Simply the Best

I like lists. No, I love lists. I've never been accused of having a fetish for them, but if the accusation had been made I'd be hard-pressed to deny it.

Now to dispel that uncomfortable image, here's a mighty intriguing list of the 100 Best Novels as compiled by the Modern Library Association. The top 10, as voted on by the association itself:

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath.

Wow, I've read half of 'em (2, ,5, 7, 8, and 10, if you're keeping score). What a cultured man I am! Time to go crack open some port and watch Masterpiece Theater. I should also mention that this is a list of the greatest English novels, so all you Proust-readers can take your complaints and shove 'em up Swann's Way.

The MLA also allowed readers to make their own list. I'm not sure how they picked their "readers," but let's take a look at the results:

1. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
2. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
3. Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. Anthem by Ayn Rand
8. We the Living by Ayn Rand
9. Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
10. Fear by L. Ron Hubbard

Wow, I guess by "readers" they mean "Neil Peart and John Travolta"! It was either that or some conclave of objectivists and scientologists. Yet another black mark on the name of democracy, right up there with American Idol and Kwame Kilpatrick.