ESSAY: First the Toilet, Then the Grave: On the Guardian’s Top 100 Novels of All Time
Jarett Kobek writes about the flawed math and the flawed logic of The Guardian’s recent list of "The Top 100 Novels of All Time." Like all such lists, its purpose remains unclear.
Picture it.
It’s one of those rare London nights when quiet falls upon The Guardian’s offices. For once, these vaunted halls do not echo with a Zone 2/3 lamentation about Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. But nature abhors a vacuum. The silence must be filled. Some version of the following conversation must have occurred:
Sophie: Ollie, have you noticed that the people aren’t picking up books?
Oliver: Too right. A bleeding shame, innit? I’m a diamond geezer, I’m a top bloke.
Sophie: Whatever is to be done?
Oliver: Allow it, bruv.
The solution was simple.
Assemble a retinue of the world’s greatest chancers. Journalists, novelists, tenured academics, all-purpose opinionators. 172 in total. A league of wounded heroes known for their reliable Right-on! thinking. Accompanied by the obligatory handful of oddballs. Like Jughead tolerated in the mansion of Veronica, the misfits will supply comic relief and freak appeal.
Once assembled, ask the chancers a simple question: What are the ten greatest novels that have ever appeared in English?
Ask each chancer to make a list. #1 through #10.
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On the Guardian’s website, a Javascript nightmare imprisons the data. A manual copy & paste approach is theoretically possible but highly unpleasant. No matter. There are other ways. The information can be freed with Selenium scripts and a headless iteration of Google Chrome, then dumped into a .CSV file.
With the data liberated, one can deduce how The Guardian generated a list of, quote, The 100 Best Novels of All Time, unquote.
Each appearance on an individual ballot is worth one point. Each relative position in a chancer’s list then adds a small bonus: 0.50 for a first-place vote, 0.45 for second, down to 0.05 for tenth. In formal terms: S(b)= ∑ᵢ [1 + (11−rᵢ)/20], where the sum ranges over every ballot on which book b appears, and rᵢ is the rank assigned to b on ballot i.
Compile all 1,720 votes, tally the results, and create an ordered list by decreasing S(b).
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When the data is broken down, a simple rule emerges. For any novel to be considered one of the best of all time, it required votes from four or more.
Had I known of this low bar to excellence, I would have enacted a campaign of corruption. You can bribe four people with roughly $300 worth of sushi sent through DoorDash.
This is not a fantasy.
I know about twenty of the chancers.
I could, and would, have done this.
###
Over the last few days, the Guardian has run a series of corrections to its list. Funnel the raw data through the above formula and the nature of the paper’s errors, disclosed or otherwise, become apparent.
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia received four votes and bonus points summing to 1.0, earning an S(b) score of 5. This ties the novel with The Bluest Eye, Dracula, and D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. On the Guardian’s official list, these books rank at #75 through #77. On the Guardian’s original list, My Ántonia sat at #100. It has since been corrected.
In both versions, corrected and uncorrected, the list gets blurry at its bottom. Four titles compete for the final spots. Each has three votes and a bonus of 0.95, achieving a score of 3.95. On the original list, the last three spots (before the mis-ranked Cather) are occupied by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between.
The list, and its surrounding apparatus, failed to mention that James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man achieved the same 3.95 score. Which is a bit weird. Portrait is the best and most ambitious of the four. A possible explanation is tie-breaking through privileging higher individual rankings. As both Catch-22 and The Road each earned a single #1 vote, this would put them ahead of Joyce. But that doesn’t explain The Go-Between. Joyce pulled two #2s and a #10. Hartley earned a #3, a #4, and a #7.
It really should have been the Best 101 Novels of All Time. But this makes for a less elegant headline.
Even this muddle was revised when the Guardian discovered another error. Some chancers had voted for Albert Camus’s The Stranger while others voted for The Outsider. Despite the different titles, this is the same book. The original French title is L’Étranger. With four votes and a bonus of 1.15, L’Étranger has an S(b) score of 5.15. This clocks in at #71. Consequently, the Guardian has changed its official list.
This removed Hartley from the rankings.
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There are two possible conclusions from the Camus debacle. The first is that the Guardian, fearsome in its op-ed opposition to The Algorithm and AI, used software to tally the voting and human beings did not fact check its work. Or: the self-appointed arbiters of literature are so ignorant that they thought Camus had written two separate books.
The first option appears more likely. Further evidence is found in the case of another anomaly that the Guardian has not acknowledged.
