I received an e-mail from the Book Depository just now, a place from which a number of 'new and used' books have been ordered from. Their latest advertising gambit to get us interested is their list of 50 Best Authors Ever, in which 'author' reasonably enough means 'novelist'.
I don't know if their list goes 1-50 in order of merit - Dickens is no.1- but I scanned it up and down a few times and didn't see James Joyce. But they ask you to nominate your own five to contribute to their survey and, to be fair, they aren't phoning you up to ask if you've ever worked in a noisy environment, tell you that they're in your area because they've just fitted some windows in a house just round the corner or ask who is supplying your gas and electricity.
It looked as if you could vote for writers already on their list and so I went Joyce, Patrick Hamilton, Thomas Hardy, Camus and George Eliot. I demurred a bit over Salinger and thought of several others but that will do, except it means I really ought to read Daniel Deronda or something else on top of Middlemarch because that was all that the vote for Eliot was based on.