The Best Books of the 20th Century

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> > What's your pick of the best book of the century?
> >
> > jbf
> 
> Paging Keith Woodward...
> 
> Paging Keith Woodward...
> 
> Pick up the white courtesy phone, please...
> 
> (The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass)

Digression In Praise of Best Book Digressions

It is true, there are morose, detracting, ill-bred
individuals (none on this list thank Shakespeare), who
pretend utterly to derelish these polite innovations. They
complain that the habit of crowding 100 best of things on
one plate, was at first introduced in compliance to a
depraved and debauched appetite, as well as to a loony toon
constitution. Sometimes they hit from down under the desk
with a bomb to scare the steadiest of fingers ever put to
keyboard, while they affirm that digressions on lists are
like foreign troops in a state, which argue that the Indian
Nation should have minds, hands, and hearts of its own,
while they subdue the natives, or drive them into the most
unfruitful corners of the Continent, wrap the indigenous
culture in Christmas boxes and sell them to the world. But,
after all that can be objected by these supercilious
censors, it must be known, that were posts to this list
confined to delivering nothing beyond what is to the
purpose, the members would quickly be reduced to One
critical keyboard. While it is true, that if the case for us
was the same as that of our grand parents of Greece and
Rome--when learning was rocked in an endlessly conscious
cradle, reared and fed, and clothed by invention, it would
not be difficult to have thousands of posts per day without
farther expatiating from the subject than my recent and 
most moderate excursions. But with knowledge it has fared as
with a numerous army, encamped on a fruitful continent set
off from the world, which will maintain itself by the
product of soil it has first won by trickery or been given;
till these wasteful enlightened ones, having exhausted their
provisions, they move ever wherever as to manifest their
destiny. But the whole coarse of things being thus entirely
changed for us, we stuff our ancient's  into hermeneutic
cannons deconstructed and launch them to the great land-fill
craters of the moon. For we have discovered a shorter and
more prudent method, to become scholars, without the fatigue
of reading or of thinking. The most accomplished way of
using books at present is two fold: either first, to serve
them as some political whores are apt to do, learn their
titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or
secondly, which is indeed the more popular, more erudite,
profounder, and more polite method, to get a thorough
insight into the index, by which, as all doctors know, the
whole book is governed and turned, like blowfish in the bay.
For to enter the library of learning through the open gate,
requires an expense of precious time; therefore will men and
women sit upon asses in  committee and vote the best they've
read by sneaking upon the library from the rear. Thus these
advisors of what to read have gained their knowledge by
coming on the posteriors of books. With such lists we trust
a doctor that discovers the whole state of the body, by
consulting only that which comes from behind. And since the
method of growing wise, learned, and sublime, now become
such a regular affair,  and since there is not a sufficient
quantity of new matters to investigate and write of in the
books we are gathered here today to join ourselves about, it
seems reasonable, that of necessity, scholars must be
permitted to digress and list the very best of the best of
the best.           

JS