Why I hate ‘top 100’ book lists (and can’t stop reading them)

What is it about these Top 100 book lists? They are absurd. If critics choose them, they reflect only the critics’ tastes. If chosen by the public, they reflect only what people interested in voting have read and liked. You can’t say these are the best books of all time; you can only say they represent something about readers’ choices at a particular moment.

And yet like many others, I find these lists compulsive reading. I want to see if my favourites are on it, or if a book I hate is high on the list. Then I moan and groan and avidly wait for the next list to appear.

The latest poll is from an ABC Radio National drive to find the 100 best Australian books of all time. This is a welcome antidote to international lists, which heavily favour American and British titles and rarely mention Australian books. You can nominate a shortlist of up to 10 books by October 1 and the final list will be announced live on a countdown on October 17 and 18.

I wonder what book will be number one? Possibly a Winton or a Garner or a Dalton or a Zusak – a book by a contemporary writer because these are the books most people read. Patrick White, long regarded as Australia’s best writer, is out of fashion. And whether we like it or not, fashion rules these lists.

I’m not alone in my concerns. A Canadian writer, Thea Lim, wants such lists abolished. “By design, a work of art… is unique, incomparable,” she writes in The Walrus newsletter. “But we resort to describing literature by how it stacks up to totally unrelated texts, because rating stuff is burned into our brains by the competitive economy.”

Here’s an idea. How about picking out the bottom 10 from any list of 100 to read?

This voids the book’s intrinsic worth and turns it into a floating commodity like Bitcoin, she claims. “Next time you talk up a book, experiment with constraining yourself to solely what’s between the covers. Don’t reach for a comparator.”

And yet comparisons are an intrinsic part of the book industry. Novelists pitch to publishers by saying their book is like two popular titles by two other authors. Prizes, awards and fellowships, not to mention bestseller lists, are all about comparisons.

So why not compare a few recent Top 100 lists? Radio National’s Top 100 Books poll last year was an international one, but bestselling Australian books (Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe and Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief) took out the first two places and two other Australian bestsellers (Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words) made the top 10.

The Guardian’s Top 100 novels list this year, voted in by authors, critics and academics worldwide, was much more angled towards the classics. George Eliot’s Middlemarch took out the top spot and the rest of the top 10 were all golden oldies. Ulysses, long regarded as a particularly challenging read, was at number three.

The New York Times recently did a survey of 503 “literary luminaries” to determine the 100 Best Books of the 21st century and it’s a very literary list. Number one is well known: Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend. But I confess I’d never heard of number two, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction story of how black Americans migrated across the country.

Here’s an idea. How about picking out the bottom 10 from any list of 100 to read? Usually the ones at the top are predictable, but the ones at the end are passionately loved by relatively few, and that’s a great space to explore.

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