Four chancers voted for four different titles in John Updike’s Rabbit series. Alex Needham voted for A Rabbit Omnibus. Ben Markovits went for Rabbit is Rich. Christobel Kent went for Rabbit, Run. And good ol’ Ian McEwan chose Rabbit at Rest.
It’s a unique case in the data: four votes, enough for greatness, for the same fictional world and same central character but with no presence in the Top 100. One might suggest that them’s the breaks. But then we look at the official list and see In Search of Lost Time at #5. As with the Rabbit books, Proust published a series of individual novels about the same protagonist.
Then there’s also the problem of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings earned three votes. The Hobbit earned one. Together, these votes achieve an aggregate S(b) of 5.25. If treated as one volume, they would achieve the rank of #70. But there has always been a sense of Lord and Hobbit as separate, if interconnected, projects. The Rabbit books are just the same dumb story.
Together, the four Rabbit votes earn an S(b) of 4.5. On a fair list, this would place the books at #90 or #91 or #92, depending on the ranks given to Cather and Camus.
Also of some note: no one voted for Rabbit Redux, which is easily the series’s most interesting book. (Unless you’re into middle aged people pissing on each other in bathtubs. Then go with Rabbit is Rich.)
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What are the ten greatest novels that have ever appeared in English?
A strange question.
Candidates are not limited to English-language origins. It’s books that have appeared in the language.
Earlier this year, Wakefield Press published Yumiko Kurahashi’s 1968 novella Scorpions in an extraordinary translation by Michael Day. This slim volume is only Kurahashi’s third book to appear in English. The first has been out of print for decades. The second is burdened with the heavy sticker price of an academic press and perhaps the worst cover in publishing history.
There is a defensible argument that the Twentieth Century’s best literature was written in Japan. Among English-speakers, this opinion is valid but highly gendered. Most of the major women writers, the ones who pre-dated the 1990s, have not been translated. Kurahashi died twenty-one years ago. All her works should be available in English. They are not.
Scorpions makes an overwhelming case for Kurahashi as a major writer. It’s no hyperbole to suggest that the novella is better and weirder and more haunting than most of the Guardian’s Top 100.
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Of the six hundred and eighty-four books that appear across the 172 lists, only seventeen were ranked at #1 by more than one person. These are:
Middlemarch – George Eliot – 19 votes
Ulysses – James Joyce – 13 votes
Beloved – Toni Morrison – 7 votes
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – 7 votes
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – 7 votes
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë – 6 votes
In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust – 6 votes
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes – 5 votes
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf – 5 votes
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville – 4 votes
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf – 4 votes
Emma – Jane Austen – 3 votes
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – 3 votes
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – 2 votes
Bleak House – Charles Dickens – 2 votes
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez – 2 votes
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – 2 votes
Not a single chancer picked Jane Eyre as #1. Four chancers stuck it at #2.
On the official list, the book is ranked as the 8th greatest novel to ever appear in English. Similarly, Orwell’s Nineteeen Eighty-Four never received an individual’s vote above #3. On the Guardian’s list, it is the sixteenth best novel of all time.
This reminds us of something about the administerial class that governs literature and, until very recently, controlled post-industrialized society. It is better to be admired than loved.
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No chancer voted for Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit.
It isn’t hard to see why. Céline’s personal reputation is awful. He wasn’t just a vociferous anti-Semite. He also collaborated with the Vichy regime. He fled to occupied Denmark and lived with other exiled Fascists before the whole thing fell apart. Céline did not receive the same death sentence as other collaborators. The official reason was bureaucratic. The unofficial reason: Céline was the greatest French writer of the Twentieth Century. He might have been the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century.
These days, it’s very hard to find someone praising his work without explanation or equivocation. Always an attempt to separate the good work from the bad man. His detractors, too, offer no end of pieties. Adam Gopnik’s 2022 piece in The New Yorker provides an excellent and well-written example from the opposition.
To which one sighs: Who fucking cares?
Why justify? Why condemn?
Here’s a breaking news flash from the desk of François Villon: a bad man can write amazing books. It’s no big deal. There is nothing amoral, or immoral, about books. Or reading them. The right metaphor for literature is drug recovery. Would you take advice from a sponsor, or counselor, who hadn’t been laid low by their own gluttony and need? Who didn’t know what it’s like to wake up in an alley soiled by their own sick?
Why, then, would we want our books written by the good and the great?
