Entertainment Weekly's top 100 novels

       Yes, it's summer silly season, and 'best of'-lists continue to be hard to resist, so I'll even link to something as arbitrary as Entertainment Weekly's recently unveiled top 100 novel-list -- one of the laziest I've ever come across. A(n annoying) gallery of the top ten is up at the EW site, but the whole hundred can be found here, for example.
       It's so silly that it's almost fun -- Tolstoy tops the list (with Anna Karenina), but War and Peace only ranks 28th -- one spot behind ... A Wrinkle in Time (yes, a ... great novel, but come on ...), etc.
       The titles under review at the complete review ?

• 19. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• 39. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• 44. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
• 47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami Haruki
• 50. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• 51. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• 68. Middlemarch by George Eliot
• 75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• 82. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

       It's not so much these as many of the other choices that are ... questionable (as are the rankings, all around) -- though without any clear indication as to the selection criteria and process it's hard even to get worked up enough to do anything more than laugh at this list. (It really does seem basically entirely random; I imagine a group of EW-staff and writers tossing out famous novel names around a table until they reach a hundred.)
       A quick (i.e. appropriately lazy) count suggests only 85 of the 100 titles were originally written in English (because there are so few great foreign novels ...) -- though, amazingly (or, again, exceptionally lazily), several foreign-language-writing authors managed to land two titles apiece on the list (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez)