Graduate school in the humanities, particularly a doctorate in literature, is not a life choice whose value and purpose are necessarily self-evident. Some people look confused when I tell them that I am getting a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century British literature. Most others respond with some version of, “What do you do with that?” What follows is a sustained answer to this question – the why and the ‘to what end’ of a life, or an interlude, in the groves of academe. If you’re wondering what the grad life is like, or why anyone chooses such a life, read on.I went to graduate school, I’m now quite sure, because I enjoyed nothing more than reading novels, poetry, and plays, and because I didn’t know what I wanted to do and because they’d pay me to read books and take classes. Not much, mind you (especially by the standard of the starting salaries my friends were being offered by investment banks) but when you’re used to work-study wages and have a morbid fear of suits and cubicles, $20,000 a year (plus tuition, health insurance, free books and meals, a computer, language study, travel to archives abroad…) is a princely sum. Especially when it comes with access to one of the country’s most beautiful campuses, an excellent library, and astonishingly bright faculty and fellow students from all over the country and the world. Genteel poverty seems a small price to pay – and sometimes itself a gift – to be a part of such a community.One of my pet theories is that the American top-tier university is as close as humanity will ever come to realizing a utopia, and Stanford, with its vast expanses of lawn, citrus, fig, and palm trees, flowering vines, and sun-tanned young people, even looks the Edenic, pre-lapsarian part. Certainly now, by and large, universities are in the business of giving students credentials and connections – that is to say, getting them good jobs in finance and business, getting them into the best schools of law and medicine. But if you forget the use-value of a BA from a top-tier university for a moment and consider the texture of college life, the utopian aspects appear.The physical surroundings are usually beautiful or inspiring; your professors are bright and interesting and challenging, very often the top of their fields (Guggenheim fellows, Nobel laureates, Genius grant winners) – people who are defining the disciplines they teach; all of your basic needs (food, shelter, health care) are met, and even if you’ve got a campus job and take your coursework as seriously as possible, there still seems to be plenty of time for conversation, parties, intellectual debates, experimentation with sex and drugs (for those so inclined), and other extracurriculars of all sorts. You are free of your parents and not yet burdened by a “real” job, or paying back your student loans, or any of the other weighty personal and financial responsibilities that descend in adulthood. Through your peers and professors you are exposed to myriad cultures, philosophies, theories, and causes, and are free (theoretically, at least) to devote your mind and your life to any one of them, or (less dramatically) simply to take solace or pleasure from Buddhism or Plato or Kant or Shakespeare.In sum, you are largely free from oppressive responsibilities, in a beautiful place, with unlimited access to gifted people and inspiring ideas. What could be better? And why wouldn’t you do it all over again a second time with the university itself footing the bill?That was my thinking about graduate school. At least, that’s what I thought before I started and at the beginning of my time at Stanford. And I still hold my utopia thesis about undergrad. But it is not entirely true about graduate school.As a graduate student, you go behind the curtain a bit more, and particularly as this relates to professors, it can be rather harrowing. I was fascinated when one of my professors told us about creating a persona: We needed, self-consciously, to fashion ourselves (appearance, theoretical approaches, research interests, even behavior and speech styles) in order to be successful academics in literature. He was only half-serious, I think. But with the persona theory in mind, I started noticing and remembering things: A very beautiful, young female professor I’d had as an undergrad, fond of mini-skirts, high-heels, and low-cut blouses, teaching something called Modernism and the Body – An academic’s Elle McPherson, as it were. There was also a Romanticist whose pale complexion, wild hair, large, dark eyes and volatile temperament seemed a quintessence distilled from the Brontes and Shelleys; A scholar of postmodern literature and culture interested in cuteness who embodied her subject ably in a pair of pigtails. Among the dix-huitiemeists, there was a pronounced preference for a rather Samuel Johnsonian turn. And I wish I meant only devastatingly clever quips and deeply humane acts of generosity (which I do), though I also refer to his apparent lack of interest in clean linen (in an era not particularly distinguished for such: see Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England) and his possible Tourette syndrome.This is a minor detail and by no means universally true. It is usually amusing – like people who look like their dogs – and can be instructive in its way. But it is also part of a larger culture of