Telegraph.co.uk has reported the results of Play.com’s poll to select The Greatest Novel of All Time. These things are always good for a laugh and a cry — many thanks to SF Awards Watch for posting the link.
With Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird at the top, Tolkien’s triology second and the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series third, Play.com’s list appeals to my tastes far more strongly than most. But I was surprised to see some other bestselling authors make the list with novels that weren’t what I believed to be their most highly-respected works.
J.K. Rowling got on the board with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — not the Hugo-winning Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Stephen King is represented by It – not what I’d have guessed is his most popular book, and not my favorite (which is either The Stand or Salem’s Lot).
There are lists of Greatest Novels all over the internet, but the pair posted by Random House’s Modern Library readily illustrate that every list seems to be the product of an agenda, especially in the internet age.
The Modern Library’s first list, composed by a board, follows canonical lines. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are numbers one and three. The rest of the list is dominated by the books English professors were assigning me as required reading when I was in college.
Popularly selected lists of “the greatest” are always a trainwreck. I’ve never forgotten the summer of 1975 when “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas was chosen the Greatest Song in the History of Rock’n’Roll by the listeners of CKLW – relegating to second place the more plausible candidate, “Hey, Jude” by The Beatles.
This entry was posted in Awards, Heard Online, Sercon and tagged Harry Potter, Hugo Awards, J. K. Rowling, SF Awards Watch, Stephen King by Mike Glyer. Bookmark the permalink.
While we certainly didn’t do it ourselves, I suspect that the startling vote for Plokta in this poll indicates merely that Plokta readers are more likely than Emerald City readers to be the kind of person who knocks together a quick bot to vote 10,000 times in online polls with inadequate security, and doesn’t actually reflect any great outpouring of support.
So that triumph of superfluous technology wasn’t your triumph after all?
Well, my hat’s off to whoever stuffed the ballot box — I always took the result as the appropriate comment on Scifi.com’s bland assumption that its readers would know what a fanzine is, let alone know which one is the best.
…the summer of 1975 when “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas was chosen the Greatest Song in the History of Rock’n’Roll by the listeners of CKLW – relegating to second place the more plausible candidate, “Hey, Jude” by The Beatles.
LOL. Then you must have really liked Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” where he sings “no no no” about 14 times in the middle of the song.
I didn’t mind listening to “Hey, Jude” though I can’t explain why it was so often the Beatles song that would rise to the top of these polls. And six minutes long!
Ah, yes, Ain’t No Sunshine. Not that Bill Withers was wasting words, but I think he helped create a shortage on that one.
hah, to think the beatles got beaten out by such crap. It is true, its impossible to get a good list from popularity, because crap comes and goes. Someone should make a list where evey song has to be at least 10 years old to be considered or something like that.