{"id":658,"date":"2013-06-30T07:45:50","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T11:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=658"},"modified":"2013-07-19T10:15:25","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T14:15:25","slug":"cream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=658","title":{"rendered":"Cream"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Books<\/a>In front of an airport rack of books, I count up the number of titles I\u2019ve read, usually almost none, and I do the same at B&N\u2019s New Arrivals table, where I generally find four or five that are in my \u201cdone\u201d stack at home. Such a sense of accomplishment to have read books other people haven\u2019t even bought yet!<\/p>\n

So, of course I file away January\u2019s inevitable lists of the \u201cbest books of the year\u201d and fell even further under the thrall of listmania when I discovered the ambitious \u201cBest Fiction of the 20th<\/sup> Century\u201d! \u00a0This meta-list compiles and compares rankings of \u201cbest books\u201d from several notable sources: the Library Journal<\/i> list, the Modern Library list, the Koen book distributors list, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course list. The lists contain 221 separate works.<\/p>\n

About this exercise, compiler Brian Kunde says, \u201cWe may take exception to what got on the lists. We may protest over what was left off. But we do learn what others considered notable in our culture \u2014 and discover how much of it we\u2019ve neither experienced, thought about, or heard of.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the truth! The books at the top of the list are familiar, at least by title, but nearer the bottom, memory goes sketchy. Malcolm Lowry\u2019s Under the Volcano<\/i> (#99)? Reynolds Price\u2019s Kate Vaiden<\/i> (#192)? Colin Wilson\u2019s The Outsider<\/i> (#219)?<\/p>\n

Some of the books I\u2019d like to check off (Done!) on these lists, did I read them or just see the movie? After the 11 TV episodes of Brideshead Revisited <\/i>(#144), does anyone actually read the book anymore? TV and movie versions may have aced out the print originals of I, Claudius <\/i>(#53) <\/i>or 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/i> (#94), too. Some books I might have read a long time ago, did I really read, or just mean to? After a few decades, memory may have resolved the matter in my favor.<\/p>\n

The Modern Library website provides separate lists of the 100 Best as determined by its Board AND by the online votes of some 217,500 \u201creaders.\u201d A comparison is instructive. While the board leads its list off with Ulysses<\/i>, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist \u00a0as a Young Man, Lolita, <\/i>and Brave New World<\/i> (four of which I\u2019ve read\u2014yay!), the top ten in the reader list includes seven books by either Ayn Rand* or L. Ron Hubbard (none of which I\u2019ve read), plus The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, <\/i>and 1984<\/i>. The readers don\u2019t get around to Ulysses<\/i> until slot 11. How many of them have actually read it, I wonder, and how many just think they should have? I confess, I have not<\/i>. Slogging through Portrait of the Artist<\/i>\u00a0 . . was enough, and while I used to know all the words to the song, \u201cFinnegan\u2019s Wake,\u201d I haven\u2019t tackled the book.<\/p>\n

*A footnote about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged<\/em>: Idaho state senator John Goedde brags “That book made my son a Republican!” He’s introduced a bill to require every high school student in the state to read it and pass a test on it to graduate. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Kunde takes the existing list rankings and creates a composite score\u2014a ranking of rankings. The top 10 using his method are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Great Gatsby<\/i>, by F. Scott Fitzgerald<\/li>\n
  2. 1984<\/i> by George Orwell (that\u2019s<\/i> worth a re-read now)<\/li>\n
  3. Catch-22<\/i> by Joseph Heller<\/li>\n
  4. The Grapes of Wrath<\/i> by John Steinbeck<\/li>\n
  5. Lolita <\/i>by Vladimir Nobokov<\/li>\n
  6. Ulysses<\/i> by James Joyce<\/li>\n
  7. Animal Farm<\/i> by George Orwell<\/li>\n
  8. Lord of the Flies<\/i> by William Golding<\/li>\n
  9. The Catcher in the Rye<\/i> by J.D. Salinger<\/li>\n
  10. Slaughterhouse Five<\/i> by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I\u2019ve read them all, except that big lump in the gravy, Ulysses<\/i>. But these are the best 20th<\/sup> century<\/i> books, the world has moved on, and the list is old. Only four books on it are from the 1990s and less than eight percent were published later than 1980. As time passes, more of late-century works may achieve the recognition that eventually came to other books\u2014most notably, the now #1 ranked Gatsby<\/i>.<\/p>\n

    Not that sales are a reliable measure of quality, but when Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby<\/i> was a commercial failure, having sold fewer than 25,000 copies since its publication in 1925. Today it continues to sell 500,000 copies a year.<\/p>\n

    Exploring further:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

    \u201cThe Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century: A Composite list and Ranking.\u201d by Brian Kunde<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIn Search of the Century’s Best Books\u201d by Brian Kunde<\/a><\/p>\n

    Modern Library\u2019s \u201cTop 100\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In front of an airport rack of books, I count up the number of titles I\u2019ve read, usually almost none, and I do the same at B&N\u2019s New Arrivals table, where I generally find four or five that are in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,40,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-fiction","category-readers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s2NkiT-cream","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":721,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}