Here's the Guardian's explanation, "Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list":There's no way in the world that 7 of the top 14 novels here were written by women.
— Ted Joy (@TedJoy71) May 16, 2026
In fact, there's only one really great novel written by a woman in the past 200 years and that's Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchel.
I'd rate it as the greatest American novel of all time. https://t.co/6OJWFjTDk9
The most striking difference between this list and its predecessors is an increase in female writers: 36 out of 100 compared with 21 in 2015 and a paltry 16 in 2003, with only Jane Austen’s Emma and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the top 10 of both previous lists. The number of women rises as the decades go by; half of the contemporary writers are female. This might not announce the decline of the great white male, but it does signal a much-needed reset.
Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, “anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged”. Virginia Woolf famously declared it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. OK, it is not as obviously passionate as Wuthering Heights..., at No 20 on our list, or as fun as Pride and Prejudice (at nine). But all human life is here.
Another undisputed masterpiece is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved at No 2. Just as Eliot wanted to make the lives of ordinary people real, so Morrison set out to make personal the experience of enslaved people. Beloved confirmed her as the great American novelist of her time. This devastating novel will haunt you for life.
This is the kind of talk you hear from enthusiasts of the novel. These things haunt you, they won't allow you to go on with your life unchanged.
It made me think of this line from Michelle Obama that's been haunting me since 2008: "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
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133 comments:
No Huck Finn in the top 100. Mark Twain completely booted out. Unbelievable.
Hare's the list
Another shit list from corporate media. Yawn.
Novels were a core creative outlet prior to the rise of film, TV, and recorded video. As such, the greatest effort went into them before the year 1900. See the billions of words and 500 page doorstops written by the Russians during their cold winters.
Novels have slowly fossilized and now compete with the literary back catalog. Still, people love to be part of a generation that "did something special." The rankings shift because they came up with ways of praising Hemmingway for "what's not there," living authors, and females.
The same BS happens with music and the visual arts too.
Middlemarch, Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, War and Peace - seems less of a list of great works than a jobs program for English professors.
It's the season for pseudo news. As summer approaches we get treated to all kinds of "stories" that could be written anytime, but are saved for the season when so many vacation, because they are meaningless stories meant to fluff out pages light with actual, you know, news. I'm creating a pseudonews tag for this season. This story gets my first one.
As with all prize lists, the real fun is spotting who is out.
And they omit Twain from their discussion of authors who are omitted! Astounding.
The Guardian generates and publishes this list not to establish some new canon, but to generate buzz for The Guardian.
Given the reception I see globally, they were very successful.
Huckleberry Finn has to be in the Top 100 along with Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.
I would rate Frankenstein, Part II by M. Reese Kennedy ahead of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. And, of course, my script was adapted from Kennedy's novel.
I couldnt get through middle march i did like daniel deronda
Love Mark Twain, always disliked Huckleberry Finn. My dad couldn’t believe we had to read Twain’s worst novel in school. I agreed with him.
Lurch was right about her husband bit not in the way she believed…
Counting up the genitalia of the authors is the most anti-art and politicized horseshit of literary review.
In 2000, the American Film Institute published its Greatest Movies of the 20th Century. The D.W. Griffith classic, Birth Of A Nation came in at #24.
When they updated the list after the Summer of George Floyd,Birth Of A Nation was no where to be seen.
The Guardian's shift to preferring female writers represents this type of erasure of classics in order elevate the mediocre in the name of diversity.
"as Stephen King points out, compiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task. King is one of more than 170 novelists, critics and academics the Guardian polled for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100. But, as he argued, 10 books is “not enough!”
So it's about selling today's messages
There are some books that literate people are supposed to like--books by Proust, Joyce, Virginia Wolf. Their books are difficult and, to my mind, not worth the effort.. George Eliot was a major writer and her books are readable and worth the effort, but, if questioned, even she would admit that she was no Dickens. Has anyone here read the Toni Morrison book? It's always on the best novels list, but it sounds intimidating. At least they're no longer touting Pynchon as a great novelist.
Different books for different people.
Men tend towards Biography/History and heroic fantasy in literature.
Women read porn. Vampires and Billionaires preferred.
Is 50 shades of grey still the best selling book ever?
If you think GOT had a bad ending, you should read Huckleberry Finn.
Nobody who puts Beloved, Ulysses, and The Sound and the Fury on "top book" lists has ever read them.
Like Hemingway said, you have to ignore the last few chapters of Huckleberry Finn, basically everything after Tom shows up, but doesn’t tell Huck that Jim was free, you are, of course free to disagree with Hemingway that it is a great novel if you like, and certainly readers today seem to overwhelmingly prefer cliterature, but it is a great novel.
As for Gone With the Wind, I was laid up and stuck watching movies, and if you watch Vanity Fair, and then watch GWTW, you will see Mitchell took Thackery’s novel and just switched wars.
