Second Thoughts

Time magazine recently chose the top 100 novels written in English since 1923, the year the magazine started. There has been a fair bit of derision (and conspiracy theorizing) from bloggers about Time’s “authoritative” choices, which are of course quite subjective.

Richard Lacayo, one of the two critics who formed the list, noted that they had to disclude a few writers who they really liked, but who had written better short stories than novels (Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme)—this sort of problem is addressed well in a Guardian article about stuffing literature into categories and then drawing up qualifications according to those categories, and why we shouldn’t do it.

This clever idea is the funniest way of responding that I’ve yet read. Who need professional critics? Go democratic opinion!