One of the more intriguing marketing promotions of recent times is set to continue at Waterstone's, with Nick Hornby unveiling the books on his "writer's table". The idea, which subverts the brute capitalist logic of the promotional tables at the front of bookshops up and down the country, is for authors to choose 40 favourite titles to appear in pole position before the advancing consumer hordes.

Hornby follows in the footsteps of Sebastian Faulks and Philip Pullman, who assembled lists ranging from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to The Call of Cthulhu, and provided "handwritten reviews" such as this one from Philip Pullman: "A pointless anecdote told in 99 different ways, or a work of genius in a brilliant translation. In fact it's both. Endlessly fascinating and very funny." (Presumably the brightest consumer close-up Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style has had in a while.)

Now Hornby's list has been released, giving an insight into what's been on his bedside table over the last few years. When confronted with a list like this, it's hard to avoid the adjective "eclectic", but what else are we to call a list that includes Anna Funder's Stasiland, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America and David Almond's Skellig? There's not much in the way of foreign tricksiness – no Calvino, no Borges – and little in the way of classics (David Copperfield, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). For someone of Hornby's blokeish (and famously list-making) authorial persona there's a surprising number of women (16), and it's funny to reflect on the ways that Donald Barthelme might have shaped the Hornby oeuvre, but I can't shake the feeling that charts like this – as diverting as they are – don't illuminate very much beyond the tills.