She bought a calorie-counting book on the way home and started reading food labels.

CNN: 'I couldn't walk': Woman loses 276 pounds

Thomas Hardy, Dickens and Tolstoy all figure in the list, alongside books for very young children like The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, and Eric Carle's early years counting book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

BBC: Pride and Prejudice tops teachers' favourite 100 books

Smith mimicked the endless, generation-counting longueurs of the Old Testament so skillfully that he rendered the book dead as literature while giving it credibility as a sacred text: a book as boring as this could have been inspired only by the breath of God.

NEWYORKER: I, Nephi