Good Reading

A couple years ago, Random House did up two lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century One list was chosen by a Board of Prominent Thinkers," the other by a poll of over four hundred thousand readers.

The Top Ten, according to the Board:

1. Ulysses, James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, James Joyce
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound And The Fury, William Faulkner
7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
8. Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler
9. Sons And Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck

It's not a bad list. Ulysses is a painfully obvious choice for the top slot, and I was a bit disappointed not to see To Kill a Mockingbird or Watership Down in the Top Ten, or even in the list at all. But overall, not bad.

And the Top Ten, according to the readers:

1. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
2. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
3. Battlefield Earth, L. Ron Hubbard
4. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
5. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. 1984, George Orwell
7. Anthem, Ayn Rand
8. We The Living, Ayn Rand
9. Mission Earth, L. Ron Hubbard
10. Fear, L. Ron Hubbard

Of ten slots, four (including the top two) are taken by Ayn Rand and three by L. Ron Hubbard. So if this list is any indication, we have a serious problem:

There are a couple hundred thousand radical über-capitalists and Scientologists running amok. And given that they breed like bunnies and that this poll was taken in 1998, those numbers could be well into half a million by now.

At this point, we're well past the possibility of using non-aggressive methods to curb their numbers, presenting us with a hard choice: herd them into reservations where they can breed in a controlled habitat, or introduce a wild strain of Marxist into their populations to thin their numbers. I'm down with either, but, heaven knows we need to do something soon.