"100 Best Novels, Ever". We all love a list.

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[00:00:00]Full disclosure, I did, in 1995, have an article printed in The Guardian.

[00:00:10]Further full disclosure, the buggers never paid me.

[00:00:15]>> [music] >> Hello, my name's Gavin. This is Genre Books and earlier this month, The Guardian newspaper, um, published the results of a survey in the form of a list, a survey of 172 authors, critics, and, um, academics to determine the 100 best novels of all time.

[00:00:44]The Guardian has, uh, produced similar lists in 2015 and 2003 and possibly before then as well.

[00:00:55]But, in this incarnation, the net has been cast considerably wider. The previous lists were compiled by just the one person.

[00:01:08]This, therefore, should be seen as a less idiosyncratic, more inclusive, and presumably less controversial list.

[00:01:20]However, I suppose we're all a lot more vocal, online, visible, brittle, and irritable than we used to outwardly demonstrate.

[00:01:32]"I hate this book. My favorite book isn't on the list. It has too many old works on it. It has too many new recent books. It's pale, stale, and male, and it's diversity gone mad." All, um, accusations in the actual comments on the article.

[00:01:54]And congratulations to all those with such comments because I'm sure this list has created the kind of stir The Guardian was wanting.

[00:02:08]Now, I'm I'm not going to go through the list here.

[00:02:13]Aaron read a book or Aaron read a book has already performed [snorts] uh this valuable service and Aaron Facers has I've seen this morning given um his thoughts on the list as well.

[00:02:29]I'll link both of those here.

[00:02:32]Nor am I in a position to judge this list on the merits of those works included.

[00:02:40]Um firstly, my name isn't Aaron.

[00:02:42]Secondly, I've checked and I've only read 38 and a bit um books out of this list. I say a bit because uh Proust is on there. I've not read all seven volumes of um Recherche du Temps Perdu.

[00:03:00]And I only have, I think, an imperfect memory of [snorts] uh quite a few of those books on that list which I have read. So, no opinions about the actual books.

[00:03:12]What I want to do is take a bit of a step back, look at how a list like this comes together, its possible pitfalls, and why despite all of the issues lists are and remain um important as we build and rebuild the canon.

[00:03:37]Of course, I'm going to say lists are important.

[00:03:40]I'm a booktuber.

[00:03:41]People like lists.

[00:03:44]Or they like to dispute those lists.

[00:03:48]In that regard, they are useful.

[00:03:52]What they are not is monolithic or definitive ever.

[00:03:59]To demonstrate this, let's look a little more deeply at how this list was compiled. First, the voters. Each of the 172 voters picked their top 10 books.

[00:04:12]Many of them brought their own criteria to the process. For example, the author Blake Morrison uh said he had purposefully not chosen any work uh younger than 70 years old.

[00:04:27]I've chosen English language novels that have stood the test of time for a long period.

[00:04:35]Almost slipping under the radar there is the qualifier English language.

[00:04:42]Without the same criteria being dictated to every voter, every voter is going to bring their own rules to their choices. And if a proportion of those canvassed are arbitrarily saying no works in translation, no works after 1960, then that is going to skew the results.

[00:05:04]I would say that non-English language novels are rather um underrepresented.

[00:05:12]There's one Korean book. There's no Japanese. There's two Italian, three French.

[00:05:19]Virginia Woolf seems to have single-handedly written more great novels in the history of humankind than the entire Spanish-speaking world, which is an achievement if true.

[00:05:32]Things are literally being lost in translation on this list.

[00:05:38]And then we come to the convener of the vote.

[00:05:42]And the two things The Guardian is world-famous for um a left-wing bias and screwing things up.

[00:05:55]Let's look at the screw-ups first.

[00:05:57]People with better mathematics and a higher threshold for boredom than I do have looked at this data because, in fairness to The Guardian, you can take a lot of data. They have presented all of their workings.

[00:06:16]And um someone spotted that uh they actually miscounted My Ántonia, um which left that book languishing in the last spot. At least My Ántonia made the list. The The other um error that somebody spotted, if this is true, is far more egregious.

[00:06:39]Albert Camus' L'Étranger is sometimes published under the name The Outsider, sometimes published under the name The Stranger.

[00:06:50]These two titles were counted separately.

[00:06:55]And the L'Étranger, consequently, does not appear on the list when it absolutely should. However, had this been counted correctly, it would have bumped Willa Cather off the bottom of the list, uh another book that had been counted, it seems, incorrectly. So, >> [snorts] >> we're going to hide into nothing there.

