The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. Douglas Coupland puts Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers at number one, blowing right by Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. But I'm more interested in the dark horses, the statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of the literati. Zane, who's the books editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, has done a statistical breakdown of the results, so we know, for example, that Shakespeare is the most-represented author (followed by Faulkner, who ties with Henry James they're followed by a five-way tie, which you can read about for yourself). There's plenty of canon fodder on the lists. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini.
(Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. Peder Zane's The Top 10 (Norton 352 pages).Įach individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. But it would be a pretty interesting obscenity. Yes, it would probably still be an obscenity. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. You went to all the big-name authors in the world≿ranzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.īut what ifjust for argument's sakeyou got insanely rigorous about it. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together.
Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. Changes of rates of pay made under a collective bargaining agreement are exempt from this requirement.Follow not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. or other applicable federal or state law, an employer need not provide advance notice prior to returning the employee to the employee's regular wage rate, as long as the employer is in compliance with all posting and notice provisions of the applicable law. When an employer has temporarily increased an employee's wage rate to comply with the prevailing wage requirements of chapter 15 the federal Davis-Bacon Act, 40 United States Code, Section 276a et seq. Notwithstanding the provision of section 623 exempting salaried employees as defined in section 663, subsection 3, paragraph K, payment of wages or salary must be made at the rate previously established by the employer, except that the employer may decrease the rate of pay, effective the next working day, if the employer gives notice to all affected employees prior to the change.
0 kommentar(er)
