Top 1000 Lists

The Guardian, a daily paper over in the UK, has been running a series of articles over the last few days developing their list of the top 1000 novels. They had done a earlier set of these before focusing on movies (and apparently music albums). I had seen it earlier and didn’t think a whole lot of it, but the series came up a lot today in my RSS feed perusals, both on SF Signal and Metafilter.

While these sort of lists are good benchmarks for readers in a particular area, I’m not sure how well the series works as a whole. During a good year while I’m out in the working world, I think I’m going to be lucky to finish 50 books. At that rate, I’d finish the whole list 20 years down the line, presuming I focused solely on that task. Admittedly, I’ve finished several of the books in the past (say 50 of them; the list isn’t complete yet and I haven’t read through most of the lists). My point still stands, though. It’s a list of books that you’d be lucky to finish unless it’s your job to read books. [I'd love to have that job, for what it's worth.]

This same concept also applies to other general 1000 ‘best-of’ lists. I don’t think someone’s really going to be able to see all 1001 things you must see before you die… unless you’re dedicated and have the time and money to do so. The list of albums and movies are a bit more achievable simply from the lesser amount of time required to listen and watch the works, but you still have to be willing to put in the time and effort to do so, and I’m not sure that many people have that ability.

All this being said, will I use this list as a reference? Sure, but I won’t use it as a guide for my reading selections for the moment. Down the line when I’m done with my award lists, if I’m looking for (say) a science fiction novel, I might use that list of best SF novels as a way of guiding my selections. The list as a whole, though, isn’t for me.

–Ryan

Book Areas

I had thought about writing up a different post for tonight, but I spent most of the evening trying to finish up one of my current books. That prompted this post about my current reading goals and what I plan to do with reviews.

At the moment, I’m currently trying to work my way through the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning books; I had read a lot of them in the past due to my love of sci-fi, but there were a lot more out there that I had yet to touch. In addition, I just started looking at Agatha Award-winning novels to cover my mystery side. Before I started, I hadn’t really hit any of these books (due to the award being handed out starting in 1989), but I’m slowly making my way through them.

On the non-fiction side, I’m currently tackling Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winning books. This is a pretty monumental task due to the relative number of books to read (at the beginning, I had read only parts of 2 of the 37 winning books) and their relative size. They just take a lot more time to finish than the award-winning fiction novels.

This isn’t to say I don’t have other books I’m reading. My backlog of owned unread books is pretty darn staggering, and every time I go to the library, my eye is struck by some collection of books. Thus my progress on these goals is a bit slower than what I would like.

At the moment, I’m currently tracking my progress of the book lists over at List of Bests (there are other lists of mine that I’m tracking up there as well, but the ones mentioned above are the main ones I’m working one). What I’ll try to do is add a short blurb of my current reads somewhere (probably on a sidebar), and then post a short review up here every time I finish a book. I’m far from a literary critic, but I should be able to give people a general sense of the book, and whether you should read it or not. It’ll be a fun experiment, and I hope it turns out well.

If people have suggestions on what I should do on here, please let me know. I’m always open for improvements and [hopefully constructive] criticism.