The New Classics?
 

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,2020...207349,00.html

I thought it was funny to see The Road and Bridget Jones Diary on the same list.

The Road better than Into Thin Air? This list has no credibility.

This may be the worst of these sorts of lists I've ever seen. And I'm a McCarthy fan. But consider the source.

Bel Canto and The Lovely Bones were two of the worst books I have read in the past 25 years. Yuck.

One of the few things they got right.

Seriously? A "classic"?

They did the same thing for movies and it was the worst list of movies I have ever seen.

The secret purpose of the best of these lists is not to get the right ranking, but to have a subtext, a theme.

Here is a great one from the Guardian:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/art...061083,00.html

I call it great not because I adopt the ranking. I don't. I like how it makes a statement. The subtext? Story over literary pretense. Note Joyce gets the smack down. Ulysses is obligatory, but relegated to number 45, and nothing else from Joyce. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man always shows up on these lists, but not here. Also, there's a heavy bias for novels originally written in English (of course, the Guardian is in London), despite the ironic no. 1, which no one could strongly argue against since it is likely the first Western novel ever written.

Aargh!

"27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man."

Why don't people ever talk about Levin! Seriously, Anna's descent is only used as a foil for Levin's rise! It's the title that throws people off.

Yeah, I was just trying to tease Waters and the others around here who dislike Krakauer.