I never understood why the corporates chose Stephen King.
He was not a good writer.
While I Lay Dying is way better than Sound and the Fury.
I loved "My Antonia," but "Huckleberry Finn" was better.
Maybe someday, "Nervous Conditions" by Tsitsi Dangarembga will be rated the greatest novel of this century, but I doubt it.
The full top 100 list is actually not bad. I have read a lot of them. There are definitely a few, "this is supposed to be good" and some DEI additions that don't belong and some notable exclusions as other commenters have mentioned. But there are a lot of really good books there.
Huckleberry Finn made me cry when I was 9. Still does. It is the absolute most important American book and bless your heart if you don’t know this in the deepest depths of your soul.
I gave a copy to a girl I met in Perth, 1983. She wrote me letters about that book for three years (She missed the point).
Podhoertz is right.
Tokenism over Tolkienism.
"It's the season for pseudo news."
In Britain they it the "silly season".
I had to read Beloved twice for classes in high school. It certainly didn't haunt me at all. It was . . fine, but rather tedious and uninteresting. Honestly, quite forgettable and in actual fact, mostly forgotten. Although grading on the rather generous curve defined by American literary fiction, I recall it as better than average.
Actually, all three of the top three seem somewhat overrated here. They're not bad, as such, and probably better than average. Middlemarch I would rate highest of the three, with Ulysses and Beloved sonewhat below, the three straddling, say, the representative works of someone like Booth Tarkington in between. And while he was regarded as a fine author an hundred years ago, practically no one reads Tarkington today -- I probably wouldn't have, myself, if his works hadn't been free on Project Gutenberg. In fairness to Joyce, though, I can imagine rereading Ulysses again, and my opinion might change.
Stephen King is chosen because he is a highly successful writer, and equally opinionated, each with the right kind of footnotes.
Guardian: The inclusion of more female writers the past two decades signals a much needed reset
Also Guardian: Reading levels are at their lowest in 20 years
It's a mystery.
The Drill SGT said...
King is one of more than 170 novelists, critics and academics the Guardian polled for their top 10
I think we found the problem with this list...
Huck Finn is indeed the greatest american novel.
In his prime Stephen King was a reliable, high-volume hack. He generated commercial IP content for film/TV adaptations and volume sales in airports. JK Rowling did something similar with Harry Potter and youth fiction. Just derivative, mass-market, polished pulp fiction. Good novels make bad movies, and bad novels make good movies.
Huckleberry Finn works well as youth fiction, but by the time I first read it as a teenager, the plot was obvious, predictable, and forced.
In many videos of what not to do when writing a book...
Stephen King makes an appearance.
Nuking randall flagg's city is such a bad ending to a book that was so long. And they made a movie about it.
Recent achievements are ALWAYS overrepresented in “Best ever” lists.
When recent works are favored and the field openly discriminates against male and especially anti-white male voices, it is only natural that women will take more spots than can be justified on achievement alone.
GWTW was a great story about female narcissism though, at least the movie, where Clark Gable’s and Hattie McDaniel’s characters back and forth winking and eye rolling at Scarlet’s behavior was the best part of the movie, I never read the book, so not sure if that aspect of the story was in there.
Huck Finn is so great because it's a fun read about a history that we are all still living.
What is ayn Rand, Chopped liver
Atlas Shrugged
We the living
Fountainhead
Anthem
Or sue Grafton
John Henry
Ayn Rand got tagged as a "right wing icon," whereby anyone who mentions her immediately gets lumped in with the right. The Guardian is left-left.
Supposedly Twain spoiled Huck Finn because his agent had contracted for a certain number of chapters without consulting him, so he didn’t end it when he should have, and wrote several frankly racist chapters with Tom torturing both Huck, who loved Jim, and of course, Jim.
“Women read porn.”
Men, however, stay away from all porn.
Men and porn are complete strangers.
lolol
I never read the book, so not sure if that aspect of the story was in there.
My memory (it's been a few decades since I read it) is of book Scarlett being a different person from movie Scarlett. More cunning, so probably no eye rolls.
Eva Marie said...
“Women read porn.”
Men, however, stay away from all porn.
Men and porn are complete strangers.
lolol
Men watch porn. It is nasty and addictive and we call each other out on it. Nobody thinks porn is a good thing and I think men that fall into that trap need help.
I was wondering if you would take the bait. You are naturally defensive and anytime someone says something negative about women you attack.
You are defensive and have been trained to attack anyone who calls women out on bad behavior.
Many people have noticed that when men fall prey to porn addiction they are shamed and people try to stop them.
But when women fall prey to their porn addiction you cannot call out their bad behavior. They get defensive and huffy.
Like you.
Have you ever thought about why that is? Do you think it is a good thing to let women spiral down into a cesspool for filth like "Milking Farm?"
