Re: Listen Up

Prufrock33@aol.com
Tue, 21 Jul 1998 21:15:39 -0400 (EDT) 

By now everyone has read the list of 100 Best Novels just released,  but did
everyone also read the accompanying New York Times commentary article by
Paul Lewis?  He noted that Modern Library, which selected the list, is a
division of Random House, which was recently purchased by the German
Bertelsmann group, which also owns Bantam Doubleday Dell, making it the
largest publisher in the world.  I just heard Bertelsmann also owns AOL but
I can't confirm that.

Bertelsmann publishes 59 of the 100 books and also publishes nine of the ten
Moden Library board members who made the selection. (Nine of the ten are
white males, heavily slanted toward historians rather than artists.)

The president of Modern LIbrary admitted that the list "is a way to bring
the Modern Library to the public's attention," and ML will reissue at least
ten of the novels in the next few months.  Random House is providing
promotional materials to bookstores which are offering the novels from the
list.  Are you getting the picture yet?

Besides being weighted in favor of books of historical significance, the
list contains very few books by women, by people of color, and by writers
from the rest of the English-speaking world besides the U.S. and Britain (39
of the books are British).  The eight women with books on the list do not
include South Africa's Doris Lessing, Canada's Margaret Atwood, or Eudora
Welty, Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, who came immediately to my mind when I
looked at the list.

It was a woman, Ann Godoff, the president and editor-in-chief of Modern
Books, who pushed the idea of the list, and she must get credit for a great
marketing coup, getting dead books onto the front page and into the national
TV news all around the English-speaking world.  Even the controversy over
what was excluded will still bring attention to  Modern Library.

I give a reluctant congratulations to her on her marketing sense while I
abhor the entire list and the process by which it was selected and the uses
to which it is being put.