COLUMN: Rating the century's best book

From Marisa Katz's, "Ineluctable Modality of the Visible," Fall '98 From Marisa Katz's, "Ineluctable Modality of the Visible," Fall '98My friends know me as an avid fan of James Joyce; and readers of this page may know me as the one with the cryptic column title from Ulysses. So when the Modern Library Board put Joyce's epic at the top of its "100 Best Novels of the 20th Century" list this summer, many people came to me for my opinion. I don't claim to come even close to understanding the mammoth text, but I can't help wondering how many of those bookstore patrons realized what they were getting themselves into, or how far they got into their reading. USA Today seemed to sum up the majority sentiment with its front page headline: "Ulysses (huh?) tops best books list." But what really impressed me was that, beyond creating a lot of confusion with its list, the MLB got everyone talking about literature in a way I hadn't previously witnessed outside my English courses. "The List" was a big topic for debate at Newsweek's Paris office where I was working -- especially since the bureau chief is the son of Deliverance author James Dickey. In discussion, we categorized all the books according to whether they were AD (Above Deliverance) or BD (Below Deliverance). Writers were spoken of as if they were racehorses. "If he could beat Hemingway, why don't you think he could beat Fitzgerald?" Along with this discussion, even more than with the American Film Institute's "100 Best Films" list, which came out around the same time, people in all circles started looking for reasons why their favorite books weren't ranked high -- or didn't make it on the MLB list at all. With a little prying, the faults of the rankings became clear. In fact, it turned out that they weren't rankings at all. The MLB members (predominantly representative of a single demographic profile) had been asked to check off 100 books from a pre-selected master list of novels (many of which they hadn't read). Only with the five most frequently mentioned novels were they permitted to specify any sort of priority order. And the panelists didn't know whether they were ranking according to personal taste or social impact. Still, despite these methodological shortcomings, many people gobbled up the list, taking its word as law. If you'd finished a majority of the books in the past, you could consider yourself well-read. If not, you had a long summer reading list. Why such excitement? The most probable explanation I can come up with is that people are hungry for an alternative to The New York Times' Best Sellers List, which at this point has become far less indicative of quality than of the publisher-generated publicity behind new works. At least that was universally the case until a couple years ago. The recent exceptions are, for the most part, a direct result of Oprah Winfrey's book club, which has proven that word of mouth is the most successful weapon against corporate dollars. And so I got to thinking: As a so-called intellectual community, couldn't Penn also carry a fair amount of clout when it came to recommending a good read? In this vein of thought, this semester The Daily Pennsylvanian is going to conduct a "Best Novels of the 20th Century According to Penn" poll. Students, faculty and staff are welcome to submit. Check out The Daily Pennsylvanian Online at dailypennsylvanian.com in the coming weeks for further details. It's probably a stretch to expect that we could influence The Times, but at the very least we could generate some conversation amongst ourselves.