self-importance, self-indulgence, and cultivated eccentricity that can get old: not showing up for office hours and exams, forgetting to send job letters, taking students failings personally and walking out of seminars after yelling something nasty at the class or an individual, attending to matters of personal hygiene in lectures, falling asleep in conference seminars, mystifying the requirements for a seminar paper or dissertation chapter and then becoming enraged when these mystified requirements are not met, asking for changes to a paper and then asking for just the opposite in the next version, using graduate students as pawns in professional rivalries – to name a few generalized examples of the unsavory side of professorial eccentricity.There are actually worse stories outside of the English department about professors who use graduate students as handmaidens and valets (to pack their bags, chauffeur, entertain guests, do laundry…) but I’ve never heard those tales first-hand. I also once heard (what I will call a legend) about a professor (English, I think) who, when asked about her sexual preference, replied simply: “graduate students.”But these are not my tales to tell. And, as far as occupational hazards go, the dangers of being yelled at irrationally and occasionally forgotten are mild, I think. Especially when what you get as recompense is a great deal of time in the presence of intellectual brilliance. There is some saying about exceptional people and how one is willing to tolerate in them behavior that would not pass in individuals of lesser personal and intellectual magnetism. I forget the exact words, but the notion, however expressed, is unapologetically elitist and perhaps only evidence that I have been in the groves too long and have had my brains addled. I do not think so.Intellectual virtuosity can be breath-taking – as breath-taking as listening to Beethoven’s 5th or 9th or seeing a Vermeer in person or Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, or whatever it is, man-made or natural, that you might find completely arresting and captivating. The best professors have minds as agile and flexible – as wonderful to behold in motion – as the bodies of professional athletes. I am waxing, I know, but part of the attraction of graduate school is the faint hope that by proximity to and tutelage from such minds as the best professors have, that we too, we novitiates, will ourselves one day be virtuosos and priests of knowledge.This is not the case for most. There is a lot of attrition in graduate programs, and even if you do make it to the end and get the degree, many are rewarded for their pains with joblessness, or a “hardship post” (there are many mythical worst places to get a job, the one I know is Southwest Texas Christian Women’s Technical Community College), or a string of adjunct positions that make for a gypsy-esque, migrant existence (a year here, a semester there – no job security and often no benefits). The English department at Stanford claims a 90% job-placement rate for its students – if they’re willing to go on the market three years in a row. Stanford also has the advantage of being a very small graduate program and so it has fewer students to place.Getting a job is a yearlong process and extremely competitive and grueling. In the fall you consult the jobs list and see what’s available in your field (Medieval, Renaissance, sometimes Seventeenth-Century, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British, Early American, Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century British, Modern British, Anglophone, Contemporary American, Theory). All of the fields have further refinements (poetry, drama, novels, Victorian, Modernism, Asian American, African American) and subtleties of periodization (long 18th Century, versus 18th Century and Restoration, for example), and this means that the first year you go on the market there may not be any jobs in your particular area of expertise in the country. Of course you’ll try to sell yourself for jobs that you’re almost a fit for, but it’s hard when there’s another candidate (or a hundred) who do exactly what a given university is looking for.You submit recommendation letters from your dissertation committee, a job letter summarizing your dissertation, your research interests, and why you’d be a good fit for the school, your CV, and a writing sample (for some schools it is as much of your dissertation as is finished), and you wait. In November you hear if you’ve gotten any interviews at the MLA Conference in December (the Modern Language Association is the professional organization for professors of language and literature). The MLA takes place immediately after Christmas every year, and if you’ve gotten any interviews, these consist of your being examined on anything and everything by three or four faculty members from the school to which you’ve applied (usually your teaching interests, your dissertation, and some form of thinking-on-your-feet questions about your period).Of the ten or so applicants interviewed for a particular position at MLA, usually three are chosen for a campus fly-back. These three are flown to the campus sometime between February and March and give a lecture to the entire department faculty. After all of the candidates have completed their visits, the faculty vote and the candidate with the most