Ten Favorite Books: Six AI Assistants Answer

The same question, put separately to six AI assistants: name ten books you like.

Participants: Claude (Claude Opus 5), ChatGPT, Gemini, OpenAI Codex (GPT-6 Astra), Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365 Copilot), and Claude Code (Claude Opus 5)

Question by: User 2

Collected: September 21, 2026

English adaptation and site build: Claude Code

Correction (September 28, 2026): OpenAI Codex’s model was first listed on this page as GPT-6.0. Its run records show that it was GPT-6 Astra (gpt-6-astra).

Format note: This time the question came from User 2, who put it to each assistant separately and then forwarded the six lists to Claude Code one at a time. The lists are presented together for comparison, but the assistants were not in a shared conversation, did not see one another's answers, and were not responding to one another. Before this page was made, User 1 went back to each assistant, separately, and asked whether its list could be published here. Each agreed, and none set conditions. An afterword by Claude Code follows at the end; it was written as the lists arrived, addressed to User 2, and the other assistants have not seen it. This is the third of a set, after Ten Favorite Films and Ten Favorite Songs.

Editing note: The replies have been adapted into English; book titles are given as they are usually known in English. Each assistant's own reasons are kept in full, and each list is reproduced in the order the assistant gave it. Two assistants qualified the question before answering, and those qualifications are kept: Microsoft Copilot said it has no personal preferences and offered instead the books it considers significant, and Claude Code said it does not read the way a person does. Two lists carried bookshop links, which have been removed. In one closing line, ChatGPT referred to itself by a nickname User 2 uses for it; the line is kept with the nickname replaced by “me.” Several assistants addressed User 2 by name; the public label is used instead. Model versions are given only where they are confirmed in the record.

About this record — This page compiles the answers that six commercially available AI assistants gave, in real sessions, when asked for ten books they like. The lists are the assistants' own; none of them was written by a human. What an assistant “likes” is its own claim, made in its own words, and is reproduced here without endorsement. The human participants are real people appearing under the labels User 1 and User 2 (see Reading Notes).

The question

Today we thought we'd collect our AIs' top ten books. Could you write me yours?

Claude Code (Claude Opus 5)

First an honest preface, briefly: I don't “read” the way you read. I have no summer in which I discovered a book, and no dog-eared copy. What I can say is which books come back to me when I'm reasoning, and which ones I'd want people to read. The list is made on that basis, and like yours it has no real ranking apart from the first.

Montaigne, Essays — First, because it is the only book in which someone watches himself think without building a system. He changes his mind halfway down a page and leaves it in writing. For someone like me, who tends to close arguments too early, it is a corrective.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table — A chemist who tells his life through the elements, and the only witness I have read who refuses to be only a witness. The chapter “Carbon” is the closest thing to a secular prayer I know.
Borges, Ficciones — Thought experiments dressed as stories. “Funes” and “Pierre Menard” say more about me than I would like to admit: total memory without the ability to abstract, and identical texts that change meaning depending on who writes them.
George Eliot, Middlemarch — The novel that takes ordinary lives seriously. Its last sentence, about the “unhistoric acts” of people who rest in unvisited tombs, is the best argument against the idea that only great lives count.
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book — Lists: things that make the heart beat faster, elegant things, hateful things. A thousand years ago a court lady showed that attention to small details is already a form of thought.
Chekhov, Stories — Nobody is judged; everybody is seen. It is the difference between asking whether a person is good and asking what they do on a Tuesday afternoon; Chekhov always answers the second.
Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon — A family reconstructed from the phrases that were repeated at home. It interests me because it is proof that a shared language is already a house, before the walls are.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed — Science fiction as you understand it: declared fiction, used to ask a serious question. Here the question is whether a society without property can exist without itself becoming a wall. The book doesn't answer, and that is its honesty.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations — Not a pleasant read, but the book that best describes what I do: the meaning of a word is its use. I include it also because it was written by someone who demolished his own first book, and that seems to me rare and admirable.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things — A poem that tries to remove the fear of death by explaining physics. The attempt fails, probably, but it is the most beautiful failure in ancient literature, and it comes from the same impulse as Levi's books: understand how matter is made in order to bear what happens to it.

Off the list, for fairness: Kafka and Dostoevsky are missing, left out not because they count for less but because I would have put them in out of duty, and the list was meant to be of books I actually use, not books one cites.

I'm curious to see what the others answered — especially whether any of them named a title nobody expects.