Perhaps we should read Céline’s exclusion along some very tired trains of thought. We might even go X.com and blame the Jews. Why not? Is Substack not the Internet? But that would ignore the reality that the Guardian’s chancers are primarily from the British intellectual and upper classes. And when have those people ever objected to anti-Semitism?
The affront must be somewhere else.
Look at the Guardian’s chosen 100 and it’s possible to discern a consensus definition of 20th and 21st Century greatness: the individual self, and that self’s psychological experience, are the key, and most imperative, interpretive tools of modern existence. The novel is where individual consciousness acquires moral meaning through refined aesthetics.
Céline, wounded meat of the First World War, had no time for that shit. Yes, his books are primarily complaints and, yes, they can be read as experiential. Yes, it’s there, but that’s the scaffold. The building has a specific and undeniable foundation: No individual matters. Only the system matters. People are chewed up and spit out and their deaths are irrelevant. Their bodies are kindling in a fire that gives them no heat. The individual is of no consequence. And even if people did matter, their lives would still be punctuated by visits to the urinal. Even if one can escape the bureaucrats, one can never tame the system of the body. First the toilet, then the grave.
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But, look, what can you expect?
It’s a list of Classics put together by people with abysmal taste in the Classics.
Take, for instance, the presence of literature’s recent monster, Hillary Mantel. Wolf Hall makes its obligatory appearance at #34. The book is a masterpiece. But the miracle of Mantel is that Wolf Hall followed on the heels of Beyond Black. Which is even better. And received zero votes.
Or note the very well-represented Charles Dickens. Bleak House at #12, David Copperfield, #33; Great Expectations, #35, and Our Mutual Friend is #72.
Bleak House!
Holy god, what garbage!
Of the 172 chancers, only the novelist Tom Crewe voted for Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. This is the writer’s best book. There is objective evidence for this opinion: Pickwick is so delightful, so charming, and so inspiring that its fans invented cosplay.
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We can calibrate the data to find the chancers with the most idiosyncratic voting. When this is done, we discover a single unambiguous hero: the Manchester-born novelist Nussaibah Younis. Of the 172, she is the only one to produce a list with nine books chosen by no other chancer.1
The second most distinct voter is Joshua Cohen. While eight of his books were not picked by any other individual, Cohen’s taste runs different than that of Younis. He chose the accepted canon’s odder works. Oliver Twist instead of Bleak House, du Maurier, Defoe, Ford Madox Ford. Every name is a legible historical artifact.
From her choices, it appears that Younis believes literature started somewhere around 2005. This is wonderful and beautiful and crackpot.
God bless you, Nussaibah Younis.
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In an accompanying essay that employs a moral tone not so dissimilar from a speech preceding an Islamic State beheading, the Guardian explains the motivations behind its list:
Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help.
Ten years since Brexit and no one’s learned a thing.
###
Netflix, attention spans, screentime.
The blame shifts outward.
There are people, I’ve been told, who are readers. They find pleasure in the act of reading. Of being enveloped by the voice of another. They enjoy the apparent psychological insights of literature, the empathic warmth. They are publishing’s most reliable customers. They will buy anything.
Everyone else?
For most, if they can be conned into shelling out good money for someone’s 200+ page nervous breakdown, then it’s better to assume that the acquisition is predicate upon the book offering some utility or insight into the current material condition. Of all people, John Irving laid this out in The World According to Garp. Fiction can move huge numbers when everyone pretends that a novel is news.
This is the unspoken point of the Guardian’s list. If the list itself becomes news, if idiots like me write irritated responses, then the heat of that news might trickle down to the 100 listed titles. William MAKEPEACE Thackery might once more become relevant.
Another unspoken implication: that the people who don’t read for pleasure are missing out. That the 100 Greatest Books hold insights absent from their lives. But look at the books. An astonishing number can be reduced to five messages: Love affairs are tricky! Some people aren’t very nice! Money is difficult! Family is tough! War sucks!
Is there a single poor person on this green Earth unaware of these messages? Do we really believe that the unwashed can be brought to pleasure through the tedium of Thomas Mann? Aren’t their lives hard enough?
Better to draft in his son Klaus. Absent from any chancer’s list, his novel Mephisto at least offers some ideas about the nature of Fascism and capitulation.
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For at least sixty years, the administerial class have served as the guardians of literature. They have steered it onto a bypass of total disconnection. Why not?
One must expect that the useless will enshrine useless books.
