I started borrowing books from the library when I was about 10 years old, but of course these all were in Finnish. I didn't get to novels in English until high school, about 24 years ago. The first novel which I read in English was either Animal Farm by George Orwell or A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. I'm not sure of the order. Probably first Orwell, and then Hemingway. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is definetely in the top-3 novels I have ever read. (I know that it is a bit macho-pretentious, but still I like it.)

In any case here is my preliminary top-10 list of English-language novels. (Most of these I have read as Finnish translations.) I might change one of these with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Hemingway wrote of this novel: "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Both Hemingway and Twain were my idols when I was young and wanted to become a writer.

• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway