I’ll repeat myself. It’s when we see educated people confidently doing something senseless that we know we’re close to the zeitgeist. The Telegraph has published a list of “The best 20 novels of all time”. ChatGPT estimates that tens of millions of novels have been written over the centuries. Different languages, cultures, historical periods.
Still, our list’s compiler is in earnest: “I swapped books in and out of the running for weeks … I was haggling with myself over a couple until the end.” Imagine. Readers rise to the bait and continue to swap and haggle. Why was Dickens left out? And Kafka. Why was Sally Rooney included? It’s a scandal. Disagreeing, they affirm such things are worth doing.
They’re in good company. In 2003, the Guardian published a list of “The 100 greatest novels of all time”, eighty-three of them written in English. In 1999, Le Monde listed the best 100 novels of the twentieth century, seven of the top ten in French. Responding in 2021 to a New York Times “last 25 years” list that included mainly American authors, Corriere della Sera produced a counter-list, but excluded all Italian authors because they were “too close to home to judge”. Italy’s a dangerous place to make enemies.
A Norwegian list boldly widens the field to include all books of any kind and has Chinua Achebe, Hans Christian Andersen, Dante, Gilgamesh and Job in the first five. Helpfully, Wikipedia offers a list of the best best-of lists, all from western countries. But – besting them all – a website, thegreatestbooks.org, deploys “a specialized algorithm” to bring together “658 ‘best of’ book lists to form a definitive guide”. Crime and Punishment comes in eleventh, Winnie the Pooh161st, The Betrothed 273rd, Normal People 1,198th.
“Definitive” gives it away. We’re talking control, putting things in order and possessing them, the same spirit that in recent years has been spawning those smug headlines: “Five things we’ve learnt from this”, “Ten things we know about that”. We get a grip on the world so we can be better achievers, because we recognize achievers. “So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list?”, asks the Guardian.
To think I began my own literary adventures supposing that rich and complex accounts of the world had the function of drawing the mind to a contemplative state in which the desire for easy meaning…
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