Amazon.com recently had a public nomination for the books of the Millennium. I thought this was a fun topic to debate, despite the fact that as I write this (1/3/00), the start of the New Millennium is just under a year away :-). The results were disappointing but hardly surprising! Since this is Dave's World, let's compare and contrast Dave's top 10 with Amazon's top 10. In true top-10 fashion, we'll start at #10 and work down to #1. The 10 Amazon picks consisted of 4 defendable candidates, 1 very borderline pick, and 5 embarrasing disasters! And all 10 were works of fiction (they really should have had a fiction and a non-fiction list) - it's what I would have expected if People magazine had been doing the poll (Further evidence? The Backstreet Boys appeared at #3 on the list of best music titles of the millennium! Gack!).
10) 1984, George Orwell On my list too - see the notes there |
10) The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould Interesting, informative, and very educational. Learn about the shady beginnings of I.Q. testing and what we perceive as incredible racism today, in the writings of people just as smart as you, living a century ago. What such blinders do you have today? :-) |
9) The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck I have tried, really tried, to like this book, due to its supposed classic status and all. But the writing style was as lackluster as the characters themselves - I have never enjoyed it. Nevertheless, the varied critical acclaim this work has enjoyed makes me begrudgingly acknowledge it as a viable selection. (If I had to read a Steinbeck book, I'd pick Travels With Charlie) |
9) The Ecology Of Commerce - Paul Hawken A great proposal for organizing business and government with an eye toward preserving, rather than raping, the Earth. |
8) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand One of the dangers of a public opinion poll on books is that some piece of Ayn Rand tripe is sure to find itself near the top of the list. Only God knows why. Rand's sophomoric writing style and one-dimensional characters can't win her any acclaim as a literary work, so I suppose the promotion of her philosophy, Objectivism, carries the popularity. But this is just as puzzling - Rand's self-obsessed, robot-esque, unlikable, humorless characters would not seem to be exemplars of anything that people would strive to be. |
8) 1984, George Orwell A frightening and insightful look at a darker side of the human condition. The torture scene near the end of this book is chilling. 1984 can be experienced on many different levels: the subjectivity of truth, Big Brother Is Watching You, a glimpse into a possible twisted dark future. |
7) Ulysses - James Joyce This didn't make my top-10, but it could have. Beautiful writing, dense enough that reading it makes a better year-long small-group project than it does an individual read. |
7) Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson The writing and characterization are fantastic. Robinson's characters are Real People - almost to the point that it reads like a documentation of what actually happened. Additionally, Robinson goes into extended stream-of-consciousness prose in places, with the writing masterfully flitting around like thoughts. A wonderful, realistic, believable account of the initial human colonization of Mars. |
6) The Stand - Stephen King I haven't read it. King does nothing for me. |
6) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee A beautifully written story - I've heard it was Lee's only book. A wonderful depiction of life through the eyes of a child. |
5) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J. K. Rowling Oh the shame, the shame. A bunch of people confused "best books of the millennium" with "most popular book in 1999 for twelve-year-olds". |
5) Gutenberg Bible - (printed by) Gutenberg Amazon (rightly) disallowed any version of the Bible, for the sensible reason that it was written well over 1000 years ago. I'll make a special exception for the Gutenburg Bible, as the first book to roll off of Gutenberg's printing press and, thus revolutionizing books and the importance of reading in the Western world. |
4) The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger This book wouldn't make my list of top 100 books of 1951. Why is it popular? Beats the heck outta me. It's not bad, it's just inconsequential. |
4) Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter An amazing, thought-provoking book. A holistic look at the field of artificial intelligence, pointing out the shortcomings of reductionism in AI. There's been some articles forecasting the next century that call for AI/robots to be able to out-think humans in a couple of decades (Newsweek, for one). No way, no how. This book will tell you why - it was probably responsible for me deciding to do my MS/CS project in AI. |
3) To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee On my list too - see the notes there. |
3) Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith The first, modern political economic book. Although this book is a dense one to wade through, its impact is undeniable. Smith is probably best known today as a proponant of laissez-faire capitalism, but I admire it more for his precise economic definitions, along with describing government minimalistically. We could use some of that today! |
2) Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell Pop literature. An easy read, but nothing notable. It's the 1930s equivalent of Michener's Centennial. OK, maybe a bit more - it won the Pulitzer Prize after all - but not much more. |
2) On Origin Of Species, Charles Darwin This one was actually on Amazon's list, at #21. Shocking! The book, an exposition of evolution, is stunning. A good metric of the "beauty" of any scientific theory is the difference between what the theory assumes and what it explains, By this metric, the Theory of Evolution is superseded only by Newton's Theory of Gravity. |
1) The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien I like this series, I always have, but the best book(s) ever?? Puh-leeze. |
1) Philosophy of Mathematics, Issac Newton Issac invents several types of calculus and places Physics on an unshakeable theoretical foundation, propelling both Mathematics and Physics far ahead of where they would have otherwise been. Newton was the first to correctly model Gravity, the first to correctly model physical force, and the first to see that the Calculus he invented (perhaps co-invented with Leibnitz) was applicable to a wide range of problems. Awesome. Amazing. People were stumbling around in the dark, and Issac came along and turned on the lights. In my opinion this book has had more impact than any other written in the last 1000 years. And it didn't even make the top 100 on Amazon! And yet, the Celestine Prophecy did, which just goes to show we live in a sick, twisted world. :-) |