The Meaning of "Favorite"
Bill Clinton, whose continued insistence on breathing serves as an endless source of outrage for a disturbingly large number of people, is catching some flack ar CalPundit and elsewhere for a list of 21 "favorite" books released by his presidential library. The complaints mostly center on the "calculated" nature of the list, which is heavy on Literature and serious non-fiction. People seem to think that there should've been a couple of trashy bestsellers on there, or soemthing.
Like most criticisms directed at Clinton, this is actually pretty stupid. For one thing, it's not inconceivable that it's a real list-- I do know a number of people who read almost exclusively Important Books. There's no a priori reason to find the list implausible on those grounds.
(As an aside, I'll also note that the people I know who read mostly Important Books also tend not to read all that many books. Whereas the people I know who read mostly genre fiction tend to read a lot. Which probably tells you... well, nothing much at all, given that I know those people precisely because they read, write, or edit the same sort of genre fiction I like. Sampling on the dependent vaiable, and all that.)
The bigger problem, though, is that "favorite books," like any "Best... Noun... Ever" list is kind of a slippery subject. I'm typing this in my "office" at home, surrounded by the hardcover portion of my book collection, and even here, I'd have trouble coming up with a good answer to "What are your favorite books?" I doubt I would come up with the same list twice.
The answer depends very strongly on who's asking, and why. There are lots of different kinds of "favorite books" lists out there. There are "the books I'm most likely to grab when I'm bored, and need something to read," which skews very heavily toward page-turning genre fiction. There are "the books I'd recommend to someone who reads the same sort of things I do," which would skew toward the more literary side of SF, and the more SF-nal side of "Manstream". There are "the books that made a really big impression on me, back in the day," which skews younger, and trashier. There wouldn't be a whole lot of overlap between those lists-- there might be two authors who would appear on all three (Brust and Westlake, at a guess), and a couple of others who would make two out of three, but they're fairly distinct categories.
The same thing holds for music-- there are records that I deem "perfect albums" that I hardly ever listen to, and some records in heavy rotation at any given time that I'll cheerfully acknowledge as trash. I don't agree with a lot of the Rolling Stone list Matt cited, but that's largely due to a different set of criteria (I would exclude "greatest hits" packages from a list of the best albums ever, for example).
In the case of Clinton's list of books, this is something prepared in conjunction with an exhibit of material from his presidential library. Which means that the category is something more like "favorite books which provide some insight into your thinking and career." Not being an especially important person, nobody's ever asked me for that sort of list, but if I were to construct one, it would contain more science books (Goedel, Escher, Bach, Gleick's Feynman biography) and less genre fiction than you might expect from my normal reading patterns. It would be a "calculated" list of favorites, in some sense, but it would also be an honest answer to the question that was actually being asked-- somebody who's trying to divine why I became a physicist from a list of my reading material might really enjoy Jhereg or Baby, Would I Lie?, but it wouldn't exactly provide much insight.
Posted at 4:49 PM | link | follow-ups |