The Atlantic magazine has just come out with a list of The Great American Novels of the past 100 years. It’s pretty much a random selection, with picks made by a variety of contributors with different points of view. In the case of most literary awards who wins tells you more about the jury than it does about the winner, and in the case of an exercise like this I think the list tells you more about the times we live in and what the editors think it is we should value than it does about the books. But since the whole purpose of lists like this is to provoke discussion, I’ll say a bit more. Here are some drive-by thoughts.

136 books were chosen. I’m not sure if there was any reason for that number, but it makes things seem even more arbitrary. I mean, if they’d insisted on only 100 books making the list then they could always say that some titles only narrowly missed out appearing. But here they don’t have that excuse. There could have been 200 Great American Novels published in the last century, but I guess there weren’t.

I think the only guideline is that the book had to be first published in the U.S. Does that make a book American? My eyebrows jumped when I saw Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons included. Tom Nichols explains: “How did a graphic novel by a pair of Brits end up on a list of great American books? Because it tells a fundamentally American story, one that’s rooted in this country’s experience of the Cold War, and built from elements—superheroes and comic books—pioneered and perfected in the United States. (It was first published here, too.)” Humph.

Who’s in? A lot of twenty-first century writers I’ve never heard of. But that makes sense because I’m old. I’ve read Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place and I don’t think many people born after say 1980 have.

Black women are very well represented. With three books I think Toni Morrison had the most titles on the list. I think that’s maybe two too many. Octavia Butler has two. There’s a good amount of genre work and even pulp included, but Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind isn’t here (per Wikipedia: “As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible.”). There’s nothing by Norman Mailer. I’m not outraged by that, but it’s a reflection of those “times we live in” I mentioned earlier.

I’d argue with a lot of the selections from individual authors. Couples is the only novel by Updike. I don’t think that was his best work. Was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the right choice to make for Philip K. Dick, or does it just get a pass because of Blade Runner? Stephen King makes the list with The Stand, a book I’ve never been able to finish. I’d have gone with Pet Sematary or perhaps It. If I had to pick two (or five) books by Philip Roth, neither Portnoy’s Complaint nor Sabbath’s Theater would be one of them. I’d definitely take White Noise ahead of Underworld for the sole Don DeLillo, though I appreciated picking The Crying of Lot 49 over Gravity’s Rainbow from Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow is overrated. Lot 49 is a better book.

But overall it struck me as a nice effort. I liked quirky selections like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. As a list of recommendations it’s worth checking out. But as always you should feel free to disagree.