Rant on Book Lists

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So the World Book Night Top 100 is out. It’s a great list but doesn’t hold many surprises. It’s littered with, and topped by, the classics; To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights (my favourite book of all time, ever. Really. Ever), Catch-22, The Great Gatsby, along with a bucketful of Booker winners and nominees which is a great thing in itself (encourages more people to read the classics, etc.) but I’d love to see a list where the classics could be excluded and only books published in the last, say, 20 years would be eligible. Then we might see some hidden gems emerge. Not to say there aren’t a few excellent, contemporary and less super-famous books on the list (The Book Thief, Wolf Hall, The Graveyard Book) but it is predominantly made up of classics and Booker/other prize nominees (excluding of course, Harry Potter).

There is another list of the 20 Most Iconic Book Covers; this includes all the same classics and more listed in the WBN 100. The problem I have with lists like this is that they are so predictable. Where is the fun in seeing a list of 100 or so books or covers when around 40-60% of it is a given?  There are some amazing books from the last 10-20 years that I believe everyone should read and are always excluded from these lists for various reasons (Travels in the Scriptorium, Transition, The Night Watch series, The Song of Ice and Fire series, Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry etc. etc. ad infinitum). This could be because they are not as well-known as those Richard & Judy darlings or even because SFF books/TV shows/films never get the same level of recognition as mainstream equivalents, but that’s a different blog post.

I do have a bit of a wasp in my keyboard about this issue. I look on these lists thinking that there may be a new, as-yet-undiscovered-by-me, awesome read but always come away disappointed. I’ve read the classics, I’ve either read or decided not to read the Booker nominees (and yes, I know that a lot of people haven’t read either) but there is nothing on the WBN list that I’ve not heard of and that either makes me spectacularly well-read or the list-makers, public vote or judging body, very predictable. 

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