The Times UK appears to be first of the big papers to publish a “Best Books of the Decade” article, and after reading it, you may join this Books@Torontoist editor in hoping that the rest of inevitable best-of lists will be a tad more authoritative – or at least more thoughtful. Though the article does not share with readers the criteria guiding the contributors’ 100 choices, a murky and possibly subconscious rationale does emerge if you look for it. These books aren’t the best books or the most influential books of the decade, they were the most talked about by the contributors and their friends at cocktail parties and lunches and book club meetings and, increasingly as the decade went on, on Internet chat boards.
That may be a harsh generalization for a list that contains some excellent and even eclectic choices, but how else to explain the inclusion of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight at # 90, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at # 17 and cracking the top-10, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, all books that no one could argue – at least with a straight face – were read for their literary merit or their cultural contribution. Even by the standards of the various genres represented, these are not particularly good books, especially Brown’s, which may just be one of the worst novels of all time.
Even more bizarre is book # 3, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which was actually published in 1995 and would have rightfully disappeared from public consciousness if Obama had not won the Democrat primaries. Did his electoral victories make Dreams from My Father a good book or did it make the book a bestseller? That doesn’t matter: the book became a must-read for a season or two, and that’s good enough for the judges. Then at # 6 there’s Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, a book composed of a single idea, one that has been thoroughly discredited by marketing and statistics guru Duncan Watts and several other academics and journalists, including Luke Lewis in NME, who asks the question that has plagued me for almost ten years: “Has anyone ever profited so handsomely by stating the arse-shatteringly obvious as Malcolm Gladwell?” That the decade’s most popular philosopher was a writer who admits that he does no original research is one the many reasons that New Year’s Eve can’t arrive quickly enough.
What the contributors have overlooked is a truism known to anyone who’s ever wiled away a few hours picking through the one-dollar tables at a used bookstore: the books that are most-talked about by the chattering classes of their time are precisely the books the rarely stand the test of time. You see them crowding the one-dollar bins of used bookstores, yellowing copies of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, anything by Carlos Castaneda – Big Idea books that cashed in on the emerging but still unexamined zeitgeist of the times and then disappeared. They are joined in the bargain bins by the novels of Sidney Sheldon, Tama Janowitz, Compton Mackenzie, C.P. Snow, and dozens of other books that undoubtedly made the best-of lists of yesteryear.
Yes, those books were talked about. That doesn’t mean you want to read them.
Shelf Absorbed is James Grainger’s running colour commentary on the world of books.
dear mister grainger,
thanks for mentioning me in your article! i am wondering if you read any of my books? i sure have been writing for many years for no money, although i was once on the best seller list for one week! my most recent book is THEY IS US.it is a cautionary horror story set in the near future. i am told by people able to read and make up their own minds without falling for any current party line that i am an Original.let me know where the dollar bin that has my books? or if you have one dollar you could read them (if you can!!!) yours truly tj