Should “Best of’s” be politically correct?

9 comments on “Should “Best of’s” be politically correct?”

1. Dave says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 11:34 am

   Short answer to your question George: No. ‘Best of’ lists should not be politically correct.

2. Jake says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 11:43 am

   An unasked question here is: who did the selecting? What was the male/female balance?

   These things don’t happen as part of one person’s poor decisions. They are systemic.

3. Monica says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

   The word “best” means that there are no caveats included. Best is best. I think tho, that Jake’s comment should be heeded. Who does the selecting? Who decideds what is ‘best’.

4. Lemon Hound says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 4:04 pm

   Nope.

   But I wish “Best ofs” would go away period. They tell us very little. They are good for hits, headlines, and comedy routines. Otherwise?

5. King Rat says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 6:11 pm

   Having a woman or two in a list of top ten isn’t a mark of “political correctness”. It’s a mark of poor quality.

   My assumption is that writing skill is fairly even between the sexes. Some top ten lists might have a few more women and some a few less. But if I see a list that is really out of whack, that tells me that, consciously or unconsciously, the people doing the selecting were looking for something besides good writing. Which means that probably the writing selected in their top ten are less likely to be good writing than someone else’s top ten that does include women. Not guaranteed to be worse writing, but likelier.

6. miette says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 9:24 pm

   Maybe they were afraid that they’d put women writers on the list only to have gender testing return curious and internationally scandalous details about their chromosomal makeup? This way, it’s only a tiny blip of news for the likes of us. I mean, it has to be, that, or they and the people at the Orange Prize have naughty photographs of one another.

   Because no one’s hapless enough tothink they can get away on their excuse. Right?

7. Brian Palmu says:
   November 5th, 2009 at 1:42 am

   “But I wish “Best ofs” would go away period. They tell us very little. They are good for hits, headlines, and comedy routines. Otherwise?”

   Does this mean you’ll be returning the award and cheque from the GG should you win the long-established “best of” national poetry award?

8. jason says:
   November 5th, 2009 at 3:02 am

   Imagine you are part of the selection process, and you end up with 10 female writers. Do you go back and select a male writer? That would be sexist and discriminatory. Imagine you find yourself with 10 male writers, and you decide to publish your top ten anyway. If you admit that the list contains only male writers, but that you believe their ten books are the year’s best, you run the risk of someone calling your methodology into question by saying your selection process was questionable and that you’re covering your backside by raising the point. Any way around it, you lose.

   Poetry contests are often designed to be blind to biographical data – you don’t know if the poet is male, female, young or old, or what the color of their skin is. If quality is the deciding factor, interpreting the results using immaterial data is pointless.

   When I was hired at the large independent bookstore I work at, I was hired with three other males. I recently helped interview for holiday temp employees, while other managers interviewed and hired for other positions. Somehow, we ended up hiring 6 female employees. Sexist? No – we hired the best applicants, and we’re happy with our great new employees.

   There are plenty of “best of” lists out there, and they fill a need for the public as an instrument to help them choose books to read – it may be odd to have a list comprised of only males, but PW’s list is just one of many, and one that lacks the selling power of Amazon’s lists (among others). I wish readers actually read more reviews and criticism, and exposed themselves to a wide variety of sources for reading suggestions, but it isn’t the case and I’m not so idealistic to think that one list from PW makes PW discriminatory or sexist or guilty of selecting gender over quality. I won’t lose sleep over it.

9. sunflower says:
   November 5th, 2009 at 9:40 am

   There’s no test we can shove a book through and know that it’s the best title of the year, no established and agreed criteria. This isn’t like saying 2 + 2 = 4. Whenever they put something like this they’re going by a wing and a prayer and riding more on experience and taste than anything else. List like this will always be subjective, so why can’t we question the results? It’s not as though there’s ever one solution to this problem?

   There are a few interesting things they did. They took a bit of risk by promoting slightly lesser known books, especially in a year when Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, A. S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Lorrie Moore not to mention Thomas Pynchon, John Irving, Phillip Roth, Jonathan Lethem, and Richard Powers (not to say that these writers would automatically write one of the best books of the year, but it’s a little surprising that there are no “big” literary writers in the top 10). (And not to diss Shop Class as Soulcraft, but is it really a better book than Too Much Happiness or Inherent Vice?) So, why not wonder why there aren’t any women or more minorities in the top 10?

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