Q&A With Lev Grossman from Time: Part 1
Today’s a cool day at 101 Books.
Lev Grossman was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the selection process for the Time Magazine All-Time 100 list. Lev is a senior writer at Time and one of the two book critics (the other, Richard Lacayo) who selected the entire Time 100 list.
Not only that, but Lev is a successful author himself–having now written four novels. Last Tuesday, The Magician King–the follow-up to Lev’s widely-read The Magicians novel–was released. It’s been described as Harry Potter for grown-ups with a little Narnia thrown in there.
Anyway, in the middle of all that, Lev took the time to answer a few questions about the Time list, the selection process, the books that were excluded, and so on.
Part 2 comes tomorrow. I’ll also include a few of my thoughts after each set of questions.
101 Books: Other than the specific rules (like the publish date), what were you looking for in a book to place it on the list?
Lev: It’s hard to put into a single world. I could say ‘greatness’ — in fact that’s probably what I would say — but I would never get done unpacking it. We wanted books that were rich, moving, entertaining, and unlike anything that had come before them. And that will never be forgotten. That’s a start.
101 Books: Can you talk a little about the selection process and what it entailed for you? How many books did you read or reread? How long did the whole process take?
Lev: I think we took roughly a year to put together the list. We budgeted three months, but it kept moving back and back and back. I reread parts of many, many books. Some I reread completely. It had been a while since I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. It held up! Other than that the process involved a mountain of email, some really amateur spreadsheeting, some well-meant trash talking, and some very long lunches.
101 Books: In Richard Lacayo’s description of the selection process, he says you both agreed on about 80 novels. Can you give some examples of a book or two that you disagreed on—and how you worked through the disagreements?
Lev: The truth is, while we disagreed on books, neither of us could come up with a complete list of 100 books that we felt were worthy. It’s harder than it looks — we both went into garbage time around #80. So there was a large Venn diagram overlap between our choices, but it was rare that one of us threw down the gauntlet and said, no, absolutely not. I’m not sure it happened.
I have never and will never be able to finish The Man Who Loved Children or The Sot-Weed Factor, and I think one Pynchon would have been enough (I am one of those people who finds Pynchon to be a bit dreary and dated, which I realize is enough to put me on many people’s list of literary idiots). But I wasn’t going to make a federal case out of it, and in the end I didn’t have books to replace them with.
101 Books: Why didn’t you rank the books, similar to the Modern Library Top 100 list?
Lev: It just seemed too arbitrary. Which is better, Deliverance or Catch-22? There’s enough arbitrariness in the mix already, with an exercise like this.
101 Books: What is your favorite on the list? Why?
Lev: I can’t name a favorite. There are too many books on the list that I love in too many different ways. I will say that I am proudest of the genre books that we put on the list. Neuromancer, Watchmen, Snow Crash, Ubik, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I think not enough lists like this give great genre writing (and drawing) its due.
101 Books: What was your 101st book?
Lev: The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
My Thoughts
- One of the main questions we’ve talked about on this blog is what makes a book “good enough” for the list. Is it the writing? The story? The cultural relevance? The creativity? One interesting thing Lev said…books “unlike any that had come before them.” That explains why a book like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was on the list. Judy Blume definitely broke ground with that one.
- I like what Lev says about going into “garbage time” after selecting 80 books. I think that’s how they were able to get a more diverse list than The Modern Library, putting some more genre specific books on the list.
- So Lev has never finished The Man Who Loved Children or The Sot-Weed Factor. Great. I still have to read those two books.
- Indeed, ranking the books is arbitrary. But it’s fun, and I guess that’s why I do it. Good conversation starter as well.
- Tom Wolfe just missed the list, huh? Haven’t read The Bonfire of the Vanities, but I remember really enjoying A Man in Full.
So, anything from the first part of this Q&A stand out to you? Fire away.
* Also, Check out Lev’s site and find out a little more about his brand-new novel, The Magician King, which is currently a top 100 book on Amazon.
Read Part Two of the Q&A.
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Q&A With Lev Grossman From Time: Part 2 | 101 Books
- Ranking The First 25 Books | 101 Books
- “A Dance To The Music of Time” May Kill Me (Or This Blog) | 101 Books
- The First 30: A Look Back | 101 Books
- Can Books and Video Games Coexist? | 101 Books
- Ranking The First 45 Novels | 101 Books
- How Many Female Authors Made The Time List? | 101 Books
I’m a big fan of genre fiction, so it’s nice to know at least one of the two people involved in the selection process was including genre books because he liked them, rather than just out of a sense of obligation. Thanks for an interesting little interview.
The books choices on the Time list were much more diverse. That’s why I like it so much better than the Modern Library list.
Agreed about Pynchon. His books are brutal to read.
I, too, was pleased to see genre fiction on the list. Too many LitCrit types seem to spit before they say “genre fiction” (or after or both). “Unlike anything that had come before” helps explain Neuromancer’s place on the list (I’m half-way through it!), but not that alone. More on all that later.
Unfortunately, what that can also do is create an incorrect impression of the genre in the mind of someone who doesn’t read that genre. Neuromancer is certainly a case in point: it founded a sub-genre, CyberPunk, but it doesn’t represent all of SF, not by a long way. Neither do/will the Pynchon books. Even adding Vonnegut and Dick doesn’t do it, the genre is just too varied. (Same is true for Fantasy.)
“One Pynchon would have been enough?” One was too many, as far as I’m concerned!
Terrific post: great to get some (more) insight into how the list was put together.
While there is a fair consensus about many of the books on the list, I still have a problem with only 2 people making the selections for the books. While they are book critics, there are still surely books that they omitted that belong on a list such as this. I think the list would have been better overall if they had more people submit suggestions for the list, poll other book reviewers and get a wider list of a couple hundred books and then pare it down to the top 100. Even if they ended up with the same list of 100 books, I would have preferred the list if they had created it this way.
I would have loved to see a woman in the selection process. I find as I read through the list, I need books to counter Money, Naked Lunch, The Man Who Loved Children, Lolita, I Claudius, Blood Meridian, Neuromancer, A Clockwork Orange, Dog Soldiers, Portnoy’s Complaint, etc, which do not represent a typical female interest. (And neither does Are You There God… but I’ll match that to Catcher in the Rye.)
I don’t know. Maybe I’m a biased guy, I’m just thinking off the top of my head, but I can think of a lot of books with strong female characters–that I believe would have female interests: Mrs. Dalloway, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, To Kill A Mockingbird, Gone With The Wind…just to name a few. And those are just the books I’ve read.
Forgot to say that I enjoyed the interview!
Thanks, Teresa. Part 2 tomorrow.
Great interview! I like that the list isn’t ranked. I enjoy seeing your rankings and reading your reasons; but for myself, I think that all the books are just too different to measure against each other. One may have great dialogue, but another has characterization that’s above the bar.
I agree. It’s totally arbitrary, practically impossible to compare the books. I mainly do it for fun and to provoke some discussion. My guess is, by the time I finish this list, I’ll probably love the top 20, hate the bottom 20, and the rest of the rankings are probably interchangeable. That’s the way it is now at least.
Interesting interview.
Personally, I like the fact that list is not ranked as well. It really gives others more room to play with it and even makes the list more intriguing. You kind of WANT to read all 100, not just the Top Ten.
I also appreciate the variety included in the list. I think it’s incredibly diverse and interesting. I thought maybe they wouldn’t do a great job representing the female tastes but you know what? Great literature is great literature and that’s what the list is. I find many of the books to be interesting reads and suit me just fine.
Also, the interesting effect of kind of burning out after Book 80. That makes sense.
Lev Grossman seemed like a really nice guy when I met him at Comic-Con. He also warned me about The Man Who Loved Children. I wish he would have been able to warn me about An American Tragedy ahead of time, though.
The name of The Man Who Loved Children just creeps me out. But I honestly have zero idea of what it’s about. My guess is Lacayo chose that one. I still have to read An American Tragedy. Uh oh.
I would have like to see a more global list. I agree that there is diversity in terms of subject matter, but most of the books were western oriented. That said, it is a list, and there’s always going to be a certain amount of dissatisfaction at the end of it.
Interesting interview though, and looking forward to part 2.
I thought it would be constructive here to count how many female authors were included in the Time List, and the the number is 17. Since Virginia Wolf has two books on the list, this means that only 18% of the list represents the female point of view, regardless of the sex of the protagonist.
Is this a reflection of the bias of the list-makers, or of society in general? Hmm. Sounds like an essay topic, doesn’t it?
Jodi
So interesting!
Thanks for sharing this.
This is really interesting – must have been great for you to see “behind the scenes” into the selection process for the list. I can see why they took a year to choose the 100. While it sounds like fun to do, I’m sure it was a lot of hard work… And I would have thought there were about 10 people making the decisions, not just two!