Why do you think it is a good thing to let women behave badly and never hold them accountable?
Too many religious shysters perverting religion today to force the kids to read Huckabee Finn. They might catch on to the charade Twain exposed in his America that carries on today, especially in the post Bush Cheney years.
Spank her hard, Achilles.
She either wants it, is asking for it, or has it coming...
Put the defensive woman in her place. Meade don't put up with the grrlboss shit here, lol.
I can't complain a whole lot about the list 2-13 that is visible in the capture photo- I have read all of 6-13. Of 5-2, I only attempted to read Ulysses but gave up about 100 pages into it.
For many centuries, The Aeniad was considered the top epic poem, but I think that spot now belongs to The Iliad. Paradise Lost is no longer even mentioned. Some people still like the Divine Comedy, but I found it rather gory. People just aren't into epic poems anymore.
One of the most popular "genres" in "women's literature" are stories where an older man is in a sexually abusive relationship with a younger man.
The genre is so popular that it is making it onto mainstream shelves.
But if you ask why this kind of story is popular with women... REEEEE!!!!!!
Stemship exploded
Anybody get hurt?
No, mam. Just a nigger killed...
America as it was. Twain told the truth. About America's religious con men too. Writer don't do that today.
It's costly to be honest.
What is ayn Rand, Chopped liver
No, just a really bad author (and not a very nice person, either).
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Once set the goal of reading the "great(est) books" with "War and Peace" being the one I most feared starting. My impression, when I finally read it, was that the author was being paid by the chapter. Sure there was a grandness to it but, I've seen better intrigue on "Dallas" and it was a couple chapters too long. Stephen King's best work, IMO, is his shortest work.
Drop some titles, Achilles...
What's your kink?
Plenty watch gay porn, but it sounds like you read the books?
The most impressive writer to me is P.G. Wodehouse. He's the one with an absolute command over the English language. It's impossible to pick one book from his oeuvre as the finest, so you won't see him on lists like these. Plus he's a comedian, so he's not to be taken seriously.
Here's Stephen Fry on the master.
Any by Muslim authors? Starmer told me they played a rich part in Western civilization.
John Horne Burns
For thr real readers...
I read some Ayn Rand. Whatever the merits of her philosophy, she's no great shakes as a writer. Theodore Dreiser didn't make the cut. He's no great shakes as a writer either, but he did succeed in writing a great novel.......Agatha Christie is the best selling writer of all time. If you judge on bulk rather than quality, she should be included.
top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch
That which is not written BY women must be written FOR women.
I had to look up Milking Farm. Actual name is Morning Glory Milking Farm. Currently it sits at #1,103,151 in Books on Amazon. That’s a fairly middling rank, meaning it’s selling occasionally but not with any real momentum right now.
Perplexity tells me it’s a “satirical commentary on late-stage capitalism.” - with explicit sexual content in the monster romance genre. lol
You’ll be happy to know that What To Expect When You’re Expecting far outranks it at #63. Women, stop reading and keep birthing those babies. And making sandwiches for your man. Dammit.
I only look at porn for a few minutes at a time.
I've tried some of them, though not any of the recent ones, and certainly not Morrison. Can't get into Ulysses. Or Gravity's Rainbow. Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer never interested me.
Loved Frankenstein. War and Peace was fine. Moby Dick had moments of brilliance, but mostly bored me.
But, yeah, most lists -- I notice especially with music -- are heavy on the more recent.
No “To Kill a Mockingbird”?
I appreciate Ayn Rand, but chuckled at Freder's quote. We'll done.
I read Beloved when it was newish and famous and kept it on my shelves even though (if I remember correctly) I thought it was kinda meh. I tried to reread it and gave up after the first couple of chapters and threw it in the goodwill pile, It's terrible. It's a list so there's always plenty to argue about. On the whole, the older the book the more likely is its presence on the list uncontroversial. The newer the book, the more likely it is to be crap by an author who checks the right woke boxes.
Equality, huh. Charity and equality are not the same thing. It's another affirmative action/diversity list. "It does signal a much-needed reset." In which quality can make way for demographics. Much needed.
Freder Frederson said...
What is ayn Rand, Chopped liver
No, just a really bad author (and not a very nice person, either).
A fascist who wants his political opponents killed and jailed and censored said this.
Shocked that freder doesn't like Ayn Rand.
“Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, “anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged”.”
The only way Middlemarch will change your life is that you’ll have significantly less of it left when you finish. Same for In Search of Lost Time (wonder if the title was a bit of ironic humor from Proust).
And agree with Podhoretz about Beloved at #2. Preposterous—the reductio ad absurdum of DEI.
The thing about female porn that annoys men is the way it is presented as fine literature and pushed to the top of “literary fiction” as if it were a deep examination of the human condition. Like teaching Fear of Flying in literature class, but that could have been a good title for The Sun Also Rises.
