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Originally Posted by Deepflow
The problem is that the list is only supposed to be "top 100 novels", not "100 most important novels", not "100 most enjoyable novels" not "100 most influential novels" or any number of different criteria all of which would have produced different lists.
This leads to a list which has a hodge-podge of different styles and different kinds of books that people think are "top" (whatever that even means!). Your point about being able to think of exceptions to this sums it up well, it's true, you can find books in there with philosophical depth (probably, I've only read 14 of them remember, and nearly all of those are in the top 20), but you can find books in there that will be a paradigm example of pretty much any other genre you care to mention..
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Well if 'top' isnt reducible to some combination of terms like important/enjoyable/deep/influential then I'm not sure what it's meant to mean.
The problem with democratic lists like this is that mediocrity will generally be pushed to the top. You see the same sort of thing in lists of the"100 Best Music Albums Ever" - if you asked 50 people who had listened to a lot of 20th century music to vote for their favourite 10 albums, you'd probably end up with 50 very very different lists. And when you tried to combine these to give the final list, youd most likely find that everyone loved completely different things, and that the majority of albums only had 1 or 2 votes for them . And the only albums that are likely to have lots of multiple votes would be the cliched 'safe' choices like the Beatles/Pink Floyd/Bob Dylan that everyone had heard, and your final list would hence be filled by these sort of bands, even though very few of your 50 voters will have actually had them in their top 3. So the result is a list of inoffensive albums that everyone can tolerate, but very few people really love - I mean hey, noone hates the Beatles right? And this looks like what has happened with the book list - is there anyone out there who is really going to say that Catcher in the Rye or Of Mice and Men is one of the best books theyve ever read? Probably not, but most people will agree that theyre 'decent', which is why they come so highly placed.