Random House's 100 Best Nonfiction Books: A Lesson on Internet Polls | Hacker News Reader

Random House's 100 Best Nonfiction Books: A Lesson on Internet Polls

randomhouse.com

9 pointsJeffJenkins9 comments

It is a good lesson to learn that the board largely picked the books their professors told them to like in college.

Haha, that too.

The link is to the nonfiction list, yet the title of the post says novels.

Here is the list of novels: http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

The 'readers' list of novels is a big a crock of shit as the non-fiction. I might be a little pessimistic, but of the top ten:

4. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien 5. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee 6. 1984 by George Orwell

Are the only credible novels there. I'm sorry Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard are not and never have been popular enough amongst the populace to hit 7 out of 10 of the top 10 spots.

Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels List (http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100rivallist.html) doesn't have Hubbard anywhere and has Rand's two most read and best respected novels. I'm a wide reader and I can say every novel on this list has been recommended to me by someone or has gotten itself known to me by its own merits. No one has ever recommended me Hubbard, save for once at a garage sale when someone tried to sell me a dozen of his books for a quarter; I opted to pay $10 picking up the Red/Blue/Green Mars series, some Heinlein, Asimov and Clark. The woman joked that she doubts the bookstore will take them; incidentally I've got friends who've worked at Savers/Value Village and they can't shift the books and don't accept them.

I agree. The fact that Joyce only comes in at number 11 is absurd.

edit: On second look, if you exclude the top ten as extraneous, explainable due to the internet poll effect, the remainder of the reader's list isn't that bad.

Yep. Throw out the Rand and Hubbard, and the list is actually pretty good. (Although, "The Hunt for Red October?" Really? :-) )

How very odd. I think that I've read 16 of the Board's 100; some I think great, e.g. Yeats's _Autobiographies_. Others, well, Fussell's _The Great War and Modern Memory_ is a fine book, but top 100? Dangerfield is fine, but again, top 100?

Also, are we to believe that a quorum of the board had worked its way through _Principia Mathematica_? In such cases my own suspicion would be that somebody said, Gee, we need a math book--anybody remember one?

Here are some book lists:

The 100 greatest books of all time everyone must read http://bighow.com/news/the-100-greatest-books-of-all-time-ev...

Top 15 Novels About Work http://bighow.com/news/book-list-top-15-novels-about-work

Besides the obvious in the reader lists, I'm extremely skeptical of Principia Mathematica being on the board's list.

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