You know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of authors being forced to use their sex appeal to sell books. First it was John "The Romantic" Keats and then it was Zadie "Quite a Lady" Smith and then we had Marisha "What a Dish-a" Pessl and now we have this. It's an outrage! A practical travesty! It's...
Oh, wait, that's actually an article about some new "greatest book ever" list. It's not about Tom Wolfe being "the hotness." Right. Sorry about that. Got hypnotized by the shirt.
The list, well, there's some new book out, and it's about some writers, who picked best books, then some other people worked mathematical voo-doo magic on it, and came up with a meta-list, and, well, you think it's wrong. The list. Not the maths.
4 comments:
But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time.
How is that "insanely rigorous"? You go to 125 (impressive!) "big-name" (meaning...?) authors who are, for the most part, inevitably white middle-class (at least) men over the age of 35 born or residing in the US & Europe, shove their lists into a calculator and then get that horribly written Times article. That's a lot of things but hardly "rigorous".
Didn't the NYTBR do this last year?
Why did you link me to the Times? You're a terrible person.
(Why the hell is a Tom Wolfe glamour shot leading that article? I don't get it.)
Right, mostly affluent white men, at least as far as the article's author is concerned (he mentions two women authors, neither contemporary). The book seems to include a few females -- three of the eight names mentioned in the Amazon editorial review. So that's at least three of 125.
You didn't mention Sebastian Junger, but that was one of the great sex-appeal marketing campaigns.
P.S. Love the blog.
Thanks for this link--maybe I'll blog abt it too. I do think lists like this are ridiculous, but nevertheless I like reading them. I do wonder what TW meant by "insanely rigorous"--it has a good sound to it, doesn't it?
Arethusa: Someone did this. Or something like this. Sometime recently. I probably made fun of it, then, too. Yikes, I'm already repeating myself. Time to quit the blog. But yeah, that Tom Wolfe picture, like...just...what?
Zen: Thanks! Yeah, I'm sad I didn't note the gender gap. I'm all about noting gender gaps right now. Can't believe I missed that one.
Lucette: Quite welcome. And yeah, rigorous does give it that "test tubes and lab equipment" feel, eh?
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