Last post on The List (really)

While I let our list of the Top 25 Books stew in its own juices, I came across this alternative to the Times’ list called the alt.list (via That Girl Who Writes Stuff). Dammit. “Alt.list” is way more clever than “our list”. The winner of the alt.list voting was The New York Trilogy by Paul Aster. Let me be the first to flaunt my ignorance – I’ve never heard of it, but I am interested in checking it out. Several familiar names followed in the voting.
I’ve enjoyed the commentary that the slackass NYT list generated in the blogosphere, and working our own list was an interesting exercise. Little did we know that we were fools, Fools!, pawns in the Grey Lady’s desperate bid for attention and relevancy. Jessa Crispin lays into the NYT Book Review in an article at the Book Standard:

And that list of the best American novels of the last 25 years? Instead of the expected responses of anger or respect, they got a large number of publications, especially online magazines like Slate and Salon, asking, “What the fuck?”

Her theory is that the Times’ strategy is to create buzz from wherever they can – even if the source of the buzz makes them look stupid and out of touch, killing their credibility. A quote from the same article says:

Look at all the talkback the Book Review got from that best-of-the-last-25-years list. Everybody hated that list, and everybody talked about it—and I guarantee you the Book Review‘s editors were counting on that. The section doesn’t need to be loved, it just needs to be read.

In other news, the posting has been infrequent this week as a computer problem that I thought that I had fixed turned into the long, slow death spiral of my hard drive. Hopefully I’ll be firing on all cylinders again soon.