For example, the top 350 books doesn't include a single Chinese book! This is enough to shows you how biased and worthless this list is. It's essentially suggesting there is no literary tradition outside the west.
It seems like your frustration is over the name of the list, and you would prefer it is listed as "The greatest books of Western Civilization". Is that an accurate assessment if the title was different you would be fine with it?
Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...
>Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...
To be fair, fully half of the top ten books were not written in English. Non-Indo-European languages can be translated just as well as French and Russian can.
True, but the number of people who focus on non-indo-european languages is a lot smaller than people who focus on languages "closer to home". Probably just comes down to numbers.
It would be interesting to see how culture impacts story/book. Russia seems to have so many amazing works of literature, but is that a function of their culture, or because of the intense focus the USA/UK put on Russia and learning their mindset during the Cold War, or because of something else?
>True, but the number of people who focus on non-indo-european languages is a lot smaller than people who focus on languages "closer to home". Probably just comes down to numbers.
I think it's likely less a question of focusing closer to home and more a product of how the publishing industry operates, as you suggested earlier. Would certainly be an interesting question for more investigation. If it were just down to numbers, I'd expect at least one book written in a non-Western language-- English language readers assuredly aren't quite as insular as the list would suggest.
>It would be interesting to see how culture impacts story/book. Russia seems to have so many amazing works of literature, but is that a function of their culture, or because of the intense focus the USA/UK put on Russia and learning their mindset during the Cold War, or because of something else?
This is also a really interesting question. There might even be some historians here who can chime in on it. It's common for certain countries' language and literature to become "in vogue" at different points in time (e.g. French was really popular in Russia in the 19th century, following the French Revolution). Maybe a similar effect played a role?
Your suggestion for naming would be more accurate and I would be fine with it. However, besides the naming, this list shows how shallow western reviewers are as greatest book lists on the chinese internet always include multiple western books.
I think this is a great point. I would really appreciate to see more accurate lists or, better yet, more diverse lists.
However, I have to point out the irony here. Every time someone complains about the lack of western representation they just pretend there isn't a southern hemisphere in the planet. The East is not composed of only Europe, Canada, and the United States.
That's to say, fight for overall diversity, not for western vs. eastern representation because that's a false dichotomy.
I don't see the irony, I'm just more knowledgable about Chinese literature so I gave an example of how biased the list is using its lack of Chinese literature. I am fully aware that many other literary traditions are also not represented on that list, I think its fair to say the vast majority of books on that list belongs to what is normally referred to as western literature.
