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| Hearsay: |
I used that title because lists are so easy and kind of hot, but you feel dirty after reading most of them. And what follows is the midget beastiality scat porn of book lists. Entertainment Weekly, that bastion of cogent thought and literary ideals, has come up with a top 100 books since 1983 (?) list aududicrously dubbed “The New Classics”. Now, no one was expecting them to want anything but Kraft Singles on their Ritz crackers, so at least there are a few good books here, but Harry Potter at #2? Stephen King at #21? Tom Wolfe anywhere on the list at all? I mean, come on. (Thanks, ND)
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June 24th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
I feel pretty damned good after watching porn. I think your post needs a new title. Stop insulting porn.
June 24th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I’ve read one (1) book of the 100, the Kingsolver.
I remember another, more sensible, list, and I counted about 40 read out of 100 on
that one.
I wonder about the procedure for their “bests”. It probably came from TV watchers who
mailed in their top (their only?) three books remembered from the Oprah club, without
having read any of them.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I’m just happy Entertainment Weekly has a book section.
Of course, I’ve read a bunch of books on the list, so maybe that makes my opinion worthless (one of those TV watchers, I guess) but some, like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried are excellent, and in other cases they didn’t even pick the best one by that writer – Glitz is better than La Brava, for example with the Elmore Leonard and William Gibson has written many better books than Neuromancer. Freedomland is better than Clockers from Richard Price. I haven’t read it yet, but I’d be surprised if The Night Manager is really Le Carre’s best since 1983.
But sure, plenty of the choices were silly. Kavalier and Clay? Come on…
June 24th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Maybe Nicole’s right – List Crack?
Frankly, the list reads like it was put together by someone on crack, all violent mood swings and lack of attention span. Imagine reading it in order: it would do some very Willy-Wonka-to-disobedient-children things to your head.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
…oh, and I’m not sure it’s physiologically possible to stomach Dan Brown and Philip Roth. You’re either bored to tears by the pandering of the former or driven mad by paragraph length sentences and pages with little action other than reflection.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Screw it. I was going to pick apart the list and it’s wonkiness but what’s the point? There are a number of decent books on the list but there are few true classics. Never mind the fact that the order of the selections is positively demented. I just hope the composers were really, really stoned when they put this travesty together. If not, they should be committed immediately.
June 24th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Ok, I can’t resist. What is Dan Brown doing anywhere near a list of ostensibly good books? That’s kind of like Mensa allowing the village idiot to join their clique. Of course, the village idiot was far too busy composing this list to join any sort of club.
June 24th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
what a bunch of snobs.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
John McFetridge, I agree; to add to your list of substitutions: Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore would have been a far better choice – no TV watcher would make it through The Windup Bird Chronicle.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:08 am
I like how they don’t even mention anything about, oh, say the fact they’ve combined fiction and non-fiction (hey, even a “graphic novel” too!). After all, in their words, these are “books”! I’m sure their “book department” decided “Why get all caught up in partitions and walls?”. Indeed. They’re all printed on paper, right? Written by humans, right? So what if Raymond Carver is at the bottom and J.K. Rowling is on top? “Let the elitists argue over it. After all, we’re not pushing ‘culture’ are we?” is the decision I’m sure they made.
Grrrr.
June 25th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Well, it is called “Entertainment” weekly, not “Culture” weekly.
Like Nathan said, these days it’s so hard to get anyone to pick up a book. The fact that some glossy US magazine put out a list that HAS Raymond Carver on it is something. Though, I bet they wanted to have Carver onthe list so bad they picked whatever he’d published since ‘83 (cause really, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is really so much better).
June 25th, 2008 at 9:46 am
“Driven mad by paragraph length sentences and pages with little action other than reflection”…
Yeah, I hate them books full of long words, built on stupid crap like ideas and character. Where the hell was Richard Marcinko on that list? That dude’s sentences are totally short! He doesn’t even use paragraphs! And there’s guns! Awesome!
(John McF is right, by the way…good on EW for dedicating a few precious pages of Olson Twins coverage to a list of books…even if it means including (gasp) non-fiction and (choke) graphic novels!? When it comes to movies, if “Die Hard” and “Room With a View” are on the same list of “New Classics”, nobody has these righteous spasms…there are no cucumber sandwich spit-takes or monocles popping off faces. I guess there just weren’t enough books about mixed-race Nova Scotia fisherman’s wives weaving baskets out of their own leg-hair to sate our cultured Canadian “taste”.)
June 25th, 2008 at 10:38 am
You’re kidding me, right?
