Silly List of Books

Don Quixote topped the 100 best books list (compiled by asking around 100 authors to nominate the “most meaningful book of all time”).

Obviously this is a nonsense from the off, but the results are pretty interesting. There are blips, like the high number of Scandinavian authors, presumably because the poll was organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs, but for the most part it looks like a lot of old people showing off: the books that make the list are all the ones we are all supposed to have read - standard canonical texts - which makes you wonder whether the writers polled were really going for titles they genuinely believe to be meaningful, or if they were making choices from a pre-selected list set in stone over the centuries: there’s not much from the last fifty years, for example.

That said, there’s plenty of obvious/likely contenders missing - Shakespeare unsurprisingly makes it in, but only with Hamlet, King Lear and Othello (wot no Macbeth?). And no Hardy, only one Dickens…

I’ve read 42. Which either means i’m unpardonably ill-read or a chronic bookworm, i’m not sure…

Posted at 10pm on 09/05/02 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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