The Internet demands frequently updated content, and lists and rankings are incredibly easy to put together and require no original thought. There’s no need to come up with a new idea every week. — Neal Pollack in Slate
MY TOP 37 LISTS OF LITERARY STUFF
1. Top 3 Books Written by Writers Who Were Not Drunks, Insane, Drunk and Insane, or Otherwise Impaired
2. Top 809 Literary Blogs That Are Actually About Literature
2a) Top 56,237 Literary Blogs That Are Actually Not About Literature
3. Top 42 Sentences That Have More Than Six Pronouns Not Written by Henry James
4. Top 344,249 Bad Sex Scenes by Otherwise Competent Writers
4a) Top 4 Good Sex Scenes by Competent Writers
5. Top 286 Stories Written Between 1990 and 1999 That Are All "Dude" Voice, But Have No Plot, Good Writing, or Other Redeeming Quality
6. Top 87 Raymond Carver Stories That Influenced MFA Students in a Really, Really Bad Way
7. Top 41,338,270 Chick Lit Books That Will Sell Better Than My Book, If It Were Ever Published
8. Top 156 Bad Ways to Say "Said"
9. Top 44 Suicide Notes by Sylvia Plath
10. Top 0 Best Selling Paperback Novels You Really Should Read Now
11. Top 1,000 Truly Great Poems
11a) Top 592,344,109 Truly Putrid Poems
11b) Top 592,341,861 Truly Putrid Poems Whose Author Thought It a Work of Genius, Before They Sobered Up
12. Top 1,603,419 Bars in Which to Drink After Not Selling Your Novel
Bad trip
13. Top 253 Top Excuses for Not Reading Milton, Cervantes, or the Anonymous Dude Who Wrote "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," That Moron Who Wrote Such Excrement That Was Fucking Torture to Read and Worse to Write a Paper About
14. Top 4,982 Meals Eaten by Balzac When Writing "Old Goriot"
15. Top 587 Barfight Scenes in a Poem in Which a Stool Is Actually Broken Over Someone’s Head
16. Top 26 Made Up Words by James Joyce That Mean Absolutely Nothing to Anybody But James Joyce
17. Top 112,907 Times I’ve Sworn While Writing
18. Top 19 Marrying Cousins in Jane Austen Novels
19. Top 4 Fake Memoirs
19a) Top 4 Fake Memoirs Not Written by James Frey
20. Top 3,140 Jokes Involving Sex in Philip Roth Novels
21. Top 66 Fictional Political Scenes That Do Not Involve Penises or Cigars
22. Top 3 Novels by Samuel Beckett
22a) Top 0 Novels by Samuel Beckett That Anyone Has Actually Read
23. Top 3 Sophocles Plays About Incest or Such
24. Top 1,448,937 Plays I Will Never See
25. Top 84,701 Rejections of My Stories
26. Top 112 Incidents of Ultra-Violence in The Illiad and The Odyssey That Involve Human Entrails Hoisted on Swords
27. Top 748 18th Century English Novels That Feature at Least 10 Exploding Corsets
28. Top 186 Great Books I Have Not Read
28a) Top 1,041 Sucky Ones I Have Read
29. Top 1,435 Publishing Houses Whose CEOs Are Certifiably Nuts
30. Top 14 Suicides Attributable to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther
30a) Top 1,846 Top Suicides Attributable to Students Being Forced to Read Goethe’s Faust
31.
My kind of Liszt
32. Top 374 Literary Agents
32a) Top 0 Literary Agents Who Will Actually Sell My Novel
33. Top 8 Scenes in a Novel Involving Heroin, Froot Loops, and the All-New 2008 Toyota Tundra
34.
35. Top 2,068 Times Hemmingway Got Wasted and Said or Did Something He Later Regretted
35a) Top 6 Times Hemmingway Got Wasted and Said or Did Something He Later Regretted in Which He Did Not Punch Somebody
36.
37. Top 37 Excuses for Not Writing
I think you greatly underestimate the number of top fake memoirs. Now that I think about it, aren’t they all?
Hilarious stuff. Now you just have to make the lists. I especially want to see the one with the barfight poems.
You said Raymond Carver.
**shudders**
8. Top 156 Bad Ways to Say “Said”
In his book, “On Writing,” Stephen King tackles this, offering up some hilarious cringe-worthy examples, some of which are from his own writing. It has made me hyper-aware of my tendency to pack on the adverbs so now I think long and hard before I type anything other than “said.”
gloria: of course, they’re all fake memoirs, in one form or another. but only three were written by james frey. and they’re the tops.
writtenwyrrd: if you don’t know your barfight poems (in which a stool is broken over someone’s head) by now, my listing them isn’t going to help you.
kofi: i presume that’s a scared raymond carver shudder.
leigh: god bless stephen king. one lesson i learned in my first (writing) job — when a person “utters,” “declares,” “blurts,” “states,” “screams,” or “says stupidly” (or “says laughingly,” “bitterly,” “angrily,”), etc., readers will never trust you as much if you had simply written, “she said.”
Bookfraud, when was the last time you wrote something for McSweeney’s? Might be nice. . .
Ack! Cheap shot, bookfraud! *ducks swinging barstool*
35b) Top 1 times Hemmingway Got Wasted and Said or Did Something He Later Regretted and didn’t live to tell about it.
Very scared, yes. I used to like him but not lately.