Best of the best

(Click to enlarge.) Tom Gauld’s cartoon at The Guardian comments on the recent elevation of Middlemarch to the Best Novel of All Time. For the curious, but not curious enough to click on that link, #100 was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Quite a few of them I’ve never read; one or two I don’t remember ever having heard of! I cannot fight the judgement of the masses. I myself wrote last year, “Middlemarch is maybe/probably the greatest English novel; at least it’s part of the discussion. Virginia Woolf calls it a ‘magnificent book, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.’” Ms Woolf herself gets in at number 4 with To the Lighthouse, behind Ulysses (3) and Beloved (2). Surprises continue as War and Peace is beaten out by Anna Karenina for the 6th slot. We’ve been down this road before (of course). In 2015 Robert McCrum did a list of the 100 best novels in English and, a couple of years later a corresponding non-fiction list. Perhaps…