Thursday

Modern Library Rankings

My son, Jack, is trying to read the greatest works of modern fiction. I got him started with Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Sound and the Fury, Wise Blood, etc. Those were obvious. In order to find more options, I googled "best 100 modern books" and I came across a nifty site by Random House: 100 Best Novels.

The site has two lists: The first, by the experts. The second, by ordinary readers who have registered with Random House.

Now, I could be wrong, but it would seem to me that readers who care enough to register at a book site are probably, at a minimum, middle-brow readers and, possibly, high-brow readers.

So what do these readers enjoy? Well, they love Ayn Rand. The acerbic Rand currently locks down four of the top eight spots, including numbers 1 and 2. That's quite a showing, but then again, L. Ron Hubbard locked down three spots in the top ten, so my assumption about the registrants' "high-brow" character might be terribly erroneous.

The lay readers, though, get quite a few things right. They put Tolkien in the top 10 and Flannery O'Connor in the top 40 (the experts snub both writers, as well as Rand and Hubbard).

I was even more struck by the non-fiction Top 100. The Randites are again out in force, logging Rand's ridiculous The Virtue of Selfishness at number one (I read it in high school and remember thinking it was vapid, and I wasn't exactly a very thoughtful teen). But they also put Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson and Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine in the top ten. When combined with two Rand books, that gives libertarian thinkers four of the top ten slots. In addition, works by Tibor Machan, Hayek, and Rothbard made the top twenty.

So regardless of whether the voters are middle-brow or high-brow, it would appear literate people are taking free market economics seriously. By that, I'm encouraged.