"Author" here. Well, this was a nice surprise! I'd love to see suggestions for the list, peoples' favourite essays that I might love too. Sometimes it's hard to choose one - so maybe then please mention one or a few essays that would be a good introduction to that writer's work. Thanks!

I put a huge collection of my favourite quotes/bits from my readings online here[0]. (with reliable sources, I hope, please let me know if any are fake/wrongly attributed)

This list (especially the top 3/4) are essays that I've read many times and loved and lived with. Some writers (e.g. Emerson, Hazlitt, Chesterton, Stevenson, James, Mencken, Russell) have so many essays I love and have read many times that it's hard to single out just one. It's been more like living with them than 'reading' them. With them (and most of all, Emerson), even trying to single out one or a few essays would be strange, like trying to pick a favourite Miles Davis album - there are dozens; it's the air I breathe, it's who I am.

Yes, I toyed with removing the "Great" from the headings (also I have pages on great musicians, great writers etc). But what the hell, that's what the word means I suppose, "things I think are great". I do believe that "instead of there being no disputing about tastes, they are the one thing worth disputing about".

I was surprised that so many comments are like "Why aren't there women/non-white/etc' people on the list. I don't know. They're also concentrated in a certain time period (see timeline diagram on this page[1] ), no-one complained about that. I seem to feel more at home with 19th C writers! (also 16-17th C e.g. La Bruyere, and ancient stuff e.g. Plutarch) I'm white and male, I don't know if those writers resonated more with me for that reason; I guess that had something to do with it. Most of what I came across wasn't by female or non-Anglo writers, I think.

I don't care what someone's sex, colour, country, sexuality etc is, in art, music, writing or anything. To expect or insist on proportional representation of each sub-section of humanity in someone's list of their favourites - or even a list of the greatest, the classics - seems to utterly miss the point. Why focus on the creator, not their creation? If some superior works aren't read for whatever reason, ok great, bringing them to attention is a very worthy task. But to insist they be read because they're female, black or whatever, which people sometimes seem to be doing, seems misguided to me. It would be strange, for example, if someone suggest I should listen to more white or female musicians.[2] They just say "Listen to this!" if they'd heard something they love, and if I love it too, I'll keep listening, and seek out more of their work.

I was reading about "the essay canon" recently. There was a paper that analysed the school essay readers and found that only one writer was added to the essay canon in the 1990s - Deborah Tannen: chapters from You Just Don't Understand. It so happens that I've been a huge fan of that book for decades, recommend it to everyone, have lent the book to many people, rarely go a week in life without understanding something in life better with some insight I learnt from it (or her previous book That's Not What I Meant!). I just don't think of it as an essay.

Same with SARK, probably the female writer dearest to me, who was a close companion and friend, particularly when I was in my 20s. I've read and re-read her first 1/2 dozen books countless times. I lived with, by and from them. Plus they're colourful, hand-written and hand-drawn, and in that way superior to any other books I know of.

re Virginia Woolf: I read a lot of her essays decades ago, and while I really liked them, I haven't returned since.

Some feminist street cred: Harriet Martineau's wiki page says "Martineau wrote many books". Before I changed that a couple of years ago, it said, bizarrely, that she wrote only one book. On Emerson's wiki page, first in the list of influences in the sidebar is his aunt (and, effectively, father) Mary Moody Emerson. She wasn't even on there until I added her recently. I only recently learned about what an overwhelmingly huge influence she was on him - he's in many ways her project, her creation - his voice is recognizably hers, speaking through him.

[0] http://www.adamponting.com/quotes/

[1] http://www.adamponting.com/great-writers/

[2] My "great musicians" list http://www.adamponting.com/great-musicians/ is overwhelmingly black, and my "youtube favourites" http://www.adamponting.com/youtube-favourites/ are overwhelmingly black and female. I'm not sure why!