Time to laud a refreshing gust of truth telling:  this gimlet eyed gem via bookninja from Esquire magazines’ Benjamin Alsup here summarized:

 "…the problem with avoiding stupid books is that you end up avoiding the books that people actually read. This makes you feel out of touch. Like one of those elitist wimps whom fat guys on the radio are always making fun of.

So I read some of them: Relentless, by Dean Koontz (Bantam); Long Lost, by Harlan Coben (Dutton); and First Family, by David Baldacci (Grand Central). And it hurt. Since I’m never going to do it again, and since I don’t recommend that anybody else try this shit at home, here’s what I learned from reading these stupid books.

1. The world is batshit insane.

2. The world is not only batshit insane; it’s after you.

3. Women are… "smart," "witty," and "graceful."

4. Stupid books take almost as long to read as not-so-stupid books.

This is the point where I’m supposed to find something positive to say about these books. That’s how it works. You’re supposed to get all counterintuitive and say that Sarah Palin is so freakishly stupid, she’s actually some kind of genius. Here’s what I can say: The Coben is not quite as bad as the Baldacci, which is not as god-awful as the Koontz.

It seems it’s widely considered bad form to call stupid things stupid. But that’s mostly what these books are. They’ll cost you $25 a pop, waste a half day of your life, and leave you neither smarter nor happier, just kind of bored and a little depressed. That’s no way to spend a summer. Screw these books. Take a walk."

  

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• margaret macmillan

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjH8ns1N9uw

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• and his heart was going like mad
• all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes i said yes i will yes
• and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets

I love the use of ‘sweet nuts’ in the first line. ‘Rededication’ is a very good poem as well. So is ‘The Sparrows,’ ‘Letter’ and ‘Ballad.’ Some contain the most exquisitely violent, striking openings:

The moon dangling wet like a half-plucked eye

And how he elevates Affliction into the canon:

Social “relevance” in fiction arises as a resonant effect of narratives that are compelling in their storytelling, the execution of which is the writer’s first obligation. “Relevance” is a quality a work of fiction possesses in addition to it primary achievement as a credible aesthetic creation, at least if the author of the work hopes it will survive its motivating but transient “subject.”

"Affliction will survive into the next generation of readers because Russell Banks is able to make the novel relevant in this way. In the long run it will be valued, I believe, for its perfectly-paced storytelling and skillful deployment of point of view, for its formal appropriation of the naturalist narrative such that what was a loosely connected set of realist narratives embodying, in various degrees of novelistic skill, a determinist worldview becomes freshly shaped into a preeminently skillful narrative that could be described as distilling the common tendencies of literary naturalism into a kind of quintessential form. It will be valued for the “relevance” of its story about the vulnerabilities of rural communities and abiding effects of male rage, to be sure."

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• best poetry books of all time
• best poems of all time
• best poetry collections of all time
• best poetry books all time
• greatest poetry books of all time
• best poem books of all time
• best books of poetry of all time
• top ten poetry books of all time
• top 10 poetry books of all time
• best poetry books ever

 Book Award lists

1. Pulitzer Prize Winners for Novel/Fiction 
2. Orange Prize for Fiction’s "50 Essential Reads by Contemporary Authors" 
3. Hugo Award Winners 
4. Booker Prize Winners 
5. Nebula Award Winners 

1. BBC’s "The Big Read – Books 1-100" 
2. MLA’s 30 Books Every Adult Should Read Before They Die 
3. Dr. Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 edition) 
4. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of All Time 
5. Random House Modern Library’s 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century 

According at least to The Oxford American’s Kevin Brockmeier. He gives us an alphabetical listing of his 50 favourite stories with an admitted contemporary English-language, science fiction, magic realists, fantasist bias. Here from it are his top ten:

"The Voices of Time" by J.G. Ballard (*)

"The Accordion Player" by John Berger (*)

"The State of Grace" by Harold Brodkey (*)

"The Light-Years" by Italo Calvino (*)

"The Prophet from Jupiter" by Tony Earley (*)

"Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold" by Theodora Goss (*)

"The Thistles in Sweden" by William Maxwell (*)

"Faith and Mountains" by Augusto Monterroso (*)

"The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy (*)

"Escapes" by Joy Williams

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• The Prophet from Jupiter by Tony Earley analysis

Don’t get me wrong. I love lists, but I love even more the rationale behind the making of them…the cited reasons why one poem or poet makes the cut, while others don’t.  In order to fashion a more than purely ‘subjective’ list the first necessity is to have read a great deal: all those works which have by others been deemed canonical; all those which haven’t. This is of course impossible. However, as time goes by, and pages are turned, we get closer and closer to the accomplishment of this goal. A better appreciation of what does or does not possess ‘value.’

All of which to say, as Northrop Frye does in The Educated Imagination: "Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time."