You’re objecting to a list in a mainstream magazine (a list that includes Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Alice Munro and Haruki Murakami in the top ten!) for deigning to include the likes of Rowling and Dan Brown (at #96/100, for the record)? What sort of fucked-up blog-wanking elitism is that?
Yeah, a list that includes (let’s just look at 60-70, for the sake of argument) Martin Amis, George Saunders, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Alison Bechdel, David Mitchell and Peter Guralnick is pandering to the mouth-breathing lowest common denominator. Clearly an indicator of the end-days upon us.
“A few good books”? Ferfucksake…
June 25th, 2008 at 11:01 am
“When it comes to movies, if “Die Hard” and “Room With a View” are on the same list of “New Classics”, nobody has these righteous spasms…”
That would be because the two you chose are both fictional, narrative-driven feature films that are at the top of their respective (though disparate) genres. To use EW’s logic, we should mix them together with documentaries, NFB shorts, and made-for-TV dramas, and put them all under the banner: “Movies”.
Is there anything morally wrong with that? No. No, my monocle is still in its place, thank you. But if you’re expecting me to yell “ENCORE!” because someone cribbed together a scrambled list of best-sellers in a mass-market periodical devoted otherwise to tits and suntans – implying that we get off our literary shrines and be *thankful* a mainstream mainstay noticed books for once – then, mixed-race Nova Scotian hair baskets aside, you better provide something better than self-righteous bullshit.
Or perhaps that’s just my cultured Canadian “taste” speaking.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I have to agree with John McFetridge. Good on EW for even making the link that books are entertainment. It isn’t Literature Weekly, it’s not Highbrow Weekly. It’s entertainment. And that’s what reading is. Whether they are novels, graphic novels or nonfiction. I think it’s kinda cool. And like lots of people have pointed out, these lists are subjective. Same as the best dressed lists, and the 50 most beautiful people.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Wow… what’s with the vitriol? Even with Dan Brown’s presence sullying the bottom 10, is this really such an awful list? It’s not supposed to be a list of the 100 greatest works of literature of the last 25 years; it’s designed more as a subjective list of “classics,” which in this context refers to books (in any genre, nonfiction and graphic novels included) that have acquired enough critical acclaim or made enough of a social impact to have entered the cultural bloodstream. I know everyone is eager to prove how much smarter they are than the editors at EW, but someone planning out their reading list for the next couple of years could do a lot worse for themselves than following EW’s suggestions.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
To mirror some of the above comments, these are new classics of entertainment. One could actually make the argument that Chabon shouldn’t be on the list, nor McCarthy, nor Roth, because since when have they ever been entertaining. Dan Brown might not be the best writer in town, but he’s a genius at plotting; Rowling’s a better writer, barnone, and plus she’s a genius storyteller.
I was sad to see Gaiman so far down the list (for Sandman), and not for any of his novels, all of which are fucking good.
“That would be because the two you chose are both fictional, narrative-driven feature films that are at the top of their respective (though disparate) genres. To use EW’s logic, we should mix them together with documentaries, NFB shorts, and made-for-TV dramas, and put them all under the banner: “Movies”.”
Sure. Along with Bowling for Columbine, An Inconvenient Truth, and Dean Koontz’s Intensity.
So, in other words, I kind of also side with the “elitist bullshit” line of thinking, here.
But hey, at least nobody called her “JK Potter.” Progress, I suppose.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
One of the reasons an admitted “elitist” such as moi (he says, flicking the pipe ash
from his tweed elbow patch)gets irritated with lists such as these is the title:
“new classics”. I know, I know, it’s
a fluffy entertainment guide, no need for outrage (though it seems from Rob in Vic
that the temp is turned up past the steam-release point with very little pressure).
But it’s just one more sign in a long line of markers that depict literature as
a happy hodgepodge, an amorphous stew of “everything’s equal, with worth”, that bugs me.
Just to create a list with one hundred of the best (not only) instant “classics” is
a hoot. I didn’t know we were living in such accomplished times.
Sure there are good authors on this list. But that’s the point. What value can it add to
Roth and Munro to share a list with Atwood, Didion, le Carre, King, and Colbert?
June 25th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Yeah, well, I’m tightly wound at the best of times…
June 25th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
“…EW for dedicating a few precious pages of Olson Twins coverage”
EW is not US Weekly, People, or InTouch. I quite like it — I’ve had a subscription for almost ten years and I don’t feel like my IQ has dropped for it — and I’m also grateful that they have not only a book section but a theatre section.
And, I admit, their puns are sometimes hilarious.
June 26th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
tom wolfe: bonfire of the vanities #57.