"Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.
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. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list....
i1.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2.Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6.Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7.The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8.In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9.The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10.Middlemarch by George Eliot"
http://www.time.com/time/arts/articl...578073,00.html
Comments?
I've only read four of these books - I'm definitely not a man of letters, I guess.