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Nabokov made lists ...
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Complete article at the following URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08wwln-medium-t.html
The Medium
Rank and File
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: June 8, 2008
Blessed are the list makers, with their sharp pencils, their certainties, their mix of words and numbers. Walt Whitman made lists. Nabokov made lists. Last year, while declaring in Time magazine that “literary lists are basically an obscenity,” Tom Wolfe admitted to having made many in his life, and then introduced a new one, ranking the best novels in the world.
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Maybe A. S. Byatt does make Amazon lists, under a pen name, as most of the Listmania crowd does. Of course, in the midst of the Amazon sprawl, even Nabokov’s contributions would have to win attention and credibility the new-fashioned way, which is to say not just by virtue of their being by Nabokov. As the world’s biggest bookstore, Amazon could employ some people with clout to issue a literary canon, ex cathedra, but it has refrained. The Listmania lists are canons only to the people who make them. You read them not to be outraged by how biased and dictatorial they are but rather to be amused by how obsessive, enlightening, off the mark or convincing they can be.
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Redundancy shouldn’t have surprised me. Curiously, list makers tend to like similar books, and some books just seem well suited to lists. Maybe certain books are even semiconsciously written to appeal to list makers. The No. 1 list on Amazon suggests there’s some truth to this: the list is called “Nick Hornby and Company!” and it includes the list maker’s favorite Hornby and Hornbyesque novels. Does it surprise anyone to remember that Hornby began his breakout novel, “High Fidelity,” with a litany of “my desert-island, all-time, Top 5 most memorable split-ups, in chronological order”? Similarly, Nabokov makes Top 10s all over Amazon, and beyond. As does A. S. Byatt, for that matter. Maybe they’re onto something.
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