[In the following essay, Foden comments on the Waterstone Bookstore's publishers list, addressing questions of the reading public's tastes versus criteria determined by literary academics.]

As long ago as 1592, second-rate poet Robert Greene was complaining about Shakespeare's rise to the top of the list. In the modern age, writers as diverse as Cyril Connolly and John Cowper Powys have produced lists of great books.

Now Waterstone's booksellers, in conjunction with Channel 4's Book Choice, has polled more than 25,000 people on their books of the century.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (written 1954–5) came first, receiving just over 5,000 votes. Some distance behind, George Orwell secured second and third place with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922, France, 1936, UK) and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) being the others in the top five. Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1995) is at number 10. Only 13 of the 100 books on the list are by women.

Martin Lee, marketing director of Waterstone's, said: "This must be one of the widest-ranging surveys of reading tastes ever to be compiled. We are very excited about the list of books and hope that it will stir a passionate debate about the merits of the century's writing."

Tolkien's other bestseller, The Hobbit, is at number 19, while Wild Swans, Jung Chang's history of three generations of Chinese women is the highest non-fiction entry at number 11. There is no poetry on the list, which includes two science books, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. Children's books proved popular choices: among them Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows, A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, and four titles by Roald Dahl—Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG.

The list, complied by the public rather than pundits seems to be based not so much on "greatness" as on appropriateness to certain stages in psychological development. Thus Peregrine Worsthorne, among the celebrity choices canvassed by the Guardian, gives a favourite book from each period of his life.

Many of the books on the Waterstone's list seem to fall into two main categories; narratives of integration and disintegration. In the former category are a large number of books about fantasy worlds, such as Tolkien's works, C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the second category are books like J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Albert Camus's The Outsider and Franz Kafka's The Trial.

Yet these categories are by no means distinct. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy is on the cusp, and so is John Fowles's The Magus. It is also a commonplace to argue that fantasy books like Tolkien's, with their insistent quests and complex internal value systems, encourage escapism and obsession, powerfully integrating the reader into a fictional world while having deleterious effects in everyday life.

Questions of literary value are necessarily involved here, in the sense that F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot understood them. Leavis had doctrinaire views about the virtues of certain types of writing, which he trumpeted as part of a crusade against industrialisation and mass culture.

Eliot argued (in his famous essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent") that new entrants to the continuum of the canon drew succour from, and refreshed old ones, in the way that his own The Waste Land (just missing out in the Waterstone's list at number 101) did with Dante and much else. This sense of a "great conversation" was at the heart of a much-mocked initiative by the University of Chicago, whose Great Books of the Western World programme (1952) offered everything from Aristotle to Zola in 60 smart leather-bound volumes, along with an index that highlighted connections between all the different works. In other words, you could look up the word "culture" and find references to it in books by Plato, Matthew Arnold, Marx, etc. More recently, American academic Harold Bloom evinced an essentially Leavisite position in his book The Western Canon (1995), and the distinguished British critic Sir Frank Kermode has argued that a classic book is one that invites multiple positive interpretations in different eras.

Kermode's "old wine in new bottles" position—first laid out in his book The Classic (1975) and reiterated in an article in the Guardian last year—lies some way between that of Leavis, Eliot and the newer breed of post-theoretical critics.

The latter would include Antony Easthope, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, who welcomes the popular appeal of the Waterstone's venture but doesn't think that it proves The Lord of the Rings is intrinsically "better" than Ulysses. "Better for what?" he asked. "There are all kind of reasons why people value things. Nothing is valuable in itself, and never was."

Galen Strawson, who teaches philosophy at Oxford University, said: "The Waterstone's list has more than merely sociological interest, yet it doesn't tell us what we should read. Some of the books have been subjected to the test of time and some have not. Will Trainspotting, for instance, be there in 10 years' time?"