The Book List That Will Occupy the Rest of Your Summer

Somehow I missed until now Newsweek‘s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List, a highly elaborate online exclusive from June 29th. Top book lists are always fun to read, and somewhat controversial. But what makes this one especially interesting is that they “crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John’s College reading list, Oprah’s, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It’s a list of lists — a meta-list.” At a basic level, you can view the list as a straight ranking: author, title, year, cover with Amazon link, brief description of the book and which sources recommended it. Number 1 on the overall ranking is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But what gives it added value is that you can filter the selections so many different ways. If you filter by year, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, from the 8th century B.C., get top ranking, with an overall ranking of #8. You can also filter by fiction or nonfiction, date range and recommending sources. Filters can be combined to check, for instance, Oprah’s Book Club recommendations of fiction from 1921-1940. (In that category, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury comes up first, and is #5 overall.) For more information on the list, see Peter W. Bernstein’s Building a Better List: Inside Newsweek‘s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List, and especially A Note on Methodology: How We Compiled Newsweek‘s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List. The latter includes links to the original lists. And by the way, how sporting to include Time’s 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. There is yet another intriguing compilation, Newsweek’s What to Read Now. And Why. This has 50 recommended titles, topped by Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. Among the other features is Chip Kidd’s annotated photo gallery My Favorite Covers. Kidd is a renowned designer and associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf, as well as a novelist. Whether or not you agree with the choices or rankings on any of these lists, they are guaranteed to keep you busy, and Newsweek is to be commended for its bold approach.