Reineke's SLA Notebook

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 6:46 am

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Xmmm
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby Xmmm » Sat Dec 16, 2017 8:08 am

reineke wrote:The Ranker

When taking into account all the voters

1 Will Shakespeare
2 Fyodor Dostoevsky
3 Leo Tolstoy
Miguel de Cervantes is no. 16

Internationally

1 Miguel de Cervantes
2 Fyodor Dostoevsky
3 Leo Tolstoy
4 Victor Hugo

Men

1 Miguel de Cervantes
2 Mark Twain
3 Dante Alighieri
15 Leo Tolstoy

Women
1 Edgar Allan Poe
2 J. R. R. Tolkien
3 Charles Dickens
6 Leo Tolstoy

Millennials

1 Miguel de Cervantes
2 Poe
3 Tolkien
21 Leo Tolstoy



I like the concept of Ranker. The top results (with lots of votes and activity) certainly seem more reasonable than the expert list.

But once you drop below the top ten and the number of votes drops down to a couple hundred, things get weird.

On the "greatest writers of all time", J.K. Rowling scores higher than Flaubert or Yeats (my personal fave poet in English). Clearly it's a popularity contest, which is why pop fiction, literary fiction, poetry, etc. need to be sorted out into separate lists.

There are even worse problems on the Sci-Fi list. Philip K. Dick is in the #2 spot, which is almost right, but Isaac Asimov is in the #1 spot, and quite honestly the witty, loquacious, intelligent Isaac Asimov simply doesn't know how to write fiction.

Even worse, Karel Čapek appears in the #97 spot (War with the Newts is the scariest book I ever read ... I actually kind of wish I never read it. But it's brilliant). The Strugatsky Brothers are in the #110 spot. These are the guys who wrote Roadside Picnic. If the best science fiction novel ever written is not The Man in the High Castle, then it has to be Roadside Picnic. But Čapek and the Strugatskys are foreigners and didn't write in English, so the hell with them. There are at least 50 talent-less hacks rated higher than the Strugatsky brothers.


I think I'll avoid lists like this and just stick with my current method, which is like: "Go to amazon and type in something you know you like. Look at all the suggestions at the bottom. Look for the ones where you can 'look inside' and read a couple pages. Then hope for the best."
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 1:36 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 4:02 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 4:20 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 4:40 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 4:45 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 4:48 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 5:22 pm

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 5:49 pm

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