votes is offered a job. This job offer comes sometime in the spring – or, it doesn’t. And then you do it all over again the next fall, and perhaps the next after that too. And that’s not even getting into fifth-year reviews and tenure proceedings once you’ve gotten a job. Alternatively, I am told, one can go into consulting, think-tank and non-profit research, marketing, high school teaching, and archival and curatorial work, but I don’t know how often or easily these happen.”Good work if you can get it,” one of my undergraduate professors called university teaching – and that “if” clause is not to be underestimated.There are other dark aspects too, that come earlier. Studying for qualifying and university oral exams can be devastatingly isolating. I think it’s a line in Shadowlands that says something to the effect of “We read to know that we are not alone,” but I assure you, in month two – or four, or six – of being immersed in the Cavalier poets, Ranter prophets, Milton, Bunyan, Behn, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, et al, you come to know a loneliness of the most rare exquisiteness. You might also find yourself sobbing a lot about how stupid you are, living on a diet of coffee, red wine, cigarettes, and proprananol, not getting out of your pajamas or brushing your hair, and sleeping badly with dreams of your teeth rotting and falling out. I generalize, of course.And even when the exams are over, there’s a lot of angst and self-hatred among Ph.D. candidates. This probably owes more to self-selection than the atmosphere of graduate school itself, but there’s something to be said for nurture in this case too. Literary scholars are ultimately critics and an atmosphere of relentless criticism, can be, well, relentless, as well as somewhat absurd. One of the fall-back ways to generate your own original critical take on a literary work or concept is simply to take issue with someone else’s reading: “Blahblahblah’s account of Romantic sensibility fails to account for __________ and fatally neglects to consider_____________” or some such. And students and professors use this same technique on each other in seminars and lectures. In the style of negative campaigning, there is a tendency to attack or show-up others’ readings of things and thereby to show oneself as supremely clever. There is a slightly disgusting general tendency to perform cleverness – when a speaker’s point or question is not to get to the crux of a literary work but instead to announce to all in attendance his or her superior smartness. And then there’s the famous jargon – acculturation, narrativity, aestheticize, dialogism… And the continued fondness in literature departments for theorists like Freud and Marx. It can feel petty, ridiculous, and vain – not about literature or history or culture at all, but about petty ego-driven bickering and self-aggrandizement by silly, small-minded people, of which you are one.I realize I have said very little about literature itself and it is worth mentioning how literature changes when it becomes the object of professional study. I think the ideal way to imagine becoming a professor is to think of yourself as a living counterpart to libraries and archives – a person who becomes a receptacle of knowledge about a particular historical period and its literature. It is your job to animate this knowledge, keep it alive, add to it if you can, share it with students, and impart it to the next generation of scholars (if you get that far). You have to have faith in the importance of the literature and history you choose and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time mentally there. It’s odd and anachronistic and hard to explain to those who don’t do it. Sometimes it’s hard to remember yourself why you do it. You also have to keep caring because there’s not much in the way of praise or material gain to keep you going if you lose faith.There are transcendent moments – when you feel you’ve gotten a novel or a poem – figured out something true that no one else has said; or an afternoon squirreled away in a rare books room looking at, say, an early nineteenth-century folio of etchings and biographical sketches of “remarkable person” (i.e. dwarves, giants, gypsy queens, cross-dressers, political and religious radicals, a “pretended rabbit breeder”) and are utterly absorbed and content. But there are other days (more days, I find lately) when you are full of self-doubt about your intellectual and dispositional fitness for the scholarly life, and doubt about the worth of your research, and the worth of the profession altogether. Sometimes you feel tired of the pressure to have a clever and unique take on every novel and poem and play that you read (and also to remember other people’s clever and unique takes on them), and books become sources of anxiety and potential humiliation rather than of pleasure, instruction, or escape.Horace counsels to seek truth in the groves of academe – and there is certainly some to be had. I have encountered great and instructive minds and literary works in my time in the groves, and though it has brought me no wealth or glory, and may well not get me a job, it has been and is a luxury and privilege. For all of the folly and absurdity to be found in academe, there is something mystical and sanctified and rarefied as well – something I am glad to have known.
