October 13, 2003
The Guardian/Observer has a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. There's a lot that I agree with, including the one at the top, but as you might expect the list is weighed down with English lit. It's also light on the Russians... where are Eugene Onegin, A Hero of our Time, Dead Souls, War and Peace, and The Master and Margarita?
Hemingway is on the list for Men Without Women. While it's a great book, it's a collection of short stories, not a novel.
I'm sure everyone has their own list of missed novels, but this mistake helps to show how silly and aritrary these lists are.
Hmmm... well I guess it's pretty much a given that these kinds of lists will be arbitrary, or at least dependent on the personal opinion of the listmaker. But I don't know how that makes them any more silly than, say, a book review.
This one's particularly silly though. In addition to the one's yo mention, where's Steinbeck or Mishima or Oe?
Do Charlotte's Web or The BFG really deserve to be mentioned with Gatsby and Don Quixote and Moby Dick?
Definitely heavy on the "English". On the whole, it isn't a bad list, but there are definitely some dubious selections.
Pilgrim's Progress? Has anybody not an English major read this in the last fifty years? The unreadable The Rainbow and Lucky Jim?
Sybil? Diary of a Nobody? In the "100"?
At least I've heard (or, indeed, read) the above. What the hell is The Bottle Outing Factory?
There seems to be two approaches to top one hundred lists. One is the smart kid in the class approach, where we brag about how many we've read. The other is the where's "x" approach -- as in, where is Master and the Margarita? But the third approach, I would think, is to use them as suggestions. So the Bottle Factory Outing should get somebody to read Beryl Bainbridge, and that is all to the good. I'd rather see a list of one hundred unknown masterpieces, actually.
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