kjmichaels

I wouldn’t say it necessarily needs to be a large compendium but a passing familiarity is important at the very least. The sci fi writer Iain Banks made a good argument as to why research is important to write in a genre:

“. . . and then the twist at the end! I almost don’t want to tell you because it’ll spoil it for you first time you read it, but I’ve got to tell you, it’s so brilliant! […] the murderer is . . . the butler!”

Now, even the most gifted literary author […] if they were foolish enough to suggest something on these lines to their agent or editor they’d immediately be informed that It’s Been Done . . . in fact, It’s Been Done to the Point of Being a Joke

[…] It’s just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research

If OP truly will put down a book if even a single word seems out of place, the advice to simply read better writers won’t solve anything. There is no author who is so great that I would honestly say they don’t have a single iffy word choice in their books somewhere. No one is flawless, even Shakespeare had dud lines.

Mostly balanced though my POV or main characters tend to bias a bit more towards being women

This really does feel like a song for no one. The lyrics seem like they might implicitly address men as a group (it’s a woman’s world and you’re lucky to be living in it) but it feels like it was really meant for women. But then feminists won’t like it because it’s too insincere and anti-feminists won’t like it because its surface level, half-assed feminism is still a bridge too far for them.

So who’s left as an audience? Enbies who needed a reminder of how stupid gender can be to point and laugh at?

Yeah, a separate page reveals the reason:

The only rules: Any book chosen had to be published in the United States, in English, on or after Jan. 1, 2000

So they counted it because its English translation was published in 2007 which I think many people will take issue with. I know I do.

Yeah, I found it overrated too which was a real shame since I liked Lee's first book so much. I remember the exact scene where I realized the book was not going to be as good as I'd been told. One of the characters explained that Pachinko looks like a game of chance but is carefully rigged to be impossible to win. I thought "that's a neat little metaphor for their lives" only for the character to add "it's almost like a metaphor our lives."

That moment of making the subtext as blunt as possible dashed any hope the book would live up to its hype. I can't in good conscience call a book with so little faith in its readers great even with the book's many strong elements. The Great Gatsby doesn't have a scene where Nick asks "hey, does that green light represent the unattainable nature of the American Dream?"

List for the paywalled:

100. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson

99. How to Be Both - Ali Smith

98. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

97. Men We Reaped - Jesmyn Ward

96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - Saidiya Hartman

95. Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

94. On Beauty - Zadie Smith

93. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

92. The Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante

91. The Human Stain - Philip Roth

90. The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen

89. The Return - Hisham Matar

88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis - Lydia Davis

87. Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters

86. Frederick Douglass - David W. Blight

85. Pastoralia - George Saunders

84. The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

83. When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut

82. Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor

81. Pulphead - John Jeremiah Sullivan

80. The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante

79. A Manual for Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin

78. Septology - Jon Fosse

77. An American Marriage - Tayari Jones

76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

75. Exit West - Mohsin Hamid

74. Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

73. The Passage of Power - Robert Caro

72. Secondhand Time - Svetlana Alexievich

71. The Copenhagen Trilogy - Tove Ditlevsen

70. All Aunt Hagar’s Children - Edward P. Jones

69. The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander

68. The Friend - Sigrid Nunez

67. Far From the Tree - Andrew Solomon

66. We the Animals - Justin Torres

65. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth

64. The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai

63. Veronica - Mary Gaitskill

62. 10:04 - Ben Lerner

61. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

60. Heavy - Kiese Laymon

59. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

58. Stay True - Hua Hsu

57. Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

56. The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner

55. The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright

54. Tenth of December - George Saunders

53. Runaway - Alice Munro

52. Train Dreams - Denis Johnson

51. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson

50. Trust - Hernan Diaz

49. The Vegetarian - Han Kang

48. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

47. A Mercy - Toni Morrison

46. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

45. The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson

44. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin

43. Postwar - Tony Judt

42. A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James

41. Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan

40. H Is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald

39. A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

38. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño

37. The Years - Annie Ernaux

36. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

35. Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

34. Citizen - Claudia Rankine

33. Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward

32. The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst

31. White Teeth - Zadie Smith

30. Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward

29. The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt

28. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

27. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

26. Atonement - Ian McEwan

25. Random Family - Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

24. The Overstory - Richard Powers

23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - Alice Munro

22. Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo

21. Evicted - Matthew Desmond

20. Erasure - Percival Everett

19. Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe

18. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders

17. The Sellout - Paul Beatty

16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon

15. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee

14. Outline - Rachel Cusk

13. The Road - Cormac McCarthy

12. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion

11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz

10. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

9. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

8. Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald

7. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

6. 2666 - Roberto Bolaño

5. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

4. The Known World - Edward P. Jones

3. Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

2. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson

1. My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

Lots of answers correctly detailing why stars struggle to get as famous now but I think another key is that Taylor Swift levels of popularity are astonishingly rare. Swift is the 14th bestselling artist of all time by album sales. She’s spitting distance from cracking the Top 10 despite half her catalogue coming out in the age of streaming and most of the artists above her on that list didn’t have to contend with streaming during their heydays. If Swift had been born a decade earlier, it’s extremely likely she’d already be a Top 10 or even Top 5 bestselling artist of all time and that kind of success is so rare that calling it one in a million would be underselling it

I can’t get over “teach Christian beliefs in schools” right next to “end free school lunches.” Great work as always, evangelicals. Jesus: famously not a fan of feeding the needy.

No, TTPD isn’t a Trainwreckord because Taylor’s career is effectively unkillable. If the awfulness of Reputation didn’t end her, the mediocrity of TTPD certainly won’t. She’ll always have an army of fans catapaulting her every album to success (if not always Eras Tour levels of success). People who aren’t hardcore fans wish it was a Trainwreckord because they’re understandably sick of her and she’s very easy to dunk on but that core fan base is unshakeable.

The specific percentage can vary from draft to draft but yes, it’s very common for your first draft to be more jetsam than gem.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an unreliable narrator situation where there was zero evidence the unreliable narrator was unreliable. It’s pretty easy to establish unreliability, so it’s pretty rare to fuck that aspect up. Like literally all it takes is having another character say “hey, that person lied!”

I feel the type of failure I see more often is unreliable narrators where it’s not super clear what the unreliable aspect of their narration actually adds to the story. You can see this in basically every argument about Kvothe as people who don’t like the character acknowledge him as unreliable but don’t see a point to him being unreliable. Even then though, that’s more of a subjective judgment.

Thanks!

Corrected

Answer: Here’s the shortest version:

• 2010 - Labour gets the shaft due to perception of mishandling the Great Recession. Tories take power

• 2015 - Tories don’t like their election odds. Promise to hold a referendum on Brexit if they win in order to shore up support. This works, Tories get a solid majority

• 2017 - Tories call an election early in hope of gaining a larger majority to help with Brexit negotiations. This backfires and Tories lose their majority but retain power by forming a minority government

• 2019 - the minority government can’t make Brexit happen. PM Boris Johnson calls an early election hoping to gain a majority to make Brexit happen. This works, Tories get a huge majority, and Brexit happens in 2020

• 2024 - Brexit turns out to suck and people feel betrayed it didn’t work out as well as was promised. PM Johnson also bungles COVID and his administration is plagued with corruption scandals. This taints the entire Tory party. Johnson resigns and both successor PMs turn out to be rather worthless and don’t change public perception of Tory incompetence. Voters line up to kick out the Tories

ETA: I originally called the 2017 government a coalition government. It’s now been changed to the correct term

What do you mean by obscure? Do you mean least known about? Most inexplicable? Has the vaguest reasoning? Best kept secret? Something that’s unimportant?