Time Imitates Art

Via Mannion, who got it via Linkmeister, comes TIME Magazine's list of the 100 Best English-language Novels published since 1923. Link explains, “Why 1923? Because that's the year Time started publishing.”

Whatever, Time.

Link notes the list is “highly subjective,” as these lists tend to be, and Mannion takes issue with some of the list's rather strange choices, particularly Gone With the Wind:

But it's on the list for the same reason Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret are on it---so that there are novels that the average TIME reader will have read. All of those, except for Gone With the Wind, are good books too but they have another virtue as well. They are all standards of high school reading lists, which means that teenagers can have a connection with the list.

I think something else seems to have influenced the list. Take a look at it. Does it also strike you, by any chance, that an inordinate number of books on this list have been turned into films that are either award-winning, regarded as classics, or have a cult following? I suspect many of these books would likely be off our collective radar (not to mention left off this list) had they not been turned into films of some acclaim.

Unlike Mannion, I happen to like Naked Lunch, but I don’t think it belongs on any “best” list, aside from perhaps “Best Books Written by Morphine Addicts Who Killed Their Wives During a Game of William Tell.” (In fact, I think it’s a shoo-in for that list.) If David Cronenberg (following not long after the 1985 documentary Burroughs) had never turned Naked Lunch into a film, which quickly developed a devoted following and introduced a whole new generation to its author’s work, I daresay the novel in question would have escaped consideration by the compilers of this list.

And I wonder if even a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, which inarguably deserves its place on the list, is offered some advantage because of the spectacular film made of its story.

In any case, these lists usually suck, and this one’s no different. Until I see a Best of… list that contains Parts Unknown, Life of Pi, and The Secret History, I’ll remain decidedly unimpressed.