neverbeencool

Like I mentioned yesterday, we’ll be out of town most of today. And since we’ll almost certainly be le pooped by the time we roll back into Casa del Justino, there’s not a snow ball’s chance of me writing a damn thing funky fresh and new on Tuesday.

Instead, you get recycled crap from my old blog.

So enjoy. Or don’t. Either way, there’ll probably be some new goodness by Wednesday.

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About nine years ago, I was miserably unemployed. This was before I met The Wife and after the failed naval career.

So as it turned out, no job meant no money. And that meant no, well, anything. With my job search going nowhere and with nothing but time on my side, I decided to catch up on some reading. About 100 years worth.

That’s no exaggeration, by the way. I was always a pretty smart guy, but was never well-read. I had a lot of catching up to do. Problem was that I didn’t know where to start…

……….

Ok, this post is going nowhere fast.

I don’t know about you, but that’s boring the shit out of me. If you want more background, let me know. Otherwise, I’m going to get to the point. The Amazing Justin-o-tron Book List 3000. It’s 227 of the finest fiction novels written in the 20th century, compiled from three different “Top 100 Books” lists.

“But Justin,” you might ask. “If there were three lists, each with 100 titles, why is The Amazing Justin-o-tron Book List 3000 only 227 books long?”

Fool. I didn’t say that each list had 100 unique titles, did I? So you thought that only one editor would think to include The Great Gatsby? Or Catcher in the Rye? Obviously, there’s some overlap.

So the first two lists came from the Modern Library’s website. (Go ahead. Click the link. Should open in a new window…)

First one on that page (The Board’s List) was actually what inspired all this. I stumbled on it when I first began to devise my scheme and originally planned to just make my way through that one. When I saw the second list on that site, though, I realized I might be selling myself short by blindly following their advice. I mean, who’s to say that I’d have anything in common with the stuffy douche bags I imagine compile that thing to begin with?

After poking around a little more, I found another list, this one thrown together by the Radcliffe Publishing Course (also on the Random House site).

So that gave me three lists, with some titles overlapping between lists, and at least one with some clearly fucked up results (So Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard really wrote 7 of the 10 best books last century, huh?).

Well, in case you missed it… I’m a big fat nerd. And faced with three similar-yet-different lists, I did what any good nerd would do: I came up with a formula for combining the books into The Amazing Justin-o-tron Book List 3000.

Here’s the gist:

• Any book that appeared on at least one of the three source lists would also appear on The Amazing Justin-o-tron Book List 3000.
• Any book that showed up on more than one list would get a bonus, more so if it made the cut on all three.
• The higher the ranking on a list, the more points the book received.
• The lists would be weighted according to a secret recipe stolen from the Colonel. The Modern Library’s Board’s List list carried the most weight, the Radcliffe List was second, and the Modern Library’s Readers’ List pulled up the rear.

When all was said and done, a hypothetical book appearing at the top of all three lists would have a score of 100. The lowest score possible (for a book that appeared only at the bottom of the Readers’ List and didn’t make the cut on the other two) was 3.4667.

See why I skipped most of the background shit? BOOOOORING. Nearly put me to sleep, hate to think of what you went through to make it this far.

Since you did make it this far, you’re probably wondering where The Amazing Justin-o-tron Book List 3000 is… Well, here’s the thing. It’s not ready for public consumption yet. I need to get it transcribed, etc. I’ll share it with the rest of the world soon.

Being a Democrat, though, I’m willing to compromise. Here are the top 10 novels of the 20th century according to Justin, the Great and Powerful. Enjoy:

Rank	Title	Author
10	Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut
9	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce
8	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
7	Lolita	Vladmir Nabokov
6	1984	George Orwell
5	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
4	Catch-22	Joseph Heller
3	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
2	Ulysses	James Joyce
1	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald