This week, The Guardian released a hierarchical assembly of the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide as the 100 Best Novels of All Time. In the process, also offering insight into their deliberation of "Jane Eyre" over "Wuthering Heights"; "Ulysses" over "Catch-22" and consideration into which title came out on top and how, in their related feature, "The Story Behind our 100 Best Novels List". Lisa Allardice for The Guardian continues by establishing the timing of this assembly of authors, and critics and the value of this exercise to the contemporary environment of language comprehension. "Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years." For one representative consideration of these statistics and the intellectual reality of these factors at work, see The Atlantic's “The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books”. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis, “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised." The Guardian quotes Margaret Atwood's observation that, "Lists procreate; they give rise to other lists,”. In 2003 The Observer’s then literary editor Robert McCrum compiled a list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time itself inspired by the BBC’s Big Read earlier that year, which asked the nation to choose its favourite novels. McCrum’s more informal polling “roaming the office for a week and buttonholing colleagues about their favourite fiction” - resulted in a list that was, as he admitted, “partial and highly personal”.
"Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial - all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive - this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway, your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible. But where is Nancy Mitford’s glittering 1945 "The Pursuit of Love", which deserves a place for its last two lines alone? The comic novel, like science fiction and crime, rarely fares well in bookish horse races. Patricia Highsmith makes the cut, but not John le Carré - or Stephen King, for that matter. Happily, for her devoted fans, Ursula K Le Guin is recognised for "The Left Hand of Darkness", with which, according to the critic Harold Bloom “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time”. There are no children’s novels, either - no "Wind in the Willows", or "Charlotte’s Web", no "Harry Potter". It is a very grown-up list."
Illustration credit: Lisa Sheehan
