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‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
Five Reasons Why I, Exhausted and Cynical in Advance of Christmas, Came to Feel That Compiling a List of My Favorite Books Made Our Culture Worse

In answer to your question of which is the best short poem I have read in the English language I can only say that I fail to see how there can be a ‘best’ poem, long or short; that is, one best in all circumstances. This attempt to appraise by comparison is, if you will allow me to say so, one of the literary vices of the time, only a little above the inquiry who is the biggest poet, novelist or prizefighter, although not quite so low down as that deepest deep of literary valuation, ‘who is the biggest seller.
From a letter by Thomas Hardy to the New York Times, 1814

The most controversial list was the Modern Library 100 best novels of the century list. The list was controversial because the selection committee was primarily a bunch of old white males and because they picked old white male books – very few by women, very few recent books and many that, frankly, are crap, though the one selected by readers, with four by the totally talentless Ayn Rand and three by the equally talentless L. Ron Hubbard, was far worse. It also seemed that the selection process was not all it should have been. Any list without Pynchon and Ballard is, frankly, not worth considering. The following are some of the articles commenting on the list:

Selection committee member, Edmund Morris in the New York Times
Ron Charles in the Christian Science Monitor
Jamie Allen, CNN
Steve Rubenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle
Francine Cunningham in the Irish Times
Katha Pollitt in The Nation
Tom Moran’s point of view
The authors reply (a witty set of e-mails from Henry James, Edith Wharton, Hemingway, etc. on the list – from Slate)
Edward Champion is reading them all (scroll down to read his essays on them – he is also reading the non-fiction ones)
As is Pam Reynolds Klocke

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