{"id":12957,"date":"2008-06-20T22:17:47","date_gmt":"2008-06-21T02:17:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=12957"},"modified":"2014-01-16T15:44:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-16T20:44:00","slug":"in-which-i-am-proven-illiterate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2008\/06\/20\/in-which-i-am-proven-illiterate\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I am proven illiterate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In celebration of <i>Entertainment Weekly<\/i>&#8216;s 1000th issue, the staff has put together various lists of what they consider &#8220;New Classics,&#8221; that is, their picks for the best movies, TV shows, albums, books, and more of the past 25 years.<\/p>\n<p>As I ran down  their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ew.com\/ew\/article\/0,,20207076_20207387_20207063,00.html\" target=\"_blank\">list of the top 100 movies<\/a>, of which these are the top 10&#151;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. <i>Pulp Fiction<\/i> (1994)<br \/>\n2. <i>The Lord of the Rings<\/i> trilogy (2001-03)<br \/>\n3. <i>Titanic<\/i> (1997)<br \/>\n4. <i>Blue Velvet<\/i> (1986)<br \/>\n5. <i>Toy Story<\/i> (1995)<br \/>\n6. <i>Saving Private Ryan<\/i> (1998)<br \/>\n7. <i>Hannah and Her Sisters<\/i> (1986)<br \/>\n8. <i>The Silence of the Lambs<\/i> (1991)<br \/>\n9. <i>Die Hard<\/i> (1988)<br \/>\n10. <i>Moulin Rouge<\/i> (2001)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#151;I felt pretty good about my cultural literacy, for it turns out that I&#8217;d seen 62 of the 100 movies listed.<!--more-->  <\/p>\n<p>But then I turned to their  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ew.com\/ew\/article\/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html\" target=\"_blank\"> choices for the top 100 books<\/a>, which began with these 10&#151;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. <i>The Road<\/i>, Cormac McCarthy (2006)<br \/>\n2. <i>Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire<\/i>, J.K. Rowling (2000)<br \/>\n3. <i>Beloved<\/i>, Toni Morrison (1987)<br \/>\n4. <i>The Liars&#8217; Club<\/i>, Mary Karr (1995)<br \/>\n5. <i>American Pastoral<\/i>, Philip Roth (1997)<br \/>\n6. <i>Mystic River<\/i>, Dennis Lehane (2001)<br \/>\n7. <i>Maus<\/i>, Art Spiegelman (1986\/1991)<br \/>\n8. <i>Selected Stories<\/i>, Alice Munro (1996)<br \/>\n9. <i>Cold Mountain<\/i>, Charles Frazier (1997)<br \/>\n10. <i>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle<\/i>, Haruki Murakami (1997)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#151;and I was horrified to discover that I&#8217;d only read 11 of <i>EW<\/i>&#8216;s top 100 books!  Before flipping to the list, I&#8217;d assumed I&#8217;d beat my movies percentage, but instead, though I&#8217;d heard of almost all of the titles, I&#8217;d hardly read any.  And so I hang my head in shame.<\/p>\n<p>If you decide to measure youself against these lists, I hope you&#8217;ll do better. Meanwhile, I can see that I&#8217;ve got some reading to do!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In celebration of Entertainment Weekly&#8216;s 1000th issue, the staff has put together various lists of what they consider &#8220;New Classics,&#8221; that is, their picks for the best movies, TV shows, albums, books, and more of the past 25 years. As I ran down their list of the top 100 movies, of which these are the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12957"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12959,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12957\/revisions\/12959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}