Courting Controversy, But In A Cowardly Way

As the magazine America trusts to report on tips for longer life! when there's no actual news to put on its cover, Time has a unique station enabling it to bring culture and thought into the waiting rooms of America's dentist offices. So it has attempted to do with the story in BlogPulse's no. 15 link today, a list of the top 100 "all time" novels in English published since the magazine's first issue appeared in 1923. (Ulysses, James Joyce's modernist epic and the greatest 20th century novel, was published the year before, and is not included on the list. If Time had not included this proviso on what books they cited and which books they excluded, we woulda been layin' the smack down up in this humpy bumpy.) But the magazine's editors have made some puzzling choices on including some famous authors' books, but not others, and not ranking them, per se, but rather listing them all in alphabetical order. Regular BlogPulse readers — and thanks to our new partnership with AOL there are millions more of you out there now — know that we have little patience with annotated lists. But it's almost not even worth getting mad about an unranked annotated list. What's the point of doing them? The Elegant Variation at least describes it as serving a basic purpose: "There's plenty to talk about in the list, and a nice added feature - some of the books feature links to the original reviews." Just another way that Time is proud to improve our national character.

Posted by Philip Ewing at October 18, 2005 10:03 AM

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene