Found at UV's pad

who got it from VoxEfx who had written:

Copy the list of ten authors below. Replace any that are not included in your home library with one(s) that are. Note any replacements in boldface. Reference where you found LibeMeme when you post.

1. Richard Wright
2. John Irving
3. Alice Walker
4. Toni Morrison
5. David Halberstam
6. Orson Scott Card
7. James Baldwin
8. Margaret Atwood
9. William Shakespeare
10. Robert A. Heinlein

The Bread and Roses precursor to VoxEfx's list was

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. John Irving
3. Alice Walker
4. Toni Morrison
5. David Halberstam
6. Mary Gaitskill
7. James Baldwin
8. Shelby Foote
9. William Shakespeare
10. Robert A. Heinlein

Bread and Roses got the meme from PSoTD who listed

1. George Orwell
2. Jorge Amado
3. William Shirer
4. Herman Melville
5. P. J. O’Rourke
6. Joseph Heller
7. Willa Cather
8. Ayn Rand
9. David Halberstam
10. William Shakespeare

PSoTD then added, "Of course, I can't admit to reading all of Moby Dick, but I do have it here." and concluded, "I should be ashamed to admit who fell off the list when I posted: Arthur C. Clarke, H.L. Mencken, Kinky Friedman, John Irving, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood."

UV had replaced VoxEfx's list with

1. Milan Kundera
2. Jennifer Crusie
3. Lawrence Sanders
4. Judith McNaught
5. Carl Hiaasen
6. Linda Howard
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Margaret Atwood
9. William Shakespeare
10. Victoria Holt

Interesting, eh? Did you note how PSoTD dropped Margaret Atwood and a mere two steps later VoxEfx added her back in? How long before someone puts Alice Walker back on the list?

My list would be boring and more an indication of what I own than what I read, which is "not much" these days.

I have on my shelves (if my shelves weren't in boxes) VoxEfx's list. I don't have Bread and Roses' Mary Gaitskill. I don't have UV's Jennifer Crusie or Linda Howard, and I don't have PSoTD's Jorge Amado.

How should one interpret a book list that's posted publicly as part of a book list meme on the Web? My stash of books are less what I've read and liked and kept and more what I think I might want to read some day, so I'm not sure my bookshelves make much sense to me, let alone the blog-reading public.

And what's up with the predominance of fiction writers on the lists above? Why no David McCullough? No Rush Limbaugh? No Howard Stern? No Erma Bombeck? No Woodward and Bernstein? How come so literary? (And why no Jerzy Kosinski, for that matter?)

Sure, I find all this fascinating and I will probably wander back (and back and back!) looking at the posted lists. I like discovering authors like Jorge Amado, whom I didn't know of before, but ... I did one of these a long while back, so this time? No meme here.

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:28 PM|| |