National Public Readiculous

My friend at A Progressive on the Prairie, who is far more knowledgeable in literary matters than I (the English professor who has no time for reading) and a topflight online book critic, sent me to look at NPR's list of Top 100 Books for the Beach. (NPR, by the way, like the Princeton Review, is in my top 150 Groups That List Things.) As might be expected, there is much to quibble with, most of which goes back to the demographic being courted with the idea. Three things, however, go beyond quibbles and straight to querulousness:

1) The list is supposed to be Books for the Beach...connoting, I suppose, light summer leisure reading. And a fair number of the books on the list match that criterion. But Anna Karenina? Bonfire of the Vanities? Lolita?? Lolita isn't just not a book for the beach -- it's a book that should only be read in a dark unheated basement with flickering candlelight at most. Or in Teheran, which these days seems pretty much the same. 

2) Given my presupposition about the nature of the list, I found it more than a little surprising that the first outright crime/detective novel on the list didn't show up until #70: Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Carl Hiaasen, whose Everglades crime sagas fairly radiate Summer Reading, peeped in at #99, with Sick Puppy. I suspect that Progressive's belief that the survey reflects a higher percentage of women readers than men may have something to do with this -- but the person who introduced me to Hiaasen (feast4thought) is a woman, and having taught film noir and crime fiction courses, I know that appreciation for the genre is far from male exclusive. But, gee, doesn't it just sound more Garrison to say you spent your afternoon on the patio perusing Anna Karenina than something by Denise Mina or Richard Price?

3) The list is called Books for the Beach, not Novels for the Beach. Again, I wasn't in on the list from the start, but it's befuddling how a list of 100 Books for the Beach could include not one single work of nonfiction. None. The first book I picked up after commencement this spring was Krakauer's Into Thin Air; the latest is Sarah Vowell's Partly Cloudy Patriot. No one else reads these things? Tom Wolfe's excremental Bonfire of the Vanities (the most fitting book title ever, since that's precisely where it belongs) is on the list, but The Right Stuff isn't? Given that it's an NPR book list and the entire David Sedaris oeuvre isn't listed in the top 5, perhaps my assumption that it's not restricted to novels is incorrect. But any book list that doesn't acknowledge the most vital genre in current American literature isn't really worth much more than what gets washed up on the beach at high tide, all things considered.