Last month, the Post-Gazette suggested a handful of proposals energizing the National Endowment for the Arts to sponsor imaginative initiatives encouraging more Americans to read.

The book department's digital suggestion box has since been filling up with reader responses and endorsements.

Among the favorites is the suggestion that the NEA sponsor a nationwide contest to name the best fiction by decade starting in the 19th century.

The winners would then go on to the "finals" and the one with the most votes would be labeled "The Great American Novel." That proposal was made Jan. 14.

Several weeks later, a copy of "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books" (Norton, $14.95) arrived.

It's edited by J. Peder Zane, book review editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. He sought out the favorites of 125 writers and, amazingly, they responded.

For example, Michael Chabon, the novelist who appears Monday at the Heinz Lectures and who set two of his novels in Pittsburgh, named these as his favorites:

1. "Labyrinths" by Borges.

2. "Pale Fire" by Nabokov.

3. "Scaramouche" by Santini.

4. "Moby-Dick" by Melville.

5. "Pride and Prejudice" by Austen.

6. "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" by Poe.

7. "In Search of Lost Time" by Proust.

8. "Paradise Lost" by Milton.

9. "Love in The Time of Cholera" by Garcia Marquez.

10. "The Long Goodbye" by Chandler.

Even Stephen King chimed in with 10, offering such unlikely titles as "McTeague" by Frank Norris and "The Raj Quartet" by Paul Scott.

Tabulating all of the entries that totaled 544 titles, Zane arrived at a consensus Top 10 list:

1. "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy.

2. "Madame Bovary" by Flaubert.

3. "War and Peace" by Tolstoy.

4. "Lolita" by Nabokov.

5. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Twain.

6. "Hamlet" by Shakespeare.

7. "The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald.

8. "In Search of Lost Time" by Proust.

9. The stories of Chekhov.

10. "Middlemarch" by Eliot.

Three Russians, two Americans, two Frenchmen and two Brits -- and one of the Russians is on the list twice.

Included are essays on their selections by several contributors and a description of all the nominated titles.

"The Top Ten" is a simple idea well-executed and can work as a conversation piece, a reference book or something to read for fun.

Let's send a copy to the NEA chairman, Dana Gioia.

Mailer redux

My review of "The Castle in the Forest" by Norman Mailer drew a welter of e-mails, including one endearing message from a reader who called me an "idiot."

The review was not in the conventional form, but a stab at satire prompted by the depressing thought that I had lost several precious hours of my life reading this mistake of a novel, hours that I can never get back.

The experience reminded me of how Geoffrey Wolff, biographer of John O'Hara, felt after reading the long-winded novelist's work:

"There were times, reading [O'Hara's] densely printed pages, when I was distracted by calculations of just how many weeks remain to someone in early middle age."

Mailer's humorless and naive rendering of Adolf Hitler's childhood, an account without irony, seemed to call for a response that was both humorous and ironic.

That's the explanation for the different take on a book review.