Book List Ballot Box Stuffing

Modern Library, the highbrow imprint of Random House did one of those 100 Best Novels list things that anyone can do. Since such lists are ubiquitous the value lies in the prestige of the listmakers. Modern Library which reprints classic works of literature would seem to have that sort of clout. Indeed, their list is full of the usual suspects. This particular list could have been made any time in the last fifty years and not have been much different.

Say what you want about contemporary fiction, but there is a notable absence of anything written in the past twenty-five years. The literature canon ossified solid about the time that John Steinbeck pushed James Fennimore Cooper off of required reading lists.

Honestly, if you make such a list in this day and age without including at least one book by Toni Morrison, you are setting yourself up for accusations of fuddy-duddyness. Slaughterhouse Five doesn't appear until number 18, but I can live with that, even if I don't recognize a few of the books rated higher.

Where they really made a mistake was in letting the readers vote on their own list. Methinks some folks with a little too much time on their hands and some rather ideological agendas did some ballot box stuffing. Let's compare the top ten in each.

THE BOARD'S LIST ULYSSES by James Joyce THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner CATCH-22 DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

THE READERS' LIST ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee 1984 by George Orwell ANTHEM by Ayn Rand WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

So according to the readers of this site, the greatest authors ever were Ayn Rand and L.Ron Hubbard, followed distantly by J.R.R. Tolkien. Noted horndog and crypto-fascist Robert Heinlein gets five entries on the longer list. I could go on for days about what this says about the internet community at large, but I won't, largely because I dislike death threats from rabid cult members.

But it does make clear to me why Ron Paul is not President in real life and why we better never go to online voting for things that really matter. At least not until the counting software is really, really secure.