Another 100, Another Controversy

The Guardian has come out with another Top 100 list. But they aren’t just limiting themselves to the last hundred years or the last century. No, their claiming to have the list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time. Yikes.

There are some predictable old-school entries, like Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress, but I’ve actually only read twenty-one of their hundred (giving myself credit for In Search of Lost Time , even though I’ve only read the first installment of that seven-volume monster.) There are also, as you can imagine, some head-scratchers. That’s right, Roald Dahl’s The BFG  is one of the Guardian’s Top 100 novels of all time. As is Wuthering Heights —excuse me…   sorry…  had to go puke.

E.B White makes the list, but John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy don’t. Hemingway’s only entry is a short story collection, Men Without Women . I dunno, we’ve looked at these lists before, and there are always flaws. The whole point seems to be not so much the cataloguing of worthy titles, but the generation of reader responses.  

Meh, I don’t have the time for that crap. I’d rather go read something.