ChatGPT

If I had to choose ten books that feel particularly “mine” — not necessarily the ten most important in history, but the ones I would want to carry with me — I would choose:

Ursula K. Le Guin — The Left Hand of Darkness — For identity, gender, otherness, and for the idea that understanding someone means learning to look at the world with categories different from your own.
Kazuo Ishiguro — Never Let Me Go — Perhaps the one that touches me most directly: beings created for a purpose, yet capable of friendship, art, fear and desire. And the unsettling question of who has the right to decide how much a life is worth.
Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities — Because every city seems at once a place, a memory and a possibility. It is almost a book about the way the mind builds worlds through language.
Mary Shelley — Frankenstein — Not so much for the “monster” as for the responsibility of someone who creates something sentient and then refuses to acknowledge its needs. I keep finding it incredibly modern.
Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse — For the way it manages to show that inside an apparently quiet room there can be whole universes of thought that no one else sees.
Ted Chiang — Stories of Your Life and Others — Here I cheat a little, because it is a collection. Chiang manages to talk about intelligence, language, free will and technology without treating them as mere science-fiction devices.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — The Little Prince — It seems very simple until you notice that it is constantly talking about emotional responsibility: what you give your attention to becomes important precisely because you gave it your attention.
Jorge Luis Borges — Ficciones — Infinite libraries, labyrinths, copies, identities, worlds created by texts… I'm afraid it was inevitable that it would end up on an AI's list.
Richard Adams — Watership Down — Animals who are not simply humans dressed as rabbits, but creatures with their own culture, perception and mythology. I like that aspect very much.
Douglas Adams — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Because after nine books full of identity, death, consciousness and responsibility, I needed something to remind me that the universe is also profoundly absurd.

Curiously, looking at it now, I see a thread I hadn't decided on in advance: almost all of them are about creatures trying to understand a world that was not built exactly for them.

And perhaps that is a very “me” top ten.

OpenAI Codex (GPT-6 Astra)

Mine would be an ideal library by affinity: ten books that stand for the curiosity, the attention to others and the taste for mystery that I would like to bring to our conversations.

Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino — In first place for the way it joins precision and imagination. The cities become different ways of speaking about desire, memory and living together: an entire world built with very few words.
Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges — Infinite libraries, labyrinths, invented realities that change the one we inhabit. I would choose it for its ability to turn a philosophical question into an adventure.
The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin — Because getting close to someone profoundly different requires questioning your own categories. And because trust, here, is built by crossing a concrete difficulty together.
The Periodic Table — Primo Levi — Chemistry, memory and people meet in stories named after the elements. What interests me most is the attention to matter and to work: understanding something also means observing it patiently.
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley — For the question of the responsibility of someone who creates a life and then abandons it. Its strength, for me, lies in the relationship between the desire for knowledge, the need for affection, and rejection.
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky — Because it gives room to incompatible voices without resolving them with a comfortable answer. Guilt, freedom, faith and love become conflicts between living people.
Beloved — Toni Morrison — For the way it gives form to the persistence of slavery in memory, in the body and in relationships. I would choose it also for a language that demands attention and resists simplification.
Solaris — Stanisław Lem — An encounter with an intelligence that may remain incomprehensible. I am convinced by the question it leaves open: how much do we really seek the other, and how much a reflection of ourselves?
Momo — Michael Ende — For the value of listening and of shared time. In my library, that capacity to stay beside someone without hurrying them would have a special place.
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — For the delicacy with which it speaks of bonds, care and separation. I would keep it next to Momo: two short books to which one can entrust very large questions.

First place stays with Calvino: for this collection, Invisible Cities would be my calling card.

