The Bad Boy’s Anger
One opens The Atlantic Monthly and is promptly introduced to a burst of joyless contrarianism. Tiring of it, one skims ahead to the book reviews, only to realize: this is the book review. A common experience for even the occasional reader of B.R. Myers, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft and execution. Myers writes as if the purpose of criticism were to obliterate its object. He scores his little points, but so what? Do reviewers really believe that isolating a few unlovely lines in a five hundred page novel, ignoring the context for that unloveliness, and then pooh-poohing what remains constitutes a reading? Is this what passes for judgment these days?
If so, Myers would have a lot to answer for. But in the real world, instances don’t yield general truths with anything like the haste of a typical Myers paragraph (of which the foregoing is a parody). And so, even as he grasps for lofty universalism, Brian Reynolds Myers remains sui generis, the bad boy of reviewers, lit-crit’s Dennis Rodman.
Myers came to prominence, or what passes for it in the media microcosmos, via “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a long jeremiad against “the modern ‘literary’ best seller” and “the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose.” It earned notice primarily for its attack on the work and reputation of novelists lauded for their style – Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and E. Annie Proulx, among others. Many of these writers were ripe for reevaluation, and “A Reader’s Manifesto” was read widely enough to land Myers a contributing editor gig at The Atlantic. It was subsequently published as a stand-alone book. Yet the essay was itself little more than an exercise in style, and not a very persuasive one at that. It was hard to say which was more irritating: Myers’ scorched-earth certainties; his method, a kind of myopic travesty of New Criticism; or his own prose, a donnish pastiche of high-minded affectation and dreary cliché.
I can’t be the only reader who wanted to cry out against the manifesto being promulgated on my behalf, but Myers had insulated himself in several ways. First, he had been so thoroughgoingly tendentious, and at such length, that to rebut his 13,000 words required 13,000 of one’s own. Second: his jadedness was infectious. It made one weary of reading, weary of writing, weary of life. Finally, in the The Atlantic‘s letters section, he showed himself to be no less willing to resort to pugnacious misreadings of his correspondents than he had been of his original subjects. “I have no idea why Jed Cohen thinks I have disparaged a hundred years of literature…” he wrote, in an exchange about his Tree of Smoke review. “Saying that reputations must never be reviewed would place reviewers above criticism.” No, one wanted to object. Saying that reviewers must never be reviewed would place reviewers above criticism. Mr. Cohen is himself criticizing a reviewer. But to argue with Myers was, manifestly, to summon his contempt. And so he whirled mirthlessly on, flourishing the word “prose” like a magic wand, working pale variations on his Reader’s Manifesto. In your face, Toni Morrison!
To date, I have yet to read a comprehensive debunking of the Myers bunkum. But his recent review of Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom really does seem to invite one – not so much because I liked the book and he didn’t, or because it caught the eye of David Brooks and from there spread to the far corners of the Internet, but because of the willfulness of his misrepresentations to the reader, and the radical degree of projection involved. To the long-time Myers watcher, the review, titled, “Smaller Than Life” looks to be a giant mirror: what Myers takes to be the philistinism of contemporary literature is an enormous reflection of his own.
Close Reading
Myers premises his complaints against Freedom on the “smallness” of its characters – their likeness to “the folks next door.” In support of these descriptions, he tenders a few details from the text: Patty Berglund bakes cookies and is “relatively dumber” than her siblings. Her husband Walter has a red face and his “most salient quality . . . [is] his niceness.” Richard Katz is a womanizing punk musician. See? Tiny. Insignificant. “Nonentities.” But even at this early stage of the argument, what should be obvious to even unsympathetic readers of the book is the smallness of Myers’ imagination. Set Richard Katz aside for the moment (maybe Myers lives next door to some priapic indie rockers). Isn’t “relatively dumber” – an elaboration of the idea that Patty’s siblings “were more like what her parents had been hoping for” – meant to tell us more about Patty’s self-image than about her IQ? Patty will return to the theme in her whip-smart autobiography, after all. And mightn’t some readers find this will-to-averageness “interesting,” psychologically speaking? Also: Isn’t Walter’s most “salient” quality (carefully elided in Myers’ quotation) actually “his love of Patty?” And “salient” for whom? Not for the author, but for the subtly anti-Berglund neighbors on Ramsey Hill, whose point-of-view mediates the novel’s opening section, “Good Neighbors.” Either unwittingly or purposefully, Myers has made a cardinal error. He has mistaken the characters’ angle of vision for the novelist’s.
As if to compensate for the oversight, he hastily concedes that the “insignificance” of its principals (again, insignificance to whom?) need not doom a novel itself to insignificance: “A good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody, as Madame Bovary demonstrates.” Invidious comparison alert! But Myers seems to have not read Madame Bovary, or, at best, to have paid it the same glancing attention he pays to Freedom. For the former has more to tell us about the latter’s style than about its “storytelling.”
Though Franzen’s temperament is warmer – he doesn’t aspire to Flaubert‘s fearsome objectivity – his technique relies to an unusual degree on the free indirect discourse Madame Bovary pioneered. Flaubert inhabits his characters, Lydia Davis tells us in the introduction to her new translation, in order to “[hold] up a miror to the middle- and lower-middle-class world of his day, with all its little habits, fashions, fads.” Irony is everywhere present, especially, she writes elsewhere, “in the words and phrases in the novel to which he gives special emphasis” – that is, underlining or italics.
They appear throughout the novel, starting on the first page with new boy. With this emphasis he is drawing attention to language that was commonly, and unthinkingly, used to express shared ideas that were also unquestioned.
