Clamouring to become visible...

This is adapted from an article that appeared on the Write Anything website on May 4, 2008. The original text can be found here. In April and May, Jodi and I started up an interesting and entertaining across our blogs and comment boxes, about books - popular books, books with merit, most read, most unread (you might remember those posts). This post was my invitation to the Write Anything readers to join the conversation.

The good, the popular

Over the past week Jodi and I have been having a long discussion about book lists.

The first list was compiled out of books that people bought because they feel they ought to read them, but never got round to it. We compared how many of these books we owned ourselves, how many we had read, and how many we wanted to.

The existence of this list poses the question why do you read a book? Are there books you read because you feel you ought to, rather than because you want to? Have you ever been guilty of purchasing a “vanity” book, one that sits on a shelf, unread, and is there to create an impression on others? These books are considered of such great merit, that to have read them is taken to reflect well on the reader. Whether or not the reputation of these books is deserved is another matter, one which for some of them I dispute.

Take a look at the list, and see for yourself which books you’ve read.

The second list is, in many ways, more interesting. It is the Waterstones bookstore’s Books of the Century - a year-by-year list of the most popular book that year. What intrigues me most about this list is how many of these books I simply haven’t heard of, and how many more famous books are notable by their absence.

The problem with any "best of" list is that, regardless of your criteria, they are necessarily subjective. Even in a list such as the Waterstones list, which tries to be neutral by examining popularity on a year by year basis, it ignores books that have a lasting appeal, in favour of books that were instantly (and sometimes only briefly) popular. A list based on popularity purely will ignore books with perhaps more literary merit (for example, celebrity "autobiographies" are frequently bestsellers), but a list based purely on literary merit risks being obscure, and of course is necessarily subjective. Who defines "literary merit"? What is "literary merit" anyway?

Take a few minutes to have a look at the lists, and think about what you read, why you read, and consider what makes a good book, and a popular book.

Leave a comment here, or take part in the discussions already going on.