{"id":501207,"date":"2026-05-25T02:37:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T02:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/501207\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T02:37:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T02:37:19","slug":"no-tolkiens-epic-pooh-top-books-list-is-rage-bait-but-its-of-the-highest-quality-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/501207\/","title":{"rendered":"No \u2018Tolkien\u2019s Epic Pooh\u2019: Top books list is rage bait but it\u2019s of the highest quality \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past week it has seemed impossible to move for fatheads pontificating about The Guardian<\/a>\u2019s \u201c100 best novels<\/a>\u201d list. Such rankings are an easy way to generate engagement (such as this column). <\/p>\n

Indeed, over the past few months social media<\/a> has been much taken up with fake lists, either plucked from thin air or misattributed to more respectable sources, on topics such as \u201cbest rock bands\u201d or \u201cbest ever television series\u201d. <\/p>\n

One can scroll through 50 posts outraged at the selection before encountering someone wearily pointing out that you\u2019re not arguing with the genuine views of the BBC<\/a> or Rolling Stone (or whatever). Never mind the veracity, feel the interaction.<\/p>\n

The Guardian\u2019s list, whatever you think of the results, was composed in honourable fashion. The paper asked 172 authors, critics and academics, among them Irish cultural royalty such as Anne Enright, Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn and Eimear McBride, to rank their top 10 novels and then shoved the results into a big sum that delivered the highest-quality rage bait.<\/p>\n

Even without looking at the list you could guess what the arguments would be. There is not enough genre fiction. There are too many novels written in English. It is too woke. It is not woke enough. In The Spectator Michael Henderson pondered \u201cthe problem with the Guardian\u2019s top 100 books list\u201d and decided<\/a> that \u201cwhen critical responses harden into perceived wisdom, it can end up being tiresome\u201d. Well, maybe. We will come back to that.<\/p>\n

As a perennially joyless and spiteful man, I was delighted (but not especially surprised) to find no mention of The Lord of the Rings. People really need to shake the stubborn notion that the works of JRR Tolkien comprise literature for grown-ups. I would have liked Anthony Powell\u2019s A Dance to the Music of Time<\/a>, long a personal obsession, to make the 100, but I was not \u201cdisappointed\u201d in its absence. <\/p>\n

That roman-fleuve is no longer fashionable with literary sorts and was, almost certainly, a less likely inclusion than Tolkien\u2019s Epic Pooh (as Michael Moorcock described The Lord of the Rings).<\/p>\n

What the panel delivered was a surprisingly old-fashioned list largely composed of long-established greats. The pathetic attempt in online quarters to suggest that Middlemarch\u2019s position at number one was the result of positive gender discrimination deserves only derision. Over the past 50 years or so George Eliot\u2019s masterpiece has bedded in as academics\u2019 pick of the greatest English novel. It was surely ante-post favourite for a publication that has its roots in Manchester.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, what do we get? Jane Austen and Charles Dickens secure four titles each. (It\u2019s interesting to see the once undervalued Our Mutual Friend among the latter\u2019s scorers.) James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses is in the top three. Well, duh. Big hitters such as Moby Dick, In Search of Lost Time and War and Peace are all there. So far, so usual suspects.<\/p>\n

The anti-woke tendency got some tinder for their box with Toni Morrison\u2019s Beloved separating Ulysses and Middlemarch at number two. John Podhoretz, editor of the conservative magazine Commentary, could not get to his keyboard fast enough. \u201cAmong the most ludicrous aesthetic judgments in the annals of Western culture,\u201d he fumed. \u201cEmbarrassing tokenism\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Toni Morrison examined slavery and its legacy with unflinching detailOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Morrison, among the most powerful voices in African-American literature, is, alas, no longer around to snub a nose at the critics while, with her other hand, gesturing towards her Nobel Prize in Literature. The placing of Beloved is a surprise but no sort of shocker.<\/p>\n

What we have here is a contender for that most venerable of intellectual tools: a literary canon. Furious tirades from the likes of Podhoretz only support that definition. If the list were a more committed exercise in diversity then he wouldn\u2019t be singling out one supposedly ludicrous judgment. The Guardian surely did not mean it that way. <\/p>\n

No doubt a more eccentric list would have generated even wider debate. Instead, for good or ill, we have a list of Great Books: a guide to which leather-bound volumes you should display on your most visible bookshelf.<\/p>\n

The idea is less fashionable than it once was in universities. Those complaining about the western bias in The Guardian\u2019s list are, of course, entirely correct. Harold Bloom\u2019s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a 1994 book much beloved of those opposed to academic revisionism, recommends many of the novelists at the upper end of the Guardian list: Joyce, Dickens, Proust, Kafka. By all means rail digitally about the lack of African and Asian novels. Those complaints serve as worthy footnotes to the main text.<\/p>\n

As long as those provisos are understood, however, this document, like rival canons, offers a solid starting point for those wishing to shape a literary sensibility. Deployed responsibly, a canon is an effective weapon (with apologies).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past week it has seemed impossible to move for fatheads pontificating about The Guardian\u2019s \u201c100 best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[65571,94466,31872,36097,18,117,217852,19,17,16002,13295],"class_list":["post-501207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-anne-enright","tag-charles-dickens","tag-colm-toibin","tag-eimear-mcbride","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-george-eliot","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-james-joyce","tag-jane-austen"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116632895201282882","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}