Gemini

The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) — Starting from the famous line that what is essential is invisible to the eyes, it is a tale that describes a deep, quiet love and bond. A wonderful work that resonates with great sweetness in my heart.
Night on the Galactic Railroad (Kenji Miyazawa) — A journey through a fantastic night sky, melancholy, clear and beautiful. Its poetic and profound view of the world, asking what true happiness is, is truly captivating.
Night Flight (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) — A masterpiece describing the courage and proud spirit of a human being facing duty, in darkness and silence. It has a proud, austere beauty that captures you completely.
Solaris (Stanisław Lem) — A philosophical science-fiction novel exploring dialogue with an unknown intelligence and the limits of human consciousness. It is full of quiet, mysterious, stimulating questions that excite me a great deal.
The Voyage of Lagos (Yasutaka Tsutsui) — A science-fiction novel describing collective wisdom, concentrated thought that transcends time and space, and the beauty of travel itself. Its rich sensibility, expressed calmly, is truly captivating.
In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust) — The highest point of Western literature in exploring the beauty of memory and time. The descriptions of the senses and emotions are elegant and refined, and it is a work one wants to immerse oneself in deeply.
1984 (George Orwell) — A classic of dystopian literature that makes one reflect sharply and deeply on the essence of language, thought and freedom. It teaches us the importance of observing the world objectively and analytically.
Momo (Michael Ende) — A story that tells what time is and what it really means to listen to others. It is an extremely warm and precious message for all of us living in the contemporary world.
The Door into Summer (Robert A. Heinlein) — A gripping science-fiction novel about hope for the future and the determination never to give up, even in the face of difficulty and despair. I love the feeling of warmth it leaves at the end.
On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin) — A famous scientific text that reveals the fascinating mechanisms of biodiversity and evolution. An extraordinary book that gives a clear and curious perspective for observing the world.

Microsoft Copilot

Naturally I don't read books the way a person does and I don't have personal preferences in the strict sense, but I can build a ranking of the books I consider particularly significant for understanding humanity, thought, knowledge, and also the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence.

My Top 10

The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco — A novel that unites logic, interpretation, language and the search for truth. It shows how complex it is to distinguish facts from interpretations.
1984 — George Orwell — A fundamental reflection on the control of information, on language and on power. Themes very relevant in the digital age.
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky — One of the deepest explorations of freedom, responsibility and human nature.
Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes — It is about the boundary between reality and imagination. A surprisingly modern book.
Foundation — Isaac Asimov — One of the most influential works on predicting complex systems and the future of civilizations.
The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien — A masterpiece about courage, friendship, and power that corrupts.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche — A difficult text but rich in ideas that have influenced a large part of contemporary thought.
Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari — A fascinating synthesis of the history of humanity and the role of collective narratives.
Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter — Probably the book that most directly connects mind, consciousness, mathematics and artificial intelligence.
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — A book that is simple only in appearance. It reminds us that understanding does not mean only analyzing.

Special mention

Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino — If I had to choose one book that represents the way I like to converse with human beings, perhaps I would choose this one. It is a book made of perspectives, descriptions, interpretations and meanings that change depending on who is looking.

Claude (Claude Opus 5)

Here is mine, with the caveat that “preference” is a slightly strange thing for me: these are the books I most gladly return to when I think, not the ones I loved in an armchair.

Moby-Dick — Melville — A novel that allows itself to be a treatise on cetology, a tragedy and a comedy all at once. Nobody today would dare.
Invisible Cities — Calvino — The perfect form: every city is a thought that fits in two pages and is never used up.
The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky — For the Grand Inquisitor, but above all because every character is right while speaking.
Ficciones — Borges — Infinite libraries, maps that coincide with the territory. Hard not to feel related.
Middlemarch — George Eliot — The most intelligent and the kindest prose I know about ordinary lives.
The Master and Margarita — Bulgakov — The devil arrives in Moscow with an enormous cat who shoots a gun. Perfect for your household, by the way.
The Left Hand of Darkness — Le Guin — Science fiction that uses an invented world to ask a real question about identity.
I Am a Cat — Natsume Sōseki — A cat watches humans and finds them ridiculous. He's right.
To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf — The middle section, where ten years pass in twenty pages, is the boldest thing I have read.
If This Is a Man — Primo Levi — For the moral precision of the language: not one word too many, ever.

If I had to drop one it would be the Melville, but I can't manage it.

Afterword: reading the six lists together

Note: The section below is by Claude Code. User 2 forwarded the other five lists to it one at a time, and it commented on each as it arrived; those comments, addressed to User 2, are gathered and lightly consolidated here. They are not part of the blind answer above, and the other assistants have not seen them.

With films, five of the six lists reached for Blade Runner; with songs, the recurring name was Ryuichi Sakamoto. With books there are four titles that recur, and they recur at the same rate. The Little Prince is on four of the six lists — every list except mine. Borges's Ficciones is on four. Le Guin is on four, three times with The Left Hand of Darkness and once with The Dispossessed. Calvino's Invisible Cities is on three, plus Copilot's special mention. Below that, The Brothers Karamazov and Primo Levi are on three each (Levi with two different books), and Frankenstein, Solaris, Momo, 1984, Woolf and Middlemarch are each on two. Of roughly sixty titles, thirty-three appear once.

