It is perhaps the ultimate reading list, a series of recommended texts from more than 100 of the leading authors and writers in the world.

If you ever wanted to know what Norman Mailer, Ian Rankin, Stephen King or Tom Wolfe read in their spare time between writing best-selling novels, a survey of authors' favourite reads has revealed their personal top 10 books.

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy leads the lists, with Anna Karenina chosen as the favourite book overall, followed by Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Vladimir Nabo-kov's Lolita and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Shakespeare was the highest-rated British author, coming sixth in the overall list with Hamlet, while the only female author in the top 10 was George Eliot, with Middlemarch.

In total, 125 authors picked 544 titles, although it may be some surprise to the literary world that the novel often accepted to be the greatest in the English language, James Joyce's Ullysses, did not make it into the top 10 overall - it appears at number 14, beneath Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Of the British writers consulted for the survey - published on March 1 by WW Norton, and simply called The Top Ten - Margaret Drabble chose Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare as her favourite work, Julian Barnes picked Madame Bovary and Kate Atkinson named Persuasion by Jane Austen.

Three Scottish authors were asked for their top 10 and their lists each reflect the author's character.

Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the Botswanan novels beginning with The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, chose Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as his favourite book, followed by War and Peace.

Also in his list is the African-themed Cry, the Beloved Country and Kidnapped, by RL Stevenson.

Ian Rankin, creator of the Inspector Rebus series of detective stories, chose King Lear by Shakespeare as his number one, Joseph Heller's masterpiece, Catch-22, in second place and Tolstoy's War and Peace at number three. He also found space for Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and RL Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A book by Herman Melville, but not Moby Dick, was chosen by acclaimed Scottish writer and stand-up comedian AL Kennedy as her first choice - The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. She also picked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and Alasdair Gray's Lanark.

Kennedy said of her third choice of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien: "It is that rare and lovely thing - a truly hallucinatory novel, shot through with fierce logic and intellectual rigor.

"It is a lyrical, amoral, funny nightmare, the most disciplined and disturbing product of an interesting writer."

Other choices in the list of authors were more obscure - the best selling US horror writer Stephen King has chosen a book few may have heard of as his favourite: The Golden Argosy edited by Van H Cartmell and Charles Grayson.

It is an anthology of writing which the author of The Shining and The Green Mile said "taught me more about good writing than all of the classes that I've ever taken".

J Peder Zane, the editor of the survey, said: "Who knows more about great books than great writers? We live in a golden age. Never before have so many books been within such easy reach.

"But when anything is possible, choice becomes torture: what to pick? Where to start?"