Ironically, Pride and Prejudice, adjusted for bias, characterizes the median.
This Land Is Your Land: On a Road Trip to Make Sense of America by Beverly Gage
Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity by Matthew Avery Sutton
The Scramble for America: How the United States Conquered a Continent by Clement Knox
These three books illuminates the 250th anniversary theme and gets at the nub of the issue of just what is America and just what is Americanism. One suspects that the current fracturing is going to lead to a second founding as new leaders put together a new governing order to deal with today's challenges.
My view is that a diversity of religion and religious followings in a strictly secular governing structure strongly supports a citizenry's commitment to high levels of personal freedom -- a concomitant to all that cultural rambunctiousness. Multiple religions put the pluralism into successful secular pluralism.
The US is being disrupted internationally because it is trying to be the suzerain over a foreign empire in the Middle East. But the US has no Manifest Destiny in the Middle East which suggests a misdirected effort. The US must go back to an alliance-based system for international security, not an imperial model. (That the French Empire ended at Bien Dien Phu and Algeria and the British at Suez seem to be lessons unappreciated in today's Washington -- a truly failing imperial capital.) Trump is on his way to being a second Keir Starmer, a busted leader whose system is trying to figure out how to jettison him.
One conclusion is that the 2026 and 2028 elections will be Come Home America elections because much needs to be done at homeand this era's internationalism has run its course. The 250th anniversary celebrations will remind all that much needs to be done in America.
I disliked Ulysses with a passion only matched by my dislike for The Sound and the Fury.
It is funny to read that Twain’s children’s books, Tom Sawyer, Connecticut Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper, etc, outrank HF as great literature though.
Just reminds me I have read so few of these classics.
Lust and Abortion is a handmade tale with Democratic support.
Top 100 Lists are overrated.
The Guardian sites a decrease in reading novels, maybe the issue is that novels are written for, as theCritical Drinker calls them, modern audiences - meaning that they cater to the woke. Because they cater to the woke they are pure shit. Speaking of Stephen King - just try to read the novel Holly. My God, what an odorous and steaming pile of shit that book is. Novels written after 2008 are for the most part trash.
Thank you Jaq. I feel free to disagree with Hemingway.
This list isn’t in my list of top 100 lists.
Now do a list for "audio books"
Surely Life of Pi, about a diverse boy trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger... moved some lady listeners, especially if you could fall asleep to the reader's voice... lol
My comment about James patterson got eaten.
Is he on the list?
James patterson has published over 200 books, many of them best sellers. He earns $70-80mm per year. He outsells the next 3 top sellers combined. (king, Grisham and?)
"I hate writing sentences he says" (quoting from memory) his books are written with AI (Sort of) he generates an outline, gives it to a staff of writers, they write the book and he publies under his name (usually as sole author)
So is he an "author"? His books have a large readership, does that make him a "good" author?
John Henry
Written or published post Obama, lawnerd?
Choose your words carefully...
(tell me Agatha Christie made the cut with at least one of hers?)
I have not read Ayn Rand. But I did see the movie!
1355 The Fountainhead (1949) Oh it cracks me up. It's an ode to non-conformity, but it's so over the top it's pretty insane.
"You have to conform, Mr. Roark."
"No. Never!"
"Conform to the laws of science and gravity, at least."
"No! I go my own way."
"Well, will you conform to the English language, and rules of grammar, so that others might understand you?"
"Never! From now on I speak my own language, that only I understand. Ungawa!"
"At least conform to our rules of social decorum and wear pants, like all the men in our society."
"Ungawa! Ungawa!"
AS I Lay Dying, Mike.
At least get the titles write if you're wading into a discussion over your head.
Meades assembled crew doesn't read, nttawwt.
Ann doesn't cultivate the intelligent here.
I have a masters in history (should be two, but I crashed out after all the coursework in the first program) and a masters in library and information science, and have been an avid reader since childhood, and I haven't read ANY of the books on the screenshotted list.
And you know, it's fine.
OTOH, though I am a non-musician I have probably listened to more pre-1960s music than 99% of Americans.
I think the time listening, and lately, watching on YT, has been
FAR better spent than if I had spent time reading all that stuff.
Why not just have separate lists for men and women readers? You'd have the top 100 for Men, and the Top 100 for women.
John Henry wrote "I hate writing sentences he says" (quoting from memory) his books are written with AI (Sort of) he generates an outline, gives it to a staff of writers, they write the book and he publies under his name (usually as sole author)
This isn’t the case. He hands an outline to one of his writers. That writer then writes the book and that author’s name is prominently displayed on the cover as the co-author. Look at any of his books and you’ll see that’s the case - with the exception of his early ones which he did write.
Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is one of those novels that haunts your thinking, a world where “the creative ages,” are in the past and scholarly effort is focused on examining art that humanity had forgotten how to produce, but I can’t recommend it as a fun read, even though I enjoyed it. It’s pretty plain to me that my tastes are not universally shared.
For instance, I don’t get the gratuitous hate for Muslims that seems to salt every thread. A Thousand and One Nights is a great work of literature and a world classic, it’s almost as if people were paid piece rates to make sure that there is a little bit of hate in each thread.
As long as we're dumping on Ayn Rand, a cruel critic once summarized her philosophy as "Truth is Booty, and Booty Truth."
BTW, all these top 100 novels lists are full of "Quotas". Its not just "we need so many women". Its "We need to have x number of contempory novels", "we need only so many novels before 1900", "We can only have x number of novels per author" and "We need so many novels by Jews or blacks or Foreigners". And the standard how many english vs. American.
To normalize a favorable juxtaposition of the sexes has two authors in a joint venture.
A fascist who wants his political opponents killed and jailed and censored said this.
Sheesh, I have never said anything remotely like this. You, on the other hand. . . .
Proust, Joyce, Bleak House, dont belong in the top 14 either. And if you're going to stick some women in top 14, "Beloved" shouldn't be there. And neither does V. Woolfe - the most absurdly overated novelist of all time. I never met anyone except a EnglishLit major who read her.
At least they didn't give us "to kill a mockingbird" or "Catcher in the Rye".
OTOH, though I am a non-musician I have probably listened to more pre-1960s music than 99% of Americans.
I'm in that 1% with you. 30-50s big band swing, Bing Crosby, Anita today etc
I recently discovered techno-classic. Edvard Greigs Hall of the mountain king with classical orchestration mashed with techno thump. A bass line so heavy it makes the car steer funny. But fascinating sound track for a Chicago to mpls drive. Does that count as pre-60s?
I've got techno Tchaikovsky downloaded for the drive back Wed.
John Henry
One thing I've noticed about the Fiction section at the local library over the last 20 years. The number of classics or novels before 1980 has gone way down. Instead, they stock HUGE numbers of James Patterson, Stephen King, Jane Evanovitch, and someone i think is called "Ann Rice". They literally have an entire shelf of James Patterson.
Meanwhile Hemingway has gone down to two novels. Fitzgerald has one. Steinbeck one. And Mailer has disappeared entirely. And lets not talk about Waugh, Trollope, or Dickens!
Yeah, where is Sue Grafton?
Women have always read the majority of fiction. Hawthorne was complaining about a 'damn mob of scribbling women" back in the 1850s. Lincoln thought "Uncle toms cabin" was responsible for the civil war - in part. That's how popular it wa.
Whats really happened in the last 30 years, is Book publishers have decided to give up on men, especially white men, readers when it comes to straight fiction. Just like TV network execs decided to write off conservatives for their late night talk shows.
So, the number of male readers has gone down and down and down. Its almost like Broadway drama - Leftwing, and dominated by women and gays.
"Nobody who puts Beloved, Ulysses, and The Sound and the Fury on "top book" lists has ever read them." If we had upvotes I would upvote this a thousand times.
@John Henry
There was a mystery writer, Lawrence Sanders, who wrote mysteries set in Palm Beach, Florida. When he died, his publishing house commissioned Vincent Lardo to continue the series. When the first post-death book, McNally’s Dilemma (1999), was published, Sanders’ name was on the cover. Lardo’s name only appeared in tiny print on the copyright page inside. Fans bought what they thought was a Sanders book and got someone else entirely. A class-action lawsuit was filed against the publisher, Putnam, and the publisher settled. From that point on, Lardo’s name had to appear on the cover of all subsequent books.
The twist was that Lardo had written all of the books. Sanders had never written any of them. So, by the terms in the settlement, all the books had to be republished giving Vincent Lardo credit.
I went through the 100 best novels of the 20th Century by random house, and man what a bunch of turkeys in the bunch.
Mailer, Bellow, V. Woolf, Salinger, Updike, Morrison, V. Pritchett. They had 3 books by Joyce, when only one deserved to be on the list. Waugh and G. Greene got only one book each. Hemingway at least got two.
And no Hammett, Christie, Chandler, or Spillane. Tolkien, Dune, Bradbury, or anyone other great SF was missing.
Ann Rand sucks as a novelist. Which is why she is so popular. She concentrates on plot and exaggerated cartoon characters. Atlas shrugged has some good moments. The sequel was a bore.
From Perplexity:
A 2024 UK study found that men don’t just read less fiction — they almost exclusively read fiction written by men. Less than 20% of purchases of top female fiction writers came from male readers. Women, by contrast, buy fiction from both male and female authors roughly equally.
