The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40. (I forgot how unattractive those caricatures are; how "grateful" I am not to be included on this list.)
This blog’s fabulous response by Joe Schuster of 20 Over 40.
The Huffington Post’s Most Overrated Writers. (“Mean” or not, I agree with a couple of those choices.)
The response from Publisher’s Weekly of the Most Underrated Writers.
On and on…and we’re not even close to the annual glut of end of the year lists.
But here’s a list I can really get behind: “Literature’s 10 Best-Dressed Characters.” Scarlett O’Hara, Holly Golightly, and, naturally, Jay Gatsby (all those shirts!).
And I think I’m going to compile my own list one of these days: “Literature’s 10 Best Meals.” Off the top of my head, we’ve got the candy canes from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the whale steak and/or the chowder scenes in Moby Dick (thank god I’ve read this book and am able to name-drop it right here), the bread in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and let’s not even get started on Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
It’s immodest, but I can’t deny that people in my novels are constantly eating: Jell-O and pumpkin pie in A Year and a Day and pierogi in Pears on a Willow Tree. Even though the new book takes place in one day in 1900, I managed to squeeze in frankfurters, beet soup, and a dinner party menu with Charlotte Russe and potatoes a la maitre d’hotel.