SOURCE: "The Voice of the People Speaks. Too Bad It Doesn't Have Much to Say," in The Washington Post, August 10, 1998, p. D2.

[In the following essay, Yardley decries the prominence of "otherworldly fantasies and ideological potboilers" in the on-line readers's list of novels, disparaging the business of list-making.]

From somewhere out in cyberspace a desperate reader, hair so high on end it's "like a fright wig," prayed last week for an inquiry into the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. No, not the list compiled by its "board" of lit'ry eminences—that's already been taken to the cleaners in this space—but the counter-survey of ordinary readers conducted by the Modern Library on its Web site, http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best/.

It took approximately 1.46 seconds to see that my correspondent, hair so magnificently on end, had if anything under-reacted. The vox...