While recently searching for lists of great books
and all-time classics, I had to confront a number of concerns and issues,
including these:
·
Who got to choose such a designation for
a book and what credentials do they have?
·
What criteria was employed to come up
with these lists?
·
How did the individual members of a
group draw a consensus – was it negotiated, debated or just voted on?
·
How often should such a list be reviewed
and edited to determine which books fade into irrelevance in favor or newer,
perhaps better ones?
·
How many books did the group members
read? What did they consult to gain
insight on books worthy of their consideration?
It’s certainly hard to compare books from one
generation to another – and it’s difficult to keep up with the torrent of books
produced today (more than 1,000 every 24 hours from traditional
publishers). Further, you have human
bias tossed into the equation.
Is there really a good method by which to truly judge which books are best?
Is there really a good method by which to truly judge which books are best?
There are some metrics that could be used, but each
has its shortfalls. Let’s take a look:
Sales
Do we judge a book based on being a bestseller? If so, which lists do we look at? What about total sales of a book – including
those that aren’t verified by bestseller lists?
Is popularity enough of a reason to judge a book? If so, Fifty Shades of Grey would rank very
high, but no one is confusing that with the works of Shakespeare.
Social
Media
This more recent invention can give us statistical
analysis on how often a book is tweeted, liked, or discussed on a platform such
as YouTube. But those could be negative
comments or they can be pushed by an assertive author. Again, such a measurement doesn’t indicate
quality.
News
Media
Should we rank a book high because it was
well-reviewed by traditional or respected media? Self-published or smaller independent presses
produce some great books but the major media doesn’t always give ink to them. They choose to review books that big publishers
produce (perceived bias) or the ones from publishers who tend to finance their
publication through advertising.
Awards
Which awards – and how many of them – must a writer
win or place high in to get a ranking worthy of greatness? What is the application and selection process
like at each award? Some awards are
politically driven. Others select from a pool of paid applicants, thus limiting
others from participating. Further, what
bias exists for the judges, and how many books do they have time to read or
review? If a thousand books were
submitted to an award, this represents eight hours of publishing’s
productivity. Based on 3,000 books
published daily – from traditional to self-published – the award is only
looking at a tiny fraction of all books released that year. Even then, who has time to read all of them
in order to make a legitimate judgment?
Impact
It’s too soon to judge the socio-political impact a
book could have on society during the first year of a book’s existence, so time
would be needed to see how a book influences others and touches the world. It would admittedly be difficult to quantify a book’s global impact.
Testimonials
If a lot of people who are well-known, credentialed
experts, and trusted individuals come out in support of a book, should weight
be given to them to determine a book’s greatness? How do we rate the testimonial-givers or the testimonials?
Experts
Do our intelligent, trained, educated and
experienced librarians, readers, editors,teachers – and even other authors –
serve best to determine a book’s greatness?
Who has the time to participate in judging and ranking books?
Let’s say each method is faulty, but relevant to be used in combination with one another to draw some kind of limited conclusion
about a select number of books from each year’s production of books. Now take the list of the year’s best books,
break it down by genre, and tell me how many books should be on this list. Now compare one year’s list to another and
another and another. After just 50 years you would have thousands of books on
the list. Now look back into the
centuries past. A conservative list of
all-time books could easily total 10,000.
If you read a book a week, in 200 years you would
get through a list that would by then have likely doubled or tripled in size. The process, as you can see, to create any
list is limited by time, subjectivity, money, experience, training, and
politics. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
try to put such a list together, for something to guide us is better than
nothing at all, but we should realize these lists are faulty and need
improvement.
However, if you want to see what some of the perceived
experts say are some of the best books of all time, take a look at these randomly
and subjectively chosen links:
My favorites? As A
Man Thinketh, Man's Search for Meaning, and most works by Leo Buscaglia, Dale
Carnegie, George Orwell, Joseph Heller, Norman Vincent Peale , Og Mandino, Stephen
Covey, Ken Blanchard, Tony Robbins, and
gosh, a hundred other writers just from this past century would occupy a list
by themselves.
What do
you believe are the best books ever?
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