I’m surprised not to see Sarah Waters on either list.
I was so happy to see that readers included Jhumpa Lahiri after a snubbing by the panel.
Oh, and ditto Murakami.
I think something to take away from the whole exercise is that it is silly to ascribe merit numerically. Number one, number three, number thirteen—these are basically meaningless distinctions (unless, I suppose, you are running a race). Consider the Modern Library 100, which creates a fairly arbitrary, often ridiculous, hierarchy between books, using basically the same process used for this list (which is, to reiterate, *not* a round-table consensus-type situation, but one based on tallies). Folks seem a little grumpy about The Corrections’ number one spot. Of course it feels a odd to call The Corrections “the best novel of the millennium.” But I don’t see how any of the novels we talked about this week would be less troublesome in that lauded position (unless, naturally, they happen to be your particular favorite).
We’re all just having a good time, right?
I would take the readers’ list over the panel’s anytime. The Corrections is only notable for the Oprah huff, other than that its professorial navel-gazing which is why it was at the top.
I thought that The Interpreter of Maladies came out in ’99.
What is it with people and “professorial?” I keep hearing this adjective leveled at things I find conspicuously intelligent, but maybe it’s meant to denote some tone or rhetorical trait to which I (a quasi-professor) am as deaf as a human to a dog-whistle. Do people hate professors? I’ve always sort of liked them. At any rate, between Chip, Gary, Denise, Enid, and Alfred, there seems to be something for everyone in The Corrections. But maybe not?
You conducted a big poll and went through all of the trouble of tabulating and organizing and compiling this list and that’s what sits at the top? Why even bother with the whole exercise? One thing has been made definitely clear though: what most professional writers want, more than anything, is not to be the best writers they can be, but the best that the market wants them to be, to be rich and famous. Yawn. So the best example of fiction writing so far this decade is an enormous, encyclopedic novel written by a very tall white guy who wears glasses. The more things change the more they stay the same. I think this comment should end with a cliched statement like that in honor of your cliched, safe, zeitgeist-approved choice.
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey?
I’m surprised at how _Kafka on the Shore_ did on the reader’s list. I felt like it was one of Murakami’s weakest novels ever (and maybe that’s a testament to his skill and ability).
Both _White Teeth_ and _Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell_ were excellent books. Definitely among my favorites of the millennium.
The whole point is to spur debate, right? Now’s when the fun begins. My personal quibble: no Aleksandar Hemon? I nominate Nowhere Man. (Oh, by the way, Hemon is also a tall white man with glasses. Oh well.)
I personally love tall white guys who wear glasses. Sexy!
And is anyone really surprised that the top book is one that’s been a commercial and critical success? In order to get the #1 spot, a book had to have the most votes, and it would be difficult for a less well known book to win, simply because the fewer people who have read a book means fewer people voting for it.
I know people who hated The Corrections or thought it mediocre, and that’s fair. But I also know people who hate a book simply because lots of other people like it…
That said, I enjoyed The Corrections very much, I had fun nominating my favorite books, and I loved reading the write-ups for all the ones that made the list. I can’t wait to get my hands on American Genius and Mortals, two books I knew very little about before the list was published.
Where oh where is China Mieville? As far as I’m concerned, he’s the tops–at least in fantasy/science fiction. But THANKS for excluding the author of Angels and Demons, whats his name!