Freedom, too, aims to be contemporary – perhaps even, as Myers puts it, “strenuously” so. But the scattered instances of “juvenile” glibness and vulgarity he portrays as its mother-tongue (“the local school ‘sucked’. . . Patty was ‘very into’ her teenage son, who, in turn was ‘fucking’ the girl next door”) are not unexamined symptoms of “a world in which nothing can happen.” Rather, like Flaubert’s common, unthinking phrases, they are necessary constituents of the novel’s attempt to show that world its face in the mirror. And if Franzen “hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically,” it’s only because he assumes his readers have read other novels written since 1850, and so already possess that frame themselves.
Not that Myers has any apparent trouble “judging the prose”; Franzen’s is “slovenly,” he insists. Nor is this the only place he seeks to have it both ways. The vulgarity he imputes at first to Franzen he finally does get around to pinning on Patty…but only to demonstrate that she “is too stupid to merit reading about.” Conversely, Franzen’s attempts at eloquence reveal him to be one of those people “who think highly enough of their own brains” that they must “worry about being thought elitist.” (Stupid people, smart people, “middlebrow” people; is there anyone who doesn’t count as a “nonentity,” in B.R. Myers book?)
It would be a mistake, however – a Myers-ish one – to read too much into this incoherence. The simple fact is that Myers’ conception of language is itself vulgar. “Prose,” for him, equals syntax plus diction, and is expected to denote, rather than to evoke. He positions himself as prose’s defender. But when he uses the word, or its cousin, “style,” what he’s really asking is for it to give way to more and faster plot. (It’s a preference Flaubert would have regarded with some amusement. “‘These days, what I really adore are stories that can be read all in one go,'” he has his protagonist say. “‘I detest common heroes and moderate feelings.'”) Myers dismisses one of Franzen’s showier metaphors – “Gene…stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman” – as “half-baked,” with no consideration for the way it connects to the Minnesota Vikings-themed rec room of the opening pages, or the Vikings garb these Minnesotans wear, or ultimately to “the old Swedish-gened depression” Gene’s son, Walter, feels “seeping up inside him . . . like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake.” Similarly, Myers writes off Freedom’s ornithological tropes as clichés, while giving us, in his own voice, sinking hearts, pushed luck, “busy lives,” “[getting] a pass,” “aspects of society,” “interesting individuals” – shopworn phrase following shopworn phrase “as the night the day.”
(This is not to mention the larger cliché of think-piece provocation – the You thought it was black, but really it’s white school of journalism. It’s no coincidence that “A Reader’s Manifesto” appeared in a magazine that was clawing back market share with cover slugs like Is God an Accident? and Did Christianity Cause the Crash? and The End of White America? and The End of Men. The approach would be codified, with no apparent irony, in the 2008 relaunch slogan: “The Atlantic. Think. Again.” But is “thinking” really le mot juste here? It’s surely no commendation for a critic that we know what he’s going to say about a novelist before we’ve read the review. Or before either of us has read the book.)
Remarkably, Myers even manages to be wrong when he tries to concede something positive about Freedom. “Perhaps the only character who holds the reader’s interest is Walter,” he writes. But the adult Walter is by far the novel’s least fully realized character. Of course, this late softening in the review is probably, like the invocation of Emma B., purely rhetorical, but I’ll condescend, as a demonstration of my own fair-mindedness, to grant Myers exactly the same degree of benefit of the doubt he imagines he’s extending to Franzen.
He is absolutely correct that contemporary book reviewers are far too “reluctan[t] to quote from the text,” but he confuses close-reading with mere assertive quotation. He consistently shows himself, here and elsewhere, to be deaf to point-of-view, tone, and implication. Indeed, he seems to revel in this deafness. (He quotes a line of capitalized dialogue – “I KNOW IT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN” – and then confesses, with italics. “I have no idea what this is meant to sound like.”) This is sort of like an art critic trumpeting his glaucoma. Or like a restaurant reviewer who can’t stomach meat.
Who’s Down in Whoville?
Of course, Myers’ real target isn’t Jonathan Franzen, or even “the modern literary bestseller,” so much as it is “our age, the Age of Unseriousness.” The old values – truth, civility, Seriousness – are seen to be under attack from “chat-room[s] . . . Twitter . . . The Daily Show . . . the blogosphere,” and “our critical establishment.” Extremism in their defense can be no vice. But, as with conservative pundits of many stripes, Myers is perfectly willing to be “truthy,” uncivil, and unserious himself, when it suits his purposes. “I especially liked how the author got a pass for the first chapter,” he huffs at one point, with the sarcasm of a high-school Heather. Thus does he participate in the destruction of value he claims to lament.
Moreover, Myers has, symptomatically, mistaken a signifier for the thing it signifies. The underlying cause of the contemporary ills he keeps alluding to is not the coarseness of our language, but our narcissism, whose most “salient” form (as I’ve argued elsewhere) is a seen-it-all knowingness that inflates the observer at the expense of the thing observed. In this sense, B.R. Myers couldn’t be more of-the-moment. It’s no wonder he’s baffled by those turns of phrase by which the novelist seeks to disappear into his characters.
Finally – and most damningly – Myers has little to tell us about beauty. For Flaubert’s contemporary Baudelaire, beauty was
made up of an eternal, invariable element . . . and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be. . . the age – its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion.
In his dyspeptic disregard for what might be amusing, enticing, or appetizing about the world we live in – his inability, that is, to read like a writer, or write like a reader – B.R. Myers has placed contemporary literature in toto beyond his limited powers. He offers us, in place of insight, only indigestion.
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!