The "New Classics"?

I unabashedly love Entertainment Weekly. (Or at least did—once my TV broke, I canceled my subscription.)

That said, the recent list of the 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008 strikes me as unbelievably provincial, and well, just plain bad.

There are a handful of great books here—out of the top 25, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Blindness, Watchmen, Love in the Time of Cholera, all jump out at me—but there are also some terrible ones—The Da Vinci Code?! even at number 96 it severely mars this list—and a ton of mediocre to decent books—such as The Road, which was selected as the best “new classic.”

The main purpose for lists is to stir up debates, and I feel like I’m playing in to Entertainment Weekly‘s hand even by posting this, but really, what a disappointment. (I suspect there will be two comments to this post, one calling me an elitist for dissing Dan Brown, the other wondering what I really expected from EW, America’s Greatest Entertainment News Source.)

All 100 Titles can be found via the link above; here’s the Top 25:

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)