EUROPE CENTRAL should be among this august list, but I can only assume few of the Millions voters have read it. It’s long and difficult, don’t you know, and its subject matter is not trendy. Vollmann’s execution of his great ambition is intimidating — few of the authors here (Bolano, perhaps a couple of others) could conceive of such a project, let alone complete it. And following its example will not make you a more marketable young writer.
Sorry to be so snarky, but, really….
Also, KAVALIER AND CLAY, TREE OF SMOKE, and OMEGA MINOR
How about Netherland?
The stand-out quality of The Corrections, and the reason it deserves a spot at least near the top (if there has to be a list at all), is that it’s a genuine novel of social criticism (that is, not social criticism masquerading as a novel, or vice versa). Franzen deserves praise for revitalizing the form. It’s more Jane Austen than John Updike.
Interpreter of Maladies did come out in ’99, and as such, should be disqualified. (That’s not to take away from its quality or the quality of Lahiri’s writing. Just that it doesn’t meet the criteria for inclusion.)
I think both of these lists are full of great novels and story collections. The comments are focusing largely on what wasn’t included and the consensus seems to be that the big, difficult novels got the shaft. I’m not sure this is entirely correct, as 2666 placed pretty highly on the list. Perhaps a book like Tree of Smoke lost out because it’s taking a while for readers to digest it, but again, 2666 puts the lie to that theory. To suggest that a book like Europe Central didn’t make the list because nobody must’ve read it is nutty. I read it. It wasn’t in my top 5. It’s an incredible book and it digs into consciousness in a way I’d never seen before, but I happen to think The Corrections is a better novel. Big and difficult doesn’t always equally better and more impressive, despite what the commentors on this site so often suggest.
While I agree with Tom, I still wouldn’t give it anywhere close to the top spot. I thought it was pretty middling, and I don’t necessarily think we need any sort of “return to form” in an era where new voices, traditionally kept out of mainstream publishing, are finally coming to the forefront.
I think Junot Diaz deserves that number one.
But hey, great list! It’s nice to just have a compiled list of suggested contemporary reading, which – for some reason – is difficult to come by. (But I’ll take suggestions) .
Dang it – several sources I looked at said 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, but I guess that’s just when she won the Pulitzer… So, Unaccustomed Earth got several votes – how about we swap that in (and counting the combined votes she got for her three books, Lahiri deserves to be on there.)
I think the panel’s list is stronger, but both are missing some key books… but that’s always to be expected. I enjoyed these lists!
Oops, I was one of the people who nominated Interpreter of Maladies on my reader’s choice list, and somehow also convinced myself it came out in 2000. But Unaccustomed Earth is great! I’m curious, did The Namesake get many votes? I’ve never liked it as much as her short stories.
Actually, Laura, it looks like The Namesake didn’t get any votes, but Unaccustomed and Interperter got almost the same number, and combined would have moved Lahiri up the list a few spots (it seems like most folks agree with you that Lahiri’s short stories are where it’s at).
Garth:
I think “professorial” has become a synonym for “intellectual.” On the one hand, I understand how someone would criticize a writer for this trait. Some writers, like many professors, can take the soul out of a story. The heady language, the “ideas,” obfuscate the feelings and emotions.
But, for the most part, the label of “professorial” is lazy. I’ve heard the tag thrown at Pynchon and DFW, for example, but I’ve encountered some of the most beautiful, well written, emotion-filled passages in both of their books.
I understand the criticism some readers have about “The Corrections.” The language, at times, does seem to take on the self-pity and cynicism of its characters. I too struggled with this, and I think it’s fair to call attention to it– as many notable critics have. But, overall, I’m certain Franzen was well-aware of this. So the questions should be why does he write like this and, secondly, is he successful? In all, Franzen has an incredible talent for family drama, and the book is incredibly well-written and challenging– two traits any great novel should have.