But the world has moved on from the idea of a sustainable middle class. Which makes it very hard to pretend that Middlemarch is news.
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The digital revolution has forged a new breed of aristocrat. Our lives are bent by their exertions of will and caprice. Read any news story and the message is the same: your self-expression is meaningless. The illusion of your much-touted individuality, imbued by marketing demographics, evaporates like panned water atop a radiator.
The administerial class has diagnosed a malady of the current moment and come up with a cure as efficacious as mercury pills for syphilis. In ten years’ time, all the middle-class people who see something in Middlemarch will no longer be middle class. They will either be poor or drafted into an imperial order. The lucky scribblers will serve as amanuenses in the House of Musk and be happy for the work. One assumes, then, that the 100 Best Novels will include a great deal of P.G. Wodehouse.
Middlemarch!
Offered into a world where every story traces back to Jeffrey Epstein. The only novelist who can give us any news about the aristocracy is de Sade. (No votes for him either.)
The message was true in the 18th Century. It’s true today. The School of Libertinage has suffered no DEI assault. Its pedagogy is static. The lesson plans never change.
Aristocrats always end up in a castle filled with bloodied sex workers.
###
In the end, the intellectual run-off of the administerial classes comes back to Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four, at #16 without a single top vote from any chancer.
Orwell’s book paints a picture of tyranny that is of great appeal. It suggests that the people who are good with language can dominate a society. Every chancer reads it and learns, way deep down inside, the importance of their skillset. In short, it is a book that believes totalitarian societies will be governed by the Humanities.
The title has become a metonym for fears of dystopia. Over the last ten years, the novel has been recommended ad nauseum, as if it has something to say about the world in which we live. Which it does not.
Nineteen Eighty-Four assumes that when Big Brother arrives, his rule will be effective. That tyranny can follow through on its own plans. That it will have plans and that these plans will not be fucked through sheer idiocy. We will be ruled by the evil, yes, but they will, in the end, still be geniuses.
Meanwhile, Céline published this in 1932:
So Parapine told me that during the retreat from Russia Napoleon’s generals had a hell of a time stopping him from going to Warsaw to get himself sucked off just once more by the Polonaise of his heart. That was Napoleon all over, even in the midst of the worst reverses and calamities. Absolutely irresponsible! Think of his Josephine! He was her eagle, but it made no difference! Ants in his pants, come hell and high water! If you’ve got a taste for wine and women, nothing can stop you. And we all have it, that’s the sad part. That’s all we think about! In the cradle, at the cafe, on the throne, in the toilet. Everywhere! Everywhere! Our peckers! Napoleon or not! Cuckold or not! Pleasure first! To hell, says the Great Defeated One, with those four hundred thousand fanatics, emberesina’d to the gills ... as long as old ‘Polion gets one last squirt! What a swine! Never mind! Life is like that! That’s how everything ends. In absurdity. Long before the audience, the tyrant is bored with the play he’s acting. When he’s good and sick of secreting delirium for the benefit of the public, he goes and gets laid. When that happens, he’s washed up. Destiny drops him in two seconds flat! His fans have no objection to his massacring them with might and main! None whatever! That’s nothing! They forgive him a hundred percent! What they won’t forgive is when he starts boring them all of a sudden. Good work is tolerated only when hammed up! Epidemics stop only when the microbes get disgusted with their toxins. Robespierre was guillotined because he kept saying the same thing, and what did for Napoleon was over two years of Legion-of-Honor inflation. That lunatic’s headache was having to supply half of sedentary Europe with a longing for adventure. An impossible job. It killed him.
This sickness at the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four has doomed the administrative class into blindness. They stumble through an increasingly repellent future and never quite grasp its contours. But, hey ho, at least their sonorous voices resound on Bluesky.
Jarett Kobek is a writer living in California. He is the author of several books including ATTA, Invocation of My Demon Brother, Do Every Thing Wrong: XXXTentacion Against the World, and Motor Spirit.
Younis’s list:
#1. The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller
#2. “Detransition, Baby” – Torrey Peters
#3. The Trees – Percival L. Everett
#4. The Sellout – Paul Beatty
#5. Vernon Subutex 1 – Virginie Despentes
#6. Love Me Tender – Constance Debré
#7. Big Swiss – Jen Beagin
#8. Mammoth – Eva Baltasar
#9. A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby
#10. We All Want Impossible Things – Catherine Newman
wow, the spreadsheet...
noting for the record that i can be bribed with ≥$60 of sushi