The publishing industry is essentially sustained by female readers. As author Ian McEwan once said, “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
Steve Sailer wrote a fairly long post on his Substack discussing this list, and his primary take away was how un-woke it was compared to what would probably have been produced five or ten years ago. Plenty of old books and dead white male authors.
He mentioned the compilation methodology which might have impacted the results. The selected respondents were not asked to create lists of 100 novels but where asked to produce top 10 lists (IIRC) which were then curated into the top 100. This probably produced some pressure not to list an author more than once, as well as leaving off some works and authors that the respondent might consider important but not making the cut.
Eva Marie,
I intend to write about Patterson and his style in my AI written book and have been looking into him. Realizing yesterday that I have never, that I recall, read him, I downloaded the latest in his Alex Cross series. I just pulled it up and there is no co-author on the cover, and in the 10 or so pages of front matter there is no mention of co-author. From the book, he is clearly claiming full credit.
I did look at his bibliography last night. Wikipedia divides it into 4 groups: Adult fiction, YA fiction, Childrens books and non-fiction. A number of the books mention co-authors but most don't.
Is a "writer" such as Patterson employs the same as a "co-author"? I would say no. But maybe we are quibbling over definitions so I won't argue strongly.
And to be clear, I am not saying that Patterson uses AI, hence the "sort of" in my comment. But what is the difference between what he does, writing an outline, having a writer(s) write the book, editing it then publishing it and what I am doing with my bios book? I am writing an detailed outline, called a prompt, in this context. I hand this off to a writer, a computer in this context. I then edit and publish.
The only difference between what Patterson and I are doing with our books is that he has humans writing and I have a computer writing. And he makes 10s of millions and I will be happy to make thousands.
I suspect that he could take his body of work, run it through Claude like I did with mine, feed his extensive outline into Claude, edit the output and have a bestseller that nobody could tell was AI generated.
I fed a couple of my Claude written chapters to Grok and Gemini. I asked Grok if it was AI or human. Grok gave me a 2-3 page answer with details why it was definitely human.
I asked Gemini if it could tell me the author's name. It could not but gave me a 2 page analysis of content and style and concluded it was a Canadian(!) journalist with extensive technical knowledge.
I think I am going to write 2-3 chapters myself, without AI and let's see if anyone can spot it.
See also the recent kerfuffle about the supposedly AI Monet painting. Which was actually Monet.
John Henry
Well crap. The twist is not true.
“The twist was that Lardo had written all of the books. Sanders had never written any of them. So, by the terms in the settlement, all the books had to be republished giving Vincent Lardo credit.” The first part is true. There was a class action lawsuit and Lardo’s name was on the subsequent books. But Sanders did write the first books in the series.
I find Dickens in general like swimming in a really cold mountain stream. A lot of hesitation going in and the first minute is awful. But once in, pretty enjoyable. I may be one of the few people who like Bleak House. I've read the book a couple times. There have been a couple good, multi-part adaptations that I've seen. Best has Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock.
I feel the same about Hemingway. I dread reading him but when I do, I find him pretty good.
I do NOT dread Anthony Trollope. Currently listening to the Librivox recording of The Warden for the 5th or 10th time.
John Henry
Patterson's latest Alex Cross books has a co-author on the cover. But this is the series he started with and the first books were written by him.
Ayn rand has a very stylized romance in addition to her argument gary cooper in the king vidor film grant bowler in the first adaptations of atlas shrugged shes trying to a tolstoyan scope
@RCOCEAN II Whats really happened in the last 30 years, is Book publishers have decided to give up on men, especially white men, readers when it comes to straight fiction. Just like TV network execs decided to write off conservatives for their late night talk shows.
What happened is that men shifted to interactive fiction per video games. That's the precise timeline when 3D graphics got realistic (i.e., Doom 1993 to Unreal 1998). Males who prefer a flim-like experience plus semi-skilled shooting and driving simulations spend their leisure time in Grand Theft Auto...
This partly explains the rise of woke films circa 2015 Ghostbusters -- the woke were the audience who still cared about the passive group theater experience. Older people have better home theater setups and no need to go out, while younger males play games, etc.
By the way, you can take any piece of literature (at least that’s been my experience) and ask if AI wrote it and AI will tell you there’s a high probability it was written by AI
Eva Marie ---
The circularity of LLM training. The AI firms strip-mined everything they could and reached a plateau per human "fuzz" and our tendency to copy all innovators.
Last 10 have been ghosted
Mark Helprin is one of my favorite novelists, especially A Soldier of the Great War. Maybe he is overlooked because he was not just a literary writer but also a speechwriter for Republicans and a conservastive journalist/commentater; he is American-Israeli and not just American (actually fought in the IDF); and his output is so varied. But his writing just captivates me, mostly.
So interesting to read everyone’s (very opinionated) opinions. I
It makes one wonder how the Guardian managed to compile a list at all. Middlemarch is my own favorite book—one I’ve reread multiple times. It’s one of my husband’s favorites, too.