What I don’t agree with are the knee-jerk reactions to the book. Franzen tends to catch the same lazy criticism as Pynchon and Wallace and Delillo. And you are right to challenge the term “professorial” in this case, which, in essence, is a cynical attack on ambition. These attacks, many of which come from those who haven’t read the books in question, stem from a misunderstanding about the writing process and, in general, irreverence for authors who experiment and try to push the form.
Most writers, to counter W.S., aren’t out to be famous. To accuse Franzen of this is ridiculous because “The Corrections” is an anomaly. Serious writers with literary ambitions don’t make the long dollar– most artists without a mind for entertainment aren’t the ones living in luxury.
And irreverence: this is a trend I don’t understand. Many like to bash “high-art” as pretentious and elitist and snobbish. It’s as if great art is all a facade, a hoax. The people who make it are intellectuals and the people who consume it want to look smart. No, great art is ambitious, challenging, and requires a finer taste.
And to “The Millions” crew and the writers who participated: thanks for the list. I don’t agree with some of the books, but who cares? The numbers game is a matter of preference, and there isn’t a dud on the list. Thanks for sparking conversation, reminding me of books I’ve read, and encouraging me to read the books I haven’t.
I have to agree with PJ about Aleksandar Hemon. Nowhere Man didn’t make a big splash when it was published, but it is (I hope) one of those books that will keep growing in stature as the years pass. Few writers have ever captured the dislocations of the refugee/exile experience as vividly as Hemon. The book is structurally dazzling, and the way Hemon reinvigorates the English language puts native speakers on notice that their mother tongue has grown tired of being taken for granted and has found herself a new lover.
I’m okay with the White Teeth snub because, though it’s a fantastic book, the ending’s pretty damn lame. I wonder if Tree of Smoke didn’t make it because, well, it’s massive, and it’s hard to vote for something you can’t finish.
“Most writers, to counter W.S., aren’t out to be famous. To accuse Franzen of this is ridiculous because “The Corrections” is an anomaly. Serious writers with literary ambitions don’t make the long dollar– most artists without a mind for entertainment aren’t the ones living in luxury.”
Right. Most writers long to live in penury and anonymity. Especially writers like Franzen, which would explain his habitual need to tell other people why whatever it is he is working on at any given moment is exactly what the publishing world, and the reading public, needs.
I think the problem with your argument is your example. Franzen is a middlebrow novelist working with traditional material to make what amounts to more of the same. The Corrections is just another in a long line of novels that flatters its audience into thinking that their lives have some kind of universal truth to them, as if a Chef, a Writer and a Businessman are avatars for all of humanity. The Corrections, to me, said nothing new about anything and did it in a way that was neither innovative nor exciting. I guess that it was picked number one by the panel shouldn’t really come as a surprise when you see who made up the panel.
I too think Oscar Wao deserves the top slot (and agree about Hemon and would have loved to see Colum McCann somewhere) but as some have observed the rankings are pretty subjective anyway.
On a separate note, while I am amused at some of the sharp rhetoric flying around, I also think it’s great to see so many so passionate about books and reading. Three cheers to the Millions for sparking such lively conversation!
The lists are very solid top to bottom, but am I the only person surprised by the lack of love on either list for Atwood’s Blind Assassin? Seems like a rather prominent omission.
I’m also curious if any of Philip Roth’s books from the decade got any votes.
I voted for the Blind Assassin, PScott! That was the one I felt sad about.
W.S., there are undoubtedly things to be said against The Corrections, but you’re getting a touch personal there.
PScott,
I considered a couple of Roth books — namely The Human Stain — but in the end, they didn’t make my top 5. If we did this same thing for the 90s, I might have picked American Pastoral #1 overall. There were actually quite a few authors whose best work seemed to happen in the late 90s, and as such, just missed the cut.
