Well yes, John, I’d say that’s a fair and accurate assessment.
Read the Guardian’s explanation of how they got this list. It’s even worse than the list itself, but it does explain the bias creating this mess with this single phrase: “Atwood’s horribly prescient The Handmaid’s Tale.” Prescient? I guess I missed the U.S. turning women into involuntary full-time baby machines.
This is a DEI list, and not a very smart or informed one. No Mark Twain, because “Huckleberry Finn” has been cancelled. Jack London was too much of a toxic masculine writer for these weenies, I guess. “Treasure Island” is too full of men and boys too. “The Three Musketeers” is nowhere to be found; nor is “The Count of Monte Christo.” The women in “Ivanhoe” are too girly. But knee jerk political correctness kicked three of the very best novels, all written by women, off the list: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” almost certainly the most influential and important American novel ever written. Humor is pretty much verboten, unless it’s anti-war humor (“Catch 22”). P.G. Wodehouse wrote the funniest novels of all time: the problem with including him would be picking which were the best. Yes, ancient odd-ball novel “Tristram Shandy” is on the list: I challenge anyone to claim it has even half the outright belly laughs of Wodehouse at his best.
Not including Tolkien is inexplicable (and I don’t even like his writing); similarly, the greatest novels that engage children while reaching adults as well were cut: “Wind in the Willows,” Watership Down,” and especially the two Lewis Carroll classics, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” both among the cleverest, most original, most quoted and influential novels in the English Language.
Meanwhile, one entry on the list, “The Turn of the Screw,” isn’t even a novel. I thought the vocalist list was absurd because it was lazy and ignorant, but “The Hundred Best Novels of All Time” is even worse, because it is overtly political. “Never has such a list been more needed,” The Guardian says. Why would incompetent, biased, misleading lists ever be “needed?” Amusingly, the explanation of this thing starts with the correct assessment in its very first sentence: “[C]ompiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task.”
Here is the stupid list. Go crazy…
Ethics Alarms 
Here is another list. There’s not much overlap of best novels. I wonder how many of either list most people have read or even recognize the titles? Apparently I need to read more “classics”, because I haven’t read many.
https://www.librarything.com/list/9659/all/Times-All-Time-100-Novels
I read 16 of these, and many more from the original list.
-Jut
Demeter,
I was thinking the same thing…or maybe not. It’s highly likely that ranking “the best” anything “of all time” is super subjective and only good for starting arguments. And books – especially works of fiction – are even more subjective, because it’s all about personal taste and perception. I love most of Robert Ludlum’s work, and Dale Brown, and Tom Clancy, but none of those books would ever sniff a top-100 list. And you might hate those authors and what they produced. If I want to list “the 100 fastest cars of all time”, that’s pretty easy to do, since there is a concrete yardstick (top speed) by which one can rank. But to rank “the 100 best cars of all time”?…can’t do it. “Best” is like “greatest”…too vague and immeasurable. Every list will have its detractors and no argument will ever be settled to anyone’s satisfaction.
I think the best we can hope for with the “greatest 100 novels” or “greatest 100 musicians” or “greatest 100 flavors of Kool-Aid” is to read the list, note the places where we concur, chuckle at the places where we differ…and then simply move on.
I’ve only read a handful of books from the Guardian’s list, and a slightly bigger handful from LibraryThing’s list, and I really don’t have much interest in reading the others.
I read Beloved.
I appreciated it.
I did not particularly like it or enjoy it.
It might make my Top 100 American Novels list.
I am not familiar with Wodenhouse, but I am glad Tristram Shandy was included. It is worthy of a spot here.
But, yeah, lots of DEI here. Some of them I like but, yes, it seems to value inclusivity.
At the same time, it does include four Dickens novels. On that, I have not read Our Mutual Friend, but Tale of Two Cities was excluded and Bleak House ranked the highest (because it is his only novel with a female narrator?).
-Jut
Read 26 on this list.
I take my DEI comment back.
They compiled the list by asking 170 authors for their Top Ten books.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. Stephen King said he could not fit Dickens into his Top Ten. I don’t know if I could either.
But, asking contemporary writers for their Top Ten could easily explain the number of “diverse” books here. It certainly could explain the modernist slant.
-Jut
“The Count of Monte Christo.”
The list is garbage, but I wouldn’t have put this book anywhere near it. Dumas is a great writer, but what he did with this book is the most boring, anticlimactic revenge story I’ve ever read. The movie (at least the Jim Caviezel one) is perhaps the only movie I would put miles ahead of its book counterpart.
No Verne? 1984? Catcher in the Rye? The Odyssey? Harry Potter? Lord of the Flies?
How disappointing.