obsessive-compulsive vampire, forms the Discworld's first newspaper. He simply finds things out and writes things down but this quickly leads to a whole pile of problems from humorous vegetables that aren't funny to people wanting to kill him.

The Truth is the twenty fifth in the Discworld series but, like all of Pratchett's novels, it is self-contained although established characters including Vetinari, Gaspode and the Watch make frequent cameos.Like all of Pratchett's fare it is bit of an acquired taste but for those who appreciate a good spoof novel then Pratchett is hard to beat.

Read on: There are over thirty Discworld books to choose from now but my particular favourites are Mort, Guards, Guards and The Colour of Magic.

Other farcical fantasies include; Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin; Odds and Gods by Tom Holt; The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde and The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin.

#2 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is one of those books that I suspect a lot of people mean to read but never quite get round to. Much like A Suitable Boy or 1984, a modern classic in other words. I started it on the train up to Aberdeen and the woman next to me confided, somewhat shamefully, that she had started it three times but had never managed to finish it. This did not fill me with optimism.

As Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces the firing squad, the history of his family is told in a series of wandering flashbacks where the Buendia dynasty proliferates like Japanese knotweed. The Buendias do not have a family tree as an unpruned shrubbery and the family relationships are more complicated even than those of the Dingle clan. I suspect I'm not the only one forced to scribble a family tree on a scrap of paper and even then my pen ran out. This is not helped by what I can only describe as Marquez's complete lack of imagination when it came to naming his characters. Three characters are named Arcadio (or some variation thereof) and, ridiculously, Aureliano himself has seventeen sons - all named Aureliano.

Despite these small, if irritating, niggles there is something enchanting about the way Marquez weaves his tale. Magic and realism coexist in a sort of rough-and-tumble Eden and fantastic tales of talking to ghosts and dabbling in alchemy are interwoven with more mundane life as the Buendias marry, cook, gossip and feud. Even though I couldn't always work out who a character was or how he related to the rest of the family I was carried away in Marquez's bewitching tale and deposited unwillingly, if slightly bemused, at the end.

Read On: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Similar tales of magical realism include: Shame by Salman Rushdie; Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes; The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.

#1 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

In the 1860s a new literary genre emerged. Shocking and too much to take for some (one critic described the genre as 'unspeakably disgusting') the sensation novel peered beneath the genteel and eminently respectable veneer of Victorian life to to reveal a world full of bigamy, madness, murder and violence.

Wilkie Collins was the best known author of this shocking new literary genre. The Moonstone is an elaborate tale of mystery and intrigue centred around a fabulous diamond, looted from a Hindu shrine, and the curse it brings on those in possession of it. The Moonstone contains all the essential ingredients of Victorian sensationalist fiction. Collins was addicted to laudanum and opium weaves its way through the narrative alongside the Victorian obsessions with India, crime and the dark arts.

Arguably in The Moonstone Collins created the first whodunit, a genre in which authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers would make their names. It is in this book that Collins establishes many of the conventions of the English detective novel; a country house setting, a large number of loosely related suspects (all with secrets of their own), a renowned detective and, of course, liberal amounts of red herrings.

I had originally started to read a battered paperback copy that my dad bought secondhand in 1970 but as it was only held together with forty year old sellotape I abandoned it amid fears it would disintegrate completely before I could finish it. Instead I opted for a more robust hardback I found in the library which probably owes its good condition to lack of reading than good care.

Shame really as I really enjoyed this book. It may have been scandalous for the Victorians but for the C.S.I. generation it's pretty tame fare. The appeal of the book, to me anyway, is the tight plotting and the evocative picture it creates, completely unintentionally, of Victorian England.

Read On: No Name by Wilkie Collins

Other works of Victorian sensationalist fiction include; Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; Bleak House by Charles Dickens; and Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu.

Recently the Guardian published a list of '1,000 Novels You Must Read'. As a person who spends more time with her nose in a book than is good for the eyesight I eagerly looked through to see just how many of the 1,000 great works of literature I had read.

The shameful answer? Thirty one.

Upto that point I had always considered myself a well-read person. Turns out that while I have read a lot of books, the books I read are not the sorts of great literature that make up the Guardian's list.

So here's my challenge. To stop such embarrassment occuring again (and partly because I cannot resist a challenge) I downloaded the Guardian's list and set myself the task of reading every single last one of them.

1,000 novels? How hard can it be?