One book that almost every literary person I know loved, but would never admit publicly to loving is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I wonder how many votes were for books the judges never read. Books you have read have an unfair advantage. It's a form of bigotry. It needs a word.
Compared to Dickens’ other novels, Bleak House seemed kind of forced, whereas most everything else he wrote was free flowing genius. I guess I could ask Grok, but I feel like he was trying to appeal to critics who were snobs about his stuff as too popular.
On a road trip my wife and I listened to an Alex Cross novel, except for the miles covered, those are hours that I will never get back, but she actually seemed to enjoy it.
I think a lot of Americans would like older music (pre-1960) if they knew it existed.
“A 2024 UK study found that men don’t just read less fiction — they almost exclusively read fiction written by men.”
Because quality female authors who can use the neutral voice are scarcer than hen’s teeth. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy is about the only example I can think of offhand.
Regarding King, he’s always been a sophomoric writer but he was a good storyteller before he became an industry.
The Guardian’s list is, of course, laughable.
Eve, Go look at Patterson's Amazon page. It has all the book covers. Very few, and only one of the 25-30 Alex Cross series have anyone other than Patterson on the cover.
It would depend on the contract one has with a writer. I sometimes work under a "writer for hire" contract. In that case, I have no more right to the work once I get paid, than a bricklayer has to the garden wall they built for you. I suspect that most of Patterson's writers are under that kind of contract. Or are w-2 employees. Some may be known in their own right and have sufficient clout to get their name on the cover. But what I see is that perhaps a quarter at a very quick visual estimate of Patterson's books do.
His very latest, 11/25, Alex Cross book which I downloaded last night mentions nobody other than Patterson on the cover or in any of the 3-4 pages of copyright, publisher, author and other info in the front of the book.
The book I am talking about is "Return of the Spider" Take a look and see if you can find a co-author or writer name. I can't, though I can find the names of both cover designer and cover artist.
John Henry
Couple a three things here for youse bookworms:
1. Virginia Woolf is not difficult to read. Her prose is excellent and stylish, and flows beautifully. The criticism against her, as expressed by Joe Orton, was that there was no interesting story beneath the ocean of beautiful prose.
2. Only read one Toni Morrison- racist anti-White trash titled Jazz. You couldn't pay me to read her writing.
3. Middlemarch was unreadable. About 800 pages of unwieldy archaic prose, brutal. Academic punishment is what it was.
4. In my youth I was a huge Faulkner fan. In my dotage, I find his overwritten, encyclopedic prose ridiculous when portraying the stream of consciousness of a rural redneck. Still, his writing does create a vivid, tangible atmosphere and intriguing stories. The Bear is a book that all you dudes who complain about the lack of masculine storytelling should have read already. It's very like Moby Dick in theme, except with a group of southern backwoodsmen hunting a massive brown bear instead of a whale.
5. The Dubliners by James Joyce is a great book, a collection of marvelous short stories wonderfully written with some of the greatest prose in English language literature. Some of the stories will make you laugh your ass off, some will make you cry your eyes out.
6. I haven't bothered to look at the list, but if it doesn't include Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov then it is incomplete. Lolita is the single greatest work of prose in American literature and it was written by a Russian in his 4th language. Nabokov called it his love letter to the English language. The writing is mesmerizing and sublime on multiple levels, and a story that the reader can't put down.
Okay, forgot to add that Ayn Rand's novel We The Living is a great novel, excellent writing and a compelling and important story that exposes the malicious and vindictive evil that is Communism and Marxist ideology. It really should be assigned reading to American students.
“Because quality female authors who can use the neutral voice are scarcer than hen’s teeth.”
It’s interesting that the author you cited has a first name that’s ambiguous as to sex of the author. If JK Rowling had written her books under her first name, I doubt they would be as popular.
On the other hand if 80% of fiction is purchased by women than the smart thing for an author to do is write for women. There are many mystery writers who started as romance writers and only branched out into writing mysteries when they made a name for themselves.
"Heart of Darkness" is all that is needed.
None of the women in the work are given proper names.
So that keeps it focused.
I am Laslo.
Your never going to get men and women interested in the same things in equal amounts. Men like to read about history, war, science, etc. and women are more interested in relationships, sex, and romance. Its the way its always been and always will be.
You have Women SF writers, but you have few "Hard science" Female SF writers. And you have lots of female dectective/crime writers, but you have very few "hard-boiled" ones like Spillane, Ellroy, or Chandler.
To me, a great writer like Edith Wharton or Jane Austen can make a female-centric novels enjoyable, but I'm not going to pick and read an average romance novel.
And while there are lots of great female novelists, but if you look at say the Top 1 percent, you'll get a lot more men. Which is true of almost every intellectual/artistic human endevour.
