PBS TV is airing an eight-part television
series, starting May 22nd, that could spark a national debate about
reading – what we should read, why we read
what we do, how to encourage more reading of great books. We need more events like this to catapult a
renewed effort to read quality books in America.
At
least one in four Americans won’t read a single book in 2018. Not even a silly humor book, a simplistic how-to book, or even an escapist novel.
America needs to read more books – and not fall victim to reading only short–form content such as blogs, texts, and social media posts. We need to embrace a well-written,
well-researched or creatively imagined book.
We need something that really gets us thinking and feeling – and
talking. Though it’s quite difficult to
say which are the most important or best books around, we can do more to
support the broad pool of books that would fall under such categories.
The Great American Read will be hosted by
Meredith Vieira and feature interesting people such as actor Morgan Freeman and author Margaret
Atwood. It’ll explore how writers create
their worlds and how readers are deeply attracted to particular stories.
According
to PBS.org, the show relied on the selections of 7200 surveyed Americans and the selections of 13 advisory members
that were selected by PBS. The survey, conducted by You Gov. purports to
have conducted a demographically and statistically representative survey but
it’s hard to imagine something as complex as identifying the favorite novel of
330 million people can be revealed by seven thousand people – an average of
about 150 per state. And who is this
advisory panel of 13 literary industry professionals?
Anyway, they’ve come up with a list of 100 novels that really are all worth reading,
though we can easily come up with hundreds of other equally worthy books! If you think about it, it would be hard to
agree on the top 100 novels of the past decade – let alone several centuries of
America’s existence.
The
list has numerous problems in how it was put together. First, it only allowed for one title per
author, so if Dickens, Twain, Orwell or others dared write more than one great
book, you had to only take one. Same
holds true for a book series. The series
is treated as one book, even though individual books in the series could be
better than other books.
The
voting wasn’t weighted in any way.
Everyone picked their top title and weren’t allowed to list their top
100.
The eventual
way the top book is selected includes open online and social media voting which
unfortunately skews to favor those who are inclined to spend time online or who
want to stuff the ballot process.
Lastly,
this list doesn’t reflect poets, plays, non-fiction, and other genres, which is
fine. To create a list of great books we
probably need to subdivide by eras, genres, sub-genres, and other factors. For instance, it’s hard to compare thrillers
with drama, satires with erotica, horror with mystery or westerns,
etc. It’s also hard to compare a 1760’s
book with one from 1850, 1920 or 2018.
My
favorites – of those on the Top 100 list – are the following:
1984
Catch-22
The Catcher in the-Rye
Crime and Punishment
Gulliver’s Travels
Invisible Man
Whichever
books make such a list – and whichever – one wins – the main thing is it gets
America reading books again and puts a focus on books of quality that stand the
test of time.
DON”T MISS THESE!!!
Great advice for
all book publicists and authors
The Secret To
Really Getting Breakthrough Book Publicity
12 key things
authors must do to promote books successfully
How authors need to
go on a social media diet
The 15 ways authors
can promote a book
Big Marketing Lessons From My All-Time
Top 10 Blog Posts
Enjoy New 2018 Author Book Marketing
& PR Toolkit -- 7th annual edition just released
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.