"I felt like they were trying not to oversaturate with any particular author which is why they grouped Harry Potter and left off some significant works , but that still astonishes me that LOTR isn't on and the Hobbit is so low. That's probably the worst moment. That and Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck in general) not being on there."
I agree on Steinbeck/LOTR...
I've never understood the idea of trying to keep such a list from being over saturated with one or two authors, though.
I mean, if it's a Top 100...it's a Top 100, if someone wrote work after work that deserves to be placed in there, put them in there.
Excellence shouldn't be penalized for casting such a shadow over everyone else.
^The preceding sentence may have smacked of snobbery...view discretion would have been advised, but as you're reading an Obi comment, you probably already expected this sort of thing anyway. ;)
Bleak House, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield FOR A START should have made it from the Dickens canon...the first three especially, I'd put those three in the Top 50 easily.
And that's just one example.
"I agree with Obi on Ayn Rand, I assume this was cobbled together by committee in which case I would definitely tell the other members of the committee I would happily let it be on the list...significantly lower. There's some stuff I like that I still wish would make way for better books...Hitchhiker's Guide, for example, which is a fun book and I really enjoy it, but I wouldn't ever list it in the top 100 of all time."
1. Hooray, we agree on Rand!
2. I'm actually going to say that I'm OK with THHGTTG being on the Top 100...it's in there at #99, I can fathom that, it's a fun book and I think is actually a pretty great satire on human significance and insignificance, the absurdity of everything from politics to religion, and so on...I see it as, if not the Gulliver's Travels of our time, then at least in that same vein of satire, and I'll happily let it stay at #99...
Especially as (for good reason) drama and tragedy tends to trend to the top of these sorts of lists, a little pinpoint humor near the bottom doesn't hurt.
Besides, poor Marvin deserves a break already! :)
"I do work in publishing,"
DO YOU NOW...well, when I finish my book (to the screams of terror and terrible exasperation) I guess I should ship it off to you then, right? :p
Because I have to tell you, TO--I promise you...
I'm a better writer than James Heller.
JOSEPH Heller no, he was brilliant...but I think I can out-write "James Heller," and apparently he's the real mastermind behind Catch-22 according to this list, so hey, you've got a star in the making! ;)
"Don't mistake me SacredDigits, I wouldn't mind if the list had a fair share of those, but they are missing a lot of 'undisputed classics'. Also, I definitely could pick a few books to get off the list, especially for stuff like don quixote which is normally at the top of book lists, or someone like kafka!"
+1...moving on...
"All "Greatest" lists are intellectual masturbation. I mean, we can't decide on a greatest baseball player with a century plus of statistical analysis and thousands of games for testing it."
Yes we can. It's Willie Mays. Willie Mays is the greatest baseball player of all-time.
And I'll shelf the literature-nerd-Obi and dust off the baseball-nerd-Obi and fight ya on it if you dare suggest it was DiMaggio, Cobb, Ruth or *shudder* Bonds. :p
ALL of the above were great players (well, 3 were great players and one was on the road to HOF greatness until he decided to become The Incredible Hulk) and I'll even spot you Ruth as possibly the best HR hitter ever (him or Aaron, I refuse to entertain Bonds the cheater in that discussion) and Cobb as arguably the best pure hitter and baserunner ever...
But in terms of doing it all--hitting for average, for power, baserunning, stealing bases, fielding, throwing, and the X Factor--it's the Say Hey Kid Willie Mays all the way, damn it.
;)
(If we were going for a Starting Lineup I'd go,
Catcher: Johnny Bench
1st Base: Lou Gehrig
2nd Base: Rogers Hornsby
Shortstop: Derek Jeter
3rd Base: Mike Schmidt
Outfield: Willie Mays
Outfield: Ty Cobb
Outfield: Ted Williams
DH: Babe Ruth
Pitcher: Walter Johnson overall, but if I have on game to pitch with my life on it, I want the man who's signed baseball I have, the greatest Jewish athlete of them all, Sandy Koufax!
There now! That wasn't so hard, now, was it? Oh, the wars of baseball nerds...)
See, ckroberts, that wasn't intellectual masturbation...that was just me being a nerd! :p
"Deciding on the greatest work in an artistic medium is even harder -- how do we define "greatest," for instance?"
I'm almost tempted to try and answer this unanswerable question by saying that the greatest are defined by our somehow knowing they're the greatest and being left with so many reasons and yet in the end still so little to adequately justify our claim.
Willie Mays is the greatest all-around baseball player in the same way Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language--
You can cite statistics, moments, works, etc., but their de factor status is upheld by something which transcends all that and isn't so easily explained.
(Yet another reason, to digress to the diamond again, why I think baseball dwells a bit too deeply on the statistical side when they pick Hall of Famers...you can boil baseball down to statistics the same way you can boil down Shakespeare to just the black and white on the page...and yet we all know something's lost in baseball and Shakespeare alike if you use stats or merely the print on the page to evaluate a player or an author...a diving catch is recorded as a simple "out" in the statistics, but we all KNOW as baseball fans that was no normal out, that took a special something extra from the player diving for the catch...likewise, when Patrick Stewart or Judi Dench or Kenneth Branagh delivers a line of Shakespeare, it somehow carries more of a punch than it does if you or I just read it in our heads the way you're reading this bit of type--it's the same words on the page, but there's more to the words than just the words, just as there's more to baseball than just the stats.)
"That said, I will defend The Road in this particular list. In my very limited opinion Cormac McCarthy is the best living novelist."
I'd rank him very highly...Top 5...
I think I'd put Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Toni Morrison and maybe Philip Roth ahead of him...Harper Lee is still alive, but while TKAM is better than any one of McCarthy's books, he's written enough that I think he can still be safely ranked ahead of her...and then there's Salman Rushdie, who I plan to read soon, so I can't say for sure whether he's ahead of McCarthy or not, but on reputation alone he probably deserves to at least be in the conversation.
"Also, where is Heart of Darkness? I'd expect it to be top fifteen."
It should be on there...Top 15? Maybe. Top 30 for sure...probably Top 20.
I have a love-hate relationship with that work--tremendously important and it's just teeming with great and searing ideas and such memorable images and characters, but Conrad has a way of making one sentence feel like five and the style is somewhat exhausting and tedious from my point of view (and again, I LOVE long works and long sentences--I have to, given that, well, that's how I write, I'd be something of a hypocrite if I said I liked everything short and sweet--but Conrad's style just isn't my favorite. That being said, it's not bad and could be worse--I think of all the novelists I've read that I'd deem "good" and keep on my bookshelf, Henry James is the one who's style I hate the most. He creates such great characters--Isabel Archer, the governess and kids from "Turn of the Screw," etc.--and dynamic scenarios...but then he ruins it with sentences that constantly feel like they're 5 clauses too long and don't flow well, especially when it comes to dialogue. In that respect I think he's the anti-Jane Austen, who has a great and very fluid style, especially in terms of her dialogue, and that helps at least keep the conversations her characters are having interesting and listenable, which is good, because half the time I honestly couldn't care less as to what frivolous high-society gossipy topic she has going on at the moment. But anyway.)
"if you don't like the 100 EW came up with in this impossible task, how about counter-proposing 100 titles of your own that you've personally read?"
Done! ;) I'll draw up my list after this post.
"PS. I hated Tess of the D'Urbervilles."
Well, I can think of one work you're already going to hate my putting in my Top 100 then.
:p
"Why did you even post this, Obi?"
Didn't you read the title of the post, ghuh? That's why. ;)
Spying
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