[00:07:16]But there we have it. The Guardian, or the Grauniad as wags will still sometimes have it, is a little bit famous for making uh the odd mistake. And um I think they have a ideological problem with the concept of subeditors.

[00:07:35]The political bias, I don't have as much of a problem with.

[00:07:40]Most times, I will probably share it.

[00:07:44]It is a left-leaning newspaper, so they will likely reach out to those authors and and those academics that they know, and the critics and the journalists are typically ones who work for or have written for the paper.

[00:08:02]It's their paper, and they can do whatever they want.

[00:08:07]I am glad, however, Owen Jones wasn't picked, though he really is insufferable.

[00:08:13]And there are no influencers either, which I'm sure was um a perennial temptation in order to get more clicks.

[00:08:24]I shudder to think what the 100 best novels, as voted for by the great and good of TikTok, would look like compared to the list we got.

[00:08:35]As far as politics go, you cannot complain about a list in The Guardian looking like it's a list in The Guardian.

[00:08:44]I do miss the days when you had decent cultural input from those on the mainstream right.

[00:08:51]It gave everything a richer landscape and a more vibrant discourse, but it is up to those on the right to kick the lunatic fringe out that seems to be in charge for the last couple of decades.

[00:09:06]Still, I do my unconscious bias training at work every year, and to think that there is not some kind of self-selecting bias in operation in compiling a list like this is to labor under a misconception. If there is one thing worse than bias, though, for a list like this, possibly it's the transparency.

[00:09:29]It's a great thing that this is a list you can drill down into and see what the individual voters have picked.

[00:09:36]It is also a terrible thing that this list everyone can see and drill down [clears throat] and look at how you voted. And this aspect of transparency is the point at which I think I want to insert the complaints I have seen from some quarters that there is a lack of genre on these lists. And I think this is where this lack of genre representation stems from.

[00:10:03]It certainly is a rather establishment list. Although, you know, they are great books.

[00:10:08]But then this is supposed to be the 100 greatest novels of all time. So, what would you expect? The question of genre is a perennial one. But if you are a literary critic, a distinguished academic, a Booker winner, um are you going to choose Jilly Cooper or Terry Pratchett or Agatha Christie?

[00:10:36]Or even just a comedic novel. There is precious little comedy on this list.

[00:10:44]It's quite serious.

[00:10:48]I don't think you are going to see those works.

[00:10:50]Are you going to pick something even if it is one of the 10 books you have most enjoyed? Are you going to pick it when everybody in your industry can see what you have picked?

[00:11:08]In most cases the answer seems to be no. You are going to put um Eliot, Dickens, Austen in that top 10 and keep your job. Thank you very much.

[00:11:23]Are people voting for their favorites or what they think is best or the acknowledged best?

[00:11:30]The pressure to keep it as serious literary fiction is a real one.

[00:11:38]And of course, um these highbrow works as we might call them are intrinsically great. There's nothing wrong with literary fiction works being considered the greatest novels ever written.

[00:11:55]But but but the critics and the academics have highbrow reputations to maintain.

[00:12:06]Don't worry. The Guardian is one step ahead of you. They have reached out to some genre representatives as well. So again, they are selecting trying to select a cross-section um certainly amongst the authors of authors of works that perhaps aren't considered highbrow.

[00:12:29]Stephen King is one of those who were asked for their top 10.

[00:12:34]The most famous living horror writer.

[00:12:38]His votes will help redress some of the balance.

[00:12:43]His list of 10 greatest books of all time include Moby Dick, Ulysses, Madame Bovary, and Emile Zola's Nana.

[00:12:54]That's fine. They might well be his favorites, but I'm not sure he was selected due to his passion for 19th century French literature. R. F. Kuang, fantasy writer, modern bestseller.

[00:13:09]Her choices include The Great Gatsby, The Brothers Karamazov, Les Misérables, Buddenbrooks.

[00:13:14]Um establishment classics.

[00:13:20]And she also chose The Name of the Rose, but unfortunately Umberto Eco didn't get enough votes to make the list.

[00:13:26]But uh thank you, Rebecca. Adam Roberts and M. John Harrison have perhaps uh more iconoclastic choices if you look at their top 10.

[00:13:36]But, um I suppose, you know, even even for Roberts, not iconic iconoclastic enough to uh not choose Middlemarch and Bleak House as as part of that 10.