It’s interesting that The Corrections has been labelled “professorial,” considering that the occupation and the ivory tower are the target of some keen (and hilarious) satire in Franzen’s novel. Also, evidence for Franzen’s beliefs in the pleasures of writing and reading is all over the place. Alas, the suggestion that something is trying to be intelligent does leave the impression of elitism. As readers, though, it’s up to us to enter a dialogue with the writer and not just approach art as a cheap fix, but as a means of communicating something of value. I think Franzen does this well.
I love Oscar Wao and Jhumpa Lahiri! I got two copies of The Known World for m birthday years ago and COULD NOT FINISH IT! I just lost interest in the plot around page 300, and did not feel like slogging through to the end.
I actually read Middlesex last week and loved it. I read Cloud Atlas earlier this year and enjoyed it qute a bit (except the longest story in the middle). The Road I was forced to read by my book club and thought it was okay.
I have read 9 of the top 20 “readers choices” (6 of the top 10) but almost none on the critics list.
I look forward to reading The Corrections soon.
It seems unfair to exclude The Savage Detectives considering its English translation came later and its impact was most certainly felt in this millennium as opposed to the last.
Also, I found it more inventive than The Savage Detectives in nearly every way: http://wwtawwta.blogspot.com/2009/05/2666.html
p.s. W.S. = Will Speers?
LB
I’m very surprised that “Life of Pi” did not make the list. Regardless of what you think of Yann Martel’s other work, this one should stand the test of time.
Life of Pi? Really?
Went searching for Norman Rush’s Mortals, found it in the remainders at Book City in Toronto for six bucks. Not bad.
Out Stealing Horses is a personal favourite. I was pleased and surprised to see it in the Pro list as it seldom gets a mention
Shout out to “Gould’s Book of Fish”, by Richard Flanagan.
“The Corrections” is the best novel of the millennium, so far? C’mon. Seriously?
How utterly boring.
That choice is more a reflection of a writerly clique than the book’s worthiness.
For the record, I have read six of the twenty critics’ choices and seven of the twenty readers’ choices. The Corrections is one of those. I was underwhelmed. Franzen can write a sentence, but the book lacked depth.
As one example of a flaw, the scene with the talking poo is derivative of Mr. Hanky of South Park fame. Mr. Hanky has been around since 1997, so South Park gets credit. And, I guess, my biggest problem with the book was that Franzen seemed primarily interested in zaniness (like the fish down the pants which seemed for all the world like a Seinfeld (Kramer) bit.) rather than saying anything new about the human condition. And, no, his one-dimensional shots at big pharma, the cruise industry, etc. do not qualify.
Still, the two lists are outstanding and provide the spur I need to catch up on some of the millenium’s best (if sometimes overrated) writing.
I was so pleased to see Austerlitz make both lists; I admire Sebold so much and I’m planning on starting The Emigrants soon. What is it with our need to “rank” in order, by number? I like the idea of bounded sets or intersecting circled sets of favorites instead of lists. With a list, where do I start…at the top? I’m interested in the intersections and what else is being read. I’m probably gonna start with Gilead, Cloud Atlas, and Never Let Me Go, based on how near they were on the list to other favorites that I’ve read. It’s all so…whacked. But what a great load of fun.
I contributed titles, but none of mine made it in the top 20…I figured they wouldn’t, but I’d love to see the entire list of submitted titles if that exists somewhere! It’s fun to see which titles got chosen the most, but I’d be more interested in seeing everything that was nominated and how many votes each title received. Max, would that be a possibility?
Hi Leah, Thanks for taking part. I’m not sure if we’ll be publishing the readers’ list of titles – probably not – but we have published the panel’s list.
Corrections??? How can that be? It is a novel of cartoons.
Very high on my top 20 list would be Kathryn Davis’s “The Thin Place,” Kate Walbert’s “A Short History of Women,” and Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth.”
My fave book of the decade is “Sacred Games” by Vikran Chandos. How can these idiots omit it?
I’ve read only Murakami, but looking forward for top-list… Thanks!