Good grief

[desperance]

Just to emphasise - as though we didn't know already - how utterly pointless a public poll can be, The Book Magazine has polled its readers to learn who is the greatest living British author. Their verdict? J K Rowling, streets ahead of Terry Pratchett in second place. I suppose it's predictable, but it's also stupid. Fond as I am of Pratchett, it's still stupid, for any given value of greatness. And all the more meaningless, when you look at the rest of the top twenty, which gives you a mixed run through current bestsellers and Grand Old Names - and then there's Alasdair Gray, who is neither.

For those who can dredge up any interest at all in such an absurdly skewed list, the top 20 (as reported in Pravda, which is the only pleasure I can derive from this whole farrago) is:

1 - J K Rowling
2 - Terry Pratchett
3 - Ian McEwan
4 - Salman Rushdie
5 - Kazuo Ishiguro
6 - Philip Pullman
7 - Harold Pinter
8 - Nick Hornby
9 - A S Byatt
10= - Jonathan Coe and John Le Carre
12 - Doris Lessing
13 - Alan Bennett
14 - Iain Banks
15 - Muriel Spark (an interesting definition of 'living', but hey...)
16 - David Mitchell
17 - Martin Amis
18 - Ian Rankin
19 - Pat Barker
20 - Alasdair Gray

Now draw up a demographic of one magazine's readership, such as might produce this range of results. Sheesh...

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

"I seek consolation whenever I can
In a Barbara Cartland and cheap marzipan."

Genre fiction is the mainstream now. It's all the rest of the world that's weird.

[hamadryad11.livejournal.com]

At least she's not on the list!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Dead, long dead. Even they have noticed...

D'you remember the world's best description of her face - looking as though two crows had crashed into the white cliffs of Dover?

[hamadryad11.livejournal.com]

I've never heard that, I don't think. It's... fitting. And yeah, I forgot the list was supposed to be living authors. My bad!

Egads. Now I'm wondering if they would have put her on it if they could have. I read one of her books once. It didn't take long before I wanted to strangle her heroine. Why did she think it was a good idea to write the stutter her herione spoke in throughout the entire book? I have no idea. But it was one of the most irritating things I've ever read. And that includes the novel written almost entirely in exclamations that I read a couple of months ago. I can't even remember what either book was about anymore, just that they irritated the hell out of me.