Category: [Books, magazines, etc]

Remember that Guardian 100 greatest novels poll? Of course you don’t, that was three weeks ago, which may as well be a lifetime in this modern age… Anyway, the probably predictable sequel has eventuated in which the readers have answered back… and the results are interesting; the readers’ list is drawn from a much bigger and broader range of submissions, 3000+  more general readers as opposed to 172 writers and critics, and the list includes a number of titles that were noticeably absent from the first one (most notably Lord of the Rings at the top of the list). But there’s also a good amount of overlap, too; the relative positions of some books may be different, but they’re on both lists somewhere, and in some cases they’re in similar places on both. Tolkien may have displaced Middlemarch, but only to second place. Ulysses is still in the top 10. Proust still comes in at 15.

I said of the original list that it was full of the sort of stuff you’d expect to find on a list like that, but interestingly the sane is kind of true about the readers’ list; almost anything on it could turn up on another greatest books list and I wouldn’t be surprised. Neither list surprises me much somehow, though for some reason I find myself liking the new list more… I do wonder if the readers’ choices were determined at all by the fact that they were responding to the “professional” one, you know, did the conspicuous absence of Tolkien inspire at least some of them to vote for him to make sure he turned up on the “amateur” one? I don’t know, but I did see some discourse about whether or not the original list was kind of “performative”… knowing that their individual top 10 choices would be visible to readers, did the authors & critics perhaps choose titles they thought they “should” pick? Did the readers perhaps do something similar? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the bigger and broader range of submissions. Maybe I’m hallucinating something. Mme Bovary and Gatsby can still fuck off either way.

So the Graun’s done a 100 greatest novels list. And it’s… fairly obvious? I mean, these things always are, you make a poll with input from (in this case) 172 participants, and obviously the usual suspects tend to dominate. It’s how these things work, and there’s not usually a lot of surprises (in this case, probably the biggest ones are the absence of Tolkien and Rowling and the amount of Virginia Woolf, and maybe the high placing of Ulysses); I’ve only read about a fifth of the books on the list, but I recognise most of the other titles at least, and most of them are the sort of thing that you’d expect from a list like this, with Middlemarch at the top and Proust, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Marquez, Rushdie, H. James, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Conrad, Thackeray, Ishiguro, Faulkner, Hardy, Baldwin, Lawrence, Hemingway… you know.

This is not what bothers me about the list; it’s in the nature of lists like this to be kind of predictable, as I said, but there’s also probably good reasons why these particular titles become “canon”, and sometimes they just are that good. I mean, Madame Bovary can fuck RIGHT off as far as I’m concerned, and I may always be perplexed at The Great Gatsby‘s enduring popularity, but I know why most of these books are here and that’s because they’re widely considered classics irrespective of what I might think of some of them. It’s their avowed rationale for the list that irritates me:

Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help. […]
Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible.

But it’s… not? It’s mostly the usual suspects you generally see on lists like these. It doesn’t reach that far beyond the US/UK/Europe axis (even Ishiguro is British). And authoritative? Well, that’s what the editors like to think. Cos I find something dreadfully smug in that “never has such a list been more needed” line; books need to be saved from other forms of popular entertainment and distraction, and THE GUARDIAN is just the… people for the job! Hang on, literature, WE’LL save you with this… list that should get the kids back into reading books! An unfinished four thousand page epic about a guy eating a cake, THAT’s what The Young People These Days need…

OK, so I’ve never read In Search of Lost Time and it may well actually be the fifth-greatest novel(s) of all time, I’m being somewhat snide; and indeed, as you may have noticed, I haven’t read anything for nearly two years so I’m probably not the right person to be looking down on a list like this… but I’m not really looking down on the list itself, I’m more looking down at the self-important assumption behind it. And the assumption that 100 titles is enough, when 500 or even a thousand usually has a much broader and more interesting range cos the really interesting and less obvious stuff lurks somewhere outside the top 100. This is true of almost every list of this sort, books, films, music, etc. I’d be more interested in a full list of all the books nominated, really. Still, I suppose I should finally read Middlemarch and see if it is that life-changing…

And another book spotted online recently, being The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis… specifically the 1975 printing by Avon Books. I mention this because nothing on that cover indicates the book was 180 years old by that point, unless the back cover mentions it or something or there’s publication info inside the thing. If you didn’t know any better (and I’m sure some people who picked up this edition didn’t), you might not know it wasn’t a new title until you started reading it and found the style a bit old-fashioned… The Monk was, of course, the pre-eminent hell-raiser of 1796 and it’s actually still kind of bracing at points, and this is pretty good cover art for it (wish I knew who did it); if you were going to disguise The Monk as a common 1970s horror paperback, this is the sort of thing you’d want…