Reviews for Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights and Poets of All Time

The average rating for Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights and Poets of All Time based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-08 00:00:00 Mrs. Stevens Any ranking of the world's best authors over the course of history is bound to fail, of course. It is bound to be biased as well. But this is a caricature of a bias. Out of 125 writers chosen from the beginning of literature until now, 50% come from the English speaking world. That is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous than the 10% women, or the general euro-centrism beside the English Literature Empire. Even the hugely criticised distribution of the Nobel Prize in Literature is less lopsided, and it has the excuse of having been created over a century of massive European bias, whereas the author of this ranking composes his random list from the perspective of our global world of today. My first impression was that he had made a list of the best authors writing in English, and had then attempted to steal the biggest names of other cultures in order to decorate it further: Dante, Homer, Goethe as part of the English canon. As a ranking, it is a joke. As a short introduction to the authors chosen, it is quite well-written and informative. Would not recommend spending money on it, though. I found it in a thrift store.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-04-29 00:00:00 Shigeyoshi Muraguchi A shortcut to good taste that obviates the need to actually expose one's self to the textual depredations of revered writers. If you wake up one day having the urge to read something 'important' you could do worse than to consult this book: its catologue of 2-4 page sumnations provides an overview of each writer's life and work, and in cases where a writer's output was uneven highlights the good stuff. Following this series of biographical sketches one after the other was like watching a parade of droll parasite worms, essentially identical, displaying human attributes like the symptoms of a plague ' sprouting limbs of madness, childhood trauma, sexual deviancy, or other tumours of identity ' and underneath it all their immature maggot forms a terrible white. Enough! Having decomposed so many bodies of text in such a compression of time has made me a little sick.