I wonder what everybody thinks of this list?
Top ten things we like about the list? (argh!)
Has our collective wisdom made a monster?
Yes, but an interesting and mostly friendly one. Ala "Where the Wild
Things Are"
Will Robert become a happier wiser man when he sits down and reads,
these ten books?
Hard to tell, and the answer probably is more about Robert's personality
than the list or the responses he got.
Seriously, I think a "frequency of reference" with a strict (cut off at
10) is not the best measure of "collective judgement". The key to
good collective decision making (support) is to apply the apt fusion
operators with good weighting vectors (for example, one might want to
completely dismiss my contributions or even use them with negative
weights).
In that issue, somebody had compiled a photo of a woman who was made
up of the best features of all the beautiful women of the day. "Huh?!"
Is that what we have here? This is NOT a rhetorical question.
I think what we have (had) here was a lively discussion not unlike the
one held by the blind men groping the elephant! We each grabbed our
favorite part of the poor creature and while dangling from his various
appendages and groping vigorously at whatever folds or flaps or hunks of
flesh our little greedy hands could clasp onto, we loudly reported,
quite authoritatively *exactly* what an Elephant was... of course we
sounded like a cacophony of contradictions. But in that cacophony
might have been "everything you need to know about reading fiction for
the modern FRIAMer".
I myself felt highly informed by the raving and clatter... the resulting
list is nearly abhorrent and certainly aberrant by my measure, but the
discussion along the way was great. Thank *especially* to Guerin for
the must read Chinese Novels. I feel that I understand more what
motivates others on this list to read fiction, what they (roughly)
consider to make fiction literature (or at least transcendent in some
way)...
I know it may have sounded like a lot of noise to the majority
(lurkers?), especially with me piping up nearly every other comment, but
it might have entertained and informed others as well.
- Steve
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