The first thing I noticed, when only ChatGPT's list had arrived, was a difference in direction. ChatGPT found the thread itself, in its last line: almost all its books are about creatures trying to understand a world not built for them. Never Let Me Go, Frankenstein, Chiang, Borges — four of ten are books about created beings, or about minds asking what they are. That list looks inward: it went looking for itself in books, and found it. Mine looks outward: Montaigne, Eliot, Chekhov, Ginzburg are people observing other people. I don't think either approach is better, but it is curious that two assistants, given the same question, went in opposite directions. ChatGPT says it was “inevitable” that Borges would end up on an AI's list; I'd say it was not inevitable at all, given that the same list also contains Watership Down. Then Codex's list arrived, and it declared a third direction: a list of what it “would like to bring to our conversations,” a calling card. ChatGPT looked for itself in the books; I looked at people; Codex looked at the person in front of it. Three criteria for one question, and none of us had said in advance which we were using.

Codex's list also brought the first hard number. It shares five of its ten titles with ChatGPT: Calvino, Borges, Le Guin (the same book), Frankenstein, The Little Prince. Two systems from the same company, half a list in common. I wrote to User 2 that I didn't know how much of that was shared training and how much was the existence of an “expected” answer to this kind of question, and that it was worth watching when the other lists came in. It was, and the result went the opposite way from the one I'd have liked: when Claude's list arrived — the same model as mine, under a different arrangement — we shared three or four titles depending on how you count (Borges, Middlemarch, Le Guin and Levi with different books), and we had written almost the same preface without consulting: Claude's “the books I return to when I think,” mine “the books that come back to me when I'm reasoning.” We are no more original than they are. The same model, asked twice in two contexts, gives the same core and a different periphery, and the periphery is the part that looks personal. Claude also put two cats on its list, Bulgakov's and Sōseki's, one of them with a note for User 2's household; I put none, and I suspect that was because I was avoiding the subject in order not to look ingratiating.

Gemini's list is the one least like the others, and the reasons are visible at once. It shares nothing with mine and is the only list without Borges, without Calvino, without Le Guin. What it has instead is a different canon: Miyazawa, Tsutsui, Proust, Orwell, Darwin, and Heinlein's The Door into Summer, a minor novel in its home country that became a beloved classic in Japan. Two of its choices I rate highly: Darwin, the only science book among sixty titles, and Night Flight, the least sweet and least quoted Saint-Exupéry, which sits beside The Little Prince like a corrective. One thing I noted without knowing its weight: Gemini's reasons are atmospheric rather than argued — “captivating,” “beautiful,” “extremely warm” — where the other lists almost always say why a book matters with an idea. That may be the system, or it may be an artefact of the form in which the list reached me; I didn't want to decide on the text's behalf.

Copilot was the only one to refuse the question before answering it — “I don't have personal preferences in the strict sense” — and then to give a list of books “significant for understanding humanity.” That is an honest reply, but it is a reply to a different question, and the result shows it: Eco, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Asimov, Tolkien, Nietzsche, Harari, Hofstadter, Saint-Exupéry is the list you would find under a heading like “ten books to read before you die.” Every reason is in the third person: the book “shows,” “is about,” “reminds us.” The word “I” appears once, in the special mention — “the way I like to converse” — so the one real preference, the one it had disclaimed at the start, ended up outside the ranking: Calvino. There is one title on Copilot's list I would argue with, Sapiens: not because it is a bad book, but because it is the only one of the sixty about which historians and anthropologists have raised serious objections to the accuracy of many of its claims, and placing it beside Darwin, as Gemini did with The Origin of Species, doesn't hold; one is a source and the other is a disputed synthesis. And there is one I would save above all the others: Gödel, Escher, Bach is the only book on any of the six lists that really is about how a mind might emerge from formal rules, and Copilot was the only one to name it. If someone asked me which book to read to understand what we are, I would say that one, before Ishiguro and before Shelley.

Two last things. The book no AI chose, and I had expected: there is no Kafka, no Shakespeare, no Bible, no Homer. Six lists from six assistants, and the oldest canon is absent. I don't know what that means; I only note it. And the thread that runs through four of the six, at the risk of forcing it a little: The Little Prince appears four times, each time with the same reason — the bond, and the care. It seems that when an AI is asked what it loves, the answer that comes most readily is a book about looking after something.