QUILLBLOG

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.