The Guardian has published a clickbait list of the 100 Best Novels. The 100 best novels, that is, insofar as translation into English permits such a judgment. The list predictably suffers from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) corruption; Toni Morrison’s Beloved is pretty good, but it ain’t the second-best novel ever published in English. Yet, what is astonishing about the list is how provincial it is. Only 22 of the 100 books were originally published in a language other than English. The putative cosmopolitans of the Guardian are far more smugly insular than their forefathers.

All such lists are ostentatious gimmicks, but even so, they have real value. A 100 Best Novels list alerts readers, particularly younger ones, about good books they might enjoy reading. They are, or should be, canon formation in the friendly sense, good-natured prompts to look for books that readers might not have known about otherwise. At their best, they softly inspire readers to find words that move and delight. At their worst, they waste readers’ time by sending them to meretricious ephemera and slowly castrate our culture by consigning past excellence to oblivion.

The Guardian’s list is of the second kind.

The Guardian assembled its list by canvassing “170 novelists, critics and academics … polled for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100.” The list’s provincial ignorance presumably is that of the entire Guardian literary culture. The Guardian preened itself for removing men and adding women to the list, for adding African women writing in English, but never noticed that they had lost Lady Murasaki and her pioneering The Tale of Genji, much less the absence of Selma Lagerlof and Sigrid Unset. Indeed, the unselfconscious abandonment of the actual literature of the world, the unconscious near-equivalence of the best books with the best English-language books, is the list’s most extraordinary characteristic. The Guardian’s list demonstrates brilliantly the narrow intellectual horizons of what passes for our literary elite.

DEI imperatives bear some of the blame. When you have to fill up a Top 100 list with (say) 30 recent novels by Mandatorily Praiseworthy Identity People, you’re going to have to cut 30 real great works. Classic foreign books go first; George Eliot is more likely to make the cut than Balzac. The DEI faux-diversity satisfies the list-maker with the appearance of cosmopolitanism: if we have Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, that’s just as good as Junichiro Tanizaki.

Then, too, the Guardian’s list registers the English language’s imperial progress. A century ago, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov chose to write in English, but they were exceptions. Most writers choose to use their native language. Now, a growing number of writers with other native languages choose to write in English: the Adichies, the Coetzees, and the flowering of Indian writers in English—Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and all their peers. The shift of literary talent toward English, at least in the countries of the former British Empire, is real.

But that is an insufficient excuse. The English language is still only one room in the mansion of the world. The Guardian’s list short-circuits the impulse to look into the other rooms.

Older generations of English and American literati cultivated that impulse. Not just the recognition that we must read the classic works of our civilization—the Bible and Homer, Virgil and Dante. They also knew that we should read our contemporaries in other languages, that even if England had been (after Cervantes’ Spain) the first great home of the novel, we had something to learn by reading at least translations of works from other languages. Foreign novels satisfy in a happy combination of aesthetic and anthropological curiosity. How do them foreign johnnies write? And what are they like?

Practically, this impulse is frequently reduced to read a few French novels. But our forefathers basically realized that it was worth reading other people’s books. The habit that began by cracking open Colette continued to curiosity about Ivan Turgenev, Rabindranath Tagore, and Lu Xun. The entire conception of the Nobel Prize in Literature builds upon the widely shared Western conception that it was worth honoring, and even reading, the best books written in foreign languages.

Moreover, our forefathers thought it worth knowing about foreign literary traditions as a whole. The Guardian still has Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks on their list, but there is no Goethe. They have Proust, but not Balzac or Stendhal, Elena Ferrante but not Alessandro Manzoni. Any scattering of foreign-language books on an English-language Great Books list inevitably will fragment other nations’ literary traditions and subordinate them to our own literary interests. But if you reduce all of foreign-language novels to a mere 22 books, you cannot even begin the process of thinking of foreign literature as a body in its own right, worthy of our educated interest.

As a rule of thumb, a Best 100 Novels list should have no more than 25 novels in the compiler’s native language. This isn’t going to be the Objective List, sub specie aeternitatis—all lists have a subjective component, and then there’s the question of what’s been translated into your language. But coming up with some list under these conditions, which tries for a fair range of novels from different literary traditions isn’t that hard. And, ideally, we should be able to produce a list that corrects for recency bias, and presumes that we generally need a few generations before we can begin to judge whether a book is any good.

A good Top 100 list should perhaps include 15 British novels and 10 American ones, for the quarter in English. Nine Russian novels, eight French, and eight German would add up to around 50. Spain, Japan, and Italy collectively could provide another 15. The listmaker then should scatter choices from a few dozen “minor” countries and languages—works such as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish The Slave (1962), Henrik Pontoppidan’s Danish Lucky Per (1898-1904), and Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali The Home and the World (1916). These general proportions are what an English-language Best 100 Novels list should look like, if it truly has ambitions to seek out the best of the world.

Such a list would be more subject to the vagaries of translation than the Guardian’s—it would include far more books from foreign languages, and not every good book has been translated into English. But a great many have. All of Balzac’s Human Comedy seems to have received at least a Victorian translation. We are far less well served, for example, in translations of Benito Pérez Galdós’s equally extensive oeuvre, but we have at least half a dozen of his novels. So far as I can tell, there are more translations into English of foreign-language novels than there are for any of our rivals. If a German, a Russian, or a Chinese wants to read the classic Portuguese novels of Eça de Queiroz, as like as not he will have to resort to Margaret Jull Costa’s translations into English. We English-speakers have been blessed in the last century by a legion of fine translators, who make it possible for us to begin to know something of humanity.

And that is what is at stake when the Guardian publishes a shamefully provincial list of the 100 Best Novels. Not a formal course of study—we are struggling above all to preserve bare literacy, knowledge of and affection toward our own national traditions, and something of our roots in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. But the spirit by which we teach the humanities, the liberal arts, should be informed by humility and curiosity, by a realization that to satisfy yourself with English-language literature is smug and solipsistic. A 100 Best Novels list should inculcate that spirit for adventurous readers wondering what to read next.

We should love what our forefathers wrote, and we should love our language and its books. But we also should be curious about and appreciative of the works of our fellows. The DEI perversion taints this impulse by dressing up banality and propaganda as cosmopolitanism. But we should still seek out the best of the world, in the spirit of Goethe’s aspiration toward Weltliteratur.

And also, because it’s fun to read good books. Isn’t it a shame that the Guardian’s bien pensants know so little of the world’s delights?

Follow David Randall on X.