John Henry, you may be right. I’m not a Patterson fan so I couldn’t tell the difference by reading them. But it’s strange then that some of the Alex Cross books have a coauthor and some of them don’t. A bit if consistency would be appreciated.
There have been great female writers, Frankenstein really is a great novel, for example, but arguing with women who can’t even sense what is missing for men in most women’s writing, and since many of them believe anything they think, they just write it off as a weakness in men.
It’s okay, watch a woman’s eyes glaze over when you start analyzing why her mower won’t start, “ I don’t care, just make it work,” are not words that generally come out of the mouths of men, that kind of thinking can be, and is transferable to literature, abstraction, analysis, moving parts that women simply don’t care about, there is just nothing for men in most women’s fiction but nagging.
A while back I came across and read a book co-written by Steven King and a local CT newspaper columnist (whose name, like the name of the book, escapes me). Anyway it was essentially a diary about the Boston Red Sox 2004 season (I think--it may have been another season).
What was striking to me was the obvious, palpable difference in the quality of the writing--you weren't told who was writing what until the end of the entry.
Steven King's writing was godawful. The local writer's stuff was pretty good.
I also remember reading Grisham's "The Firm" way back when. The writing was also godawful--but I couldn't put it down.
Achilles said “You are naturally defensive and anytime someone says something negative about women you attack.”
Criticizing women unfairly tends to get pushback from me. But I wouldn’t categorize my comments as attacks.
"On the other hand if 80% of fiction is purchased by women than the smart thing for an author to do is write for women."
Wasn't this the premise for "As Good as it Gets?"
Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
BTW, if I responded to every dumb comment made about women in the comment section I’d have to hire a stable of writers who would spend more time commenting than James Patterson’s writers spend writing his novels.
I'm not at all discouraged by the low state of the arts as reflected in lists from the Guardian or the NYT which have gone soft totalitarian. Their people can only read what soothes or inflames in the correct manner. Naturally the arts are discouraged, they wouldn't be the arts if they lived well in the NYT world.
The books people are reading are the Bible, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter - these aren't novels because realistic novels don't help one see the world when it is bending into a new shape. If I could write a novel I'd base it on a character like Trump or Elon Musk who understands and is changing the world. That would be multi-charactered, multi-leveled. But at present who has the sort of understanding to show the left gradually revealing its antisemitic totalitarian soul and the right staggering like a New Year's drunk at the revelations and the new men coming up like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Spencer Prattand the old men howling like Bernie Sanders? And the incredible AOC of "World War Eleven" and "the first silo" who is still quite a viable Dem (what are the qualifications - "$30 million obtained in two years, yes, the she's one of us." Is it like that?) Or who can show what it was to revive the drive toward space, the engineering, the finance, the dream? This is the stuff of a thousand histories, novels, comics, legends and, in our time, it's real. I love books and Dickens, Galsworthy, Doris Lessing, and like that but in one sense they only suggest to me that I'm not comprehending my own times as well as they did. Or, anyhow, the novelists aren't comprehending. But they will. JK Rowling.
This is the usual bilge from the usual left wing suspects who are forever coming up with new "indexes" of freedom or prosperity or whatever metric, all deliberately designed and massaged so they can shit on the US and Western civilization.
"Cuba scores higher than the US on this health care index because they have more doctors per capita and they're all free!"
Yes, but they have less training than an American nurse's assistant and treat people with tree bark and dirty dishrags...
"Sweden's infant mortality rate is half of the US."
Yes, because any infant delivered below 28 weeks is put in a broom closet to die and is logged as "stillborn" instead of a live birth with perinatal death.
"China scores higher on this index of press freedom because the government actually pays journalists instead of them having to compete in the dog-eat-dog capitalist marketplace for revenue!"
Ah, yeah, they are all just regular Ida Tarbells over there, aren't they?
"Montana scores lower than Illinois on this 'Quality of Life' index because they are too white and lack diversity."
You don't say! Now I know why there is such a stampede of people moving from Montana to Illinois...
Of course, your taxes pay egghead professors plenty of money to dream these "indexes" up and get them published....
Re: Eva Marie:
If JK Rowling had written her books under her first name, I doubt they would be as popular.
I don't . . I grew up reading classic children's literature by authors like Edith Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle, so it's not particularly difficult for me to imagine her being as successful under a female name as under an ambiguous initial. For one thing, she was writing books for children, a genre where female authors weren't particularly unusual. For another, she was writing in the 1990s, not the 1860s.
I suppose you might analogise her to E.L. Konigsberg, a children's author of perhaps only a generation or two before her, but even though I haven't read anything by her since I was perhaps ten, I remembered Konigsberg as a woman (I suppose from author photos on the dustjacket?) and looking her up confirmed that yes, she was a woman, just as I remembered from my childhood. I think by the late 1980s it was quite normal.
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