[00:13:49]But, of course, they could legitimately be two of his favorite novels. I don't know, and I don't much care other than with my cynic's hat on, I think certain writers were perhaps drafted in to ensure that uh Tolkien got on the list or to stave off any criticism about it being too academic or literary fiction-oriented.

[00:14:18]The transparency of the vote, perhaps the fear of being the the one who voted Hobbit when everyone else cried Virginia Woolf was too much. I do believe people may be intimidated in their choices by the fact that everyone can see what they have chosen.

[00:14:37]Um Siri Hustvedt didn't even select a Paul Auster novel.

[00:14:43]And apologies to those with uh Apple devices for for mentioning Siri.

[00:14:48]I do wonder, though, um how different a blind or anonymous vote would look.

[00:14:58]The final factor I'd like to look at is an author becoming victim of their own success, splitting the vote.

[00:15:09]Virginia Woolf, I keep mentioning her, but she is the author who appears on this list most times. She seems to have escaped this. All of the works seem to They She has a lot of votes, but they seem to be evenly distributed um enough between the books to include more on the 100 list.

[00:15:31]However, John Steinbeck's votes, less than Virginia Woolf's, but split between The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Cannery Row. So, whilst he got seven votes, none of the books got onto the list.

[00:15:48]But, the number 100 on that list only got four votes.

[00:15:52]Possibly five. This is the My Ántonia thing.

[00:15:57]Actually, even number 70 on the list only got four votes.

[00:16:01]There's There's a little fretting that Lord of the Rings didn't make the list, but Tolkien got four votes.

[00:16:08]The one person who voted Hobbit had switched allegiance to Lord of the Rings, he'd be on that list.

[00:16:16]So, no Lord of the Rings, no Name of the Rose, no Catherine the Great, no To Kill a Mockingbird, no Trollope, no War.

[00:16:25]There are famous beloved books that did not make the list.

[00:16:31]And if you feel that strongly about it, make your own list.

[00:16:36]I'm only slightly being facetious there.

[00:16:39]Present an alternative and keep the dialogue going. Every list is going to have its issues. And tastes and the canon are constantly changing. The 2003 list from the Guardian had John Bunyan, Samuel Richardson, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde.

[00:17:02]Actually, the Samuel Richardson there, I checked.

[00:17:08]He got two votes this time out of the 172 voters.

[00:17:13]One was for Clarissa and one was for Clarissa Harlow and they counted them differently although they're the same book.

[00:17:20]Can our view of the greatest works of all time change so much and so regularly?

[00:17:28]Let's hope so.

[00:17:29]Or we'll all run out of things to talk about. The only thing to change, I think, is how we talk about it.

[00:17:37]Now, without wanting to toot our own horn, I think on a on BookTube we make quite a good job out of it.

[00:17:46]People seem to be, by and large, respectful uh of each other's choices and will hear them out.

[00:17:58]Looking at the comments on the Guardian piece, um you can see that this putatively 100 greatest novels of all time has been introduced and used as a tool to batter other people over the head to further their own thought processes.

[00:18:17]Intellectualism is killing us.

[00:18:20]Books by female authors here are the reason why men don't read.

[00:18:24]Although 64 out of the 100 books are written by men.

[00:18:29]We've had enough of experts. People only read Penguin Classics to be seen reading Penguin Classics.

[00:18:36]This list isn't intellectual enough.

[00:18:37]Where's the Strindberg?

[00:18:40]Well, Yabu sucks to all that.

[00:18:43]What do I take from the list?

[00:18:46]I take it, as most things, as a challenge and a front. I'm not interested in in reading the whole list, but it is a reminder of books I have not read and that I need to.

[00:19:00]The Magic Mountain, The Age of Innocence, Things Fall Apart, Anna Karenina. I've not read any of them.

[00:19:06]There are books that are new to me on this list as well. The Transit of Venus, The Vegetarian, Pedro Páramo.

[00:19:13]Another good thing about this list and a good thing about the transparency I was perhaps suggesting wasn't a good idea is in drilling down, if I like a particular book, I can see who voted for that book and what other books did that person vote for.

[00:19:28]Have I read those?

[00:19:32]Just take what you want and move on.

[00:19:36]And don't argue with a list.

[00:19:40]It cannot argue back.

[00:19:42]Until next time.

[00:19:44]Bye.