Literary lists The summer harvest of “best books” rankings

The Economist, Sep 3rd 2012, 17:51 by A.C. http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/09/literary-lists

EFFORTS to rank the world’s stories are necessarily biased, often pedantic and always incomplete. Still, such lists are a regular feature of the literary sections of newspapers and magazines, and now book websites and blogs. It is during the dog days of summer—followed closely by the New Year news-hole—that the rankings are usually trotted out.

The summer of 2012 has been no exception. Indeed, it has produced a bumper crop. We have views on the 100 top young adult novels from America’s National Public Radio, the 70most important post-war European novels according to Die Zeit, a German weekly, and a tournament among 36 contenders for the Great American Novelist, organised by theGuardian in Britain. In a sly bit of one-upsmanship, Publishers Weekly, an American trade journal, has even produced a list of the ten most difficult books. 

Before clicking to see how many of these toughies you have read, know that your correspondent notched up three. For this is the main purpose of such lists: they let us measure our intellects against some lofty standard—and each other—while providing self-satisfaction and more than a hint of snobbery. And they reaffirm a sense of worth against the massing philistines whose preference for entertainment over art determines bestseller lists.

A decade ago, John Carey, a British literary critic, lambasted such lists in his compendium “Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books.” To Mr Carey, book snobs “frighten off would-be readers”. So do lists of great books, which “seem like end-of-term reports, dispatched to the Almighty, to show Him how well his earth creatures are doing on the cultural side”.

Yet guides to the “best” books endure. Perhaps that is because they can be roadmaps, optimistic outlines of an ideal life of the mind. They provide an illusion of control over our incapability to get through even a fraction of the books that interest us. We will get to really read when we retire, we imagine. And so we keep the list to hand. More to the point, the making of such lists is what we expect, even demand, of book reviewers. It is after all their job: to make judgments, separate the literary wheat from chaff.

Yet the Guardian and NPR sought consensus, summoning an online community to coalesce around some notion of quality. In the case of NPR, more than 75,000 people nominated titles that were winnowed down by a jury of children’s librarians and booksellers. At theGuardian, a participatory tournament is currently pitting authors against each other one book at a time, in what Matthew Spencer, the originator, likens to a Euro Championship-style knockout format. Each system has yielded rich veins of great reads and revealed interesting cultural differences. (The American effort mirrors presidential politics, with its popular vote and electoral college, while the British is a cross between Wimbledon and the World Cup.)

The format of the seven-week series on the European canon that concluded last week inDie Zeit is more serious (and thus profoundly “Deutsch”.) Not content to simply list major writers or titles, the paper assigned reviewers to ten novels chosen as the most important of each decade since the second world war. The paper of record for Germany’s liberal intelligentsia, Die Zeit acknowledged that such “old-European ordering systems” are discredited, but still useful in trying to define a continental cultural identity. In this it too is reacting to an existential threat—this time to Europe itself, if not to big-L literature. It would be foolish to imagine one European quality that “could in fact hold us together,” writes Iris Radisch, the paper’s book editor. “But we have a pretty big suitcase filled with pretty good books. And we think it possible that we might find an answer there.”

It bears noting that the summer of 2012 will be remembered for the staggering sales of a quasi-pornographic juggernaut without a shred of literary merit. In this light, the lists drawn up by readers in America and Europe perform an almost existential function. If, as many believe, the literary novel is under threat, what could be a better, if unconscious, rearguard action? “Fifty Shades” repelled by 100 great titles, or 70, or ten.