Isn’t any effort to quantify something that is ultimately subjective bound to have limitations?

Take the IMDb Top 250, for instance, which comes from the entire pool of films and uses both total number of votes and cumulative total. (Plus some other secret things like prioritizing certain users’ votes.) You still end up with a disproportionate number of boyish favorites at the top, with purposeful efforts to push certain films out of the Top 250 by giving it one star to keep others on the cherished (and thus ultimately meaningless) list. Hey, I love Luke Skywalker, too, but “Star Wars” really isn’t the 12th best movie in history.

What would be interesting to me are lists compiled WITH obvious bias – since some be-all end-all best of list is basically futile. So give us the NY Times snobby list. The 12th grade English teacher’s list. The totally spurious Scientologist ballot-stuffing list. What-have-you. It would be interesting to see the overlap!

OK, so is it better to have a publisher with a very narrow 10 member “review board” come up with a list of “greatest books”? And, the kicker is that the board could only choose from Modern Library’s own titles!!!!!

From the Wikipedia article about “Modern Classics”:

“The list was compiled via approval voting, by sending each board member a list of 440 pre-selected books from the Modern Library catalogue and asking each member to place a check beside novels they wished to choose.”

So the list the board had to choose from was pre-selected from the publisher’s catalog? What kind of list is that????

Hey, I don’t advocate the “readers’ web poll” method they tried out either (opening it up to ALL books and taking unlimited votes from everyone) — they wound up with 4 Ayn Rands and 3 L.Ron Hubbards (!!) in the top 10. That’s clearly ballot box stuffing.

Something tells me there should be a happy medium somewhere — maybe part “academic/author board” and part readers, but don’t limit to only the books that the company published itself. That is clearly bogus.

The list was devised by “a jury of scholars and writers” on behalf of “the editorial board of Modern Library, which has been publishing classic English-language literature at affordable prices since 1917 and is now a division of Random House.”

Now, I’m not a rabid Randian, who think that Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem should be #1 through #4…. there are plenty of folks like that. Nonetheless, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each belong SOMEWHERE on that list — they are monumental works. The Times is really showing its liberal / snooty elite colors here.