[In the following essay, Headlam makes observations about a list compiled from a survey of on-line readers at Random House's Web site, comparing the results to Modern Library's list.]

Literature has certainly come a long way since it really mattered.

Consider the example of the Modern Library, which recently published its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, starting with James Joyce's Ulysses at No. 1 and ending with Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons at No. 100.

Forty years ago, critics and intellectuals would have dismissed a list like this one as a cheap marketing ploy. Today, critics celebrate the marketing smarts behind the Modern Library list but confess that they cannot be bothered to read the great works anymore. Once, we loved literature and scoffed at the list; now, we love the list and laugh at Ulysses.

The Modern Library list has uncovered one place, apparently, where books still matter, and that is the Internet. Concurrent with its publication of the list, Random House, Modern Library's parent company, established a readers' poll, where on-line visitors could vote for their favorite works of fiction at www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/l00best. If the Modern Library list represents the middlebrow sensibility, the poll, which runs until September, gives a snapshot of the literary tastes of the on-line community, what could be called netbrow.

As might be expected, the poll has yielded a few predictable trends, like a predilection for science fiction and fantasy, a bizarre affection for Ayn Rand, who has four books in the top 30, including Atlas Shrugged at No. 1, and a few mysteries, like who is Charles de Lint and how did he get four books among the top 50?

But the readers' poll does have its virtues, especially when placed beside the Modern Library list. Readers who also use the Internet, for example, seem less afraid of experimental fiction, like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (No. 8) and less ashamed of big, historical crowd pleasers like Gone With the Wind (No. 48) and Bonfire of the Vanities (No. 95), all of which failed to make the Modern Library list.

While most of the Modern Library entries were written before 1950, many readers' poll books were written in the last 20 years. Only nine of the Modern Library books were written by women. The readers' poll list, helped along by Ayn Rand, has 24.

The Modern Library list has also been attacked for being too American. The Internet list is, if anything, too Canadian, with books by Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, various Tek War novelizations from the Modern Library reject William Shatner and the four entries from Charles de Lint who, it turns out, lives in Ottawa.

And the readers' poll, however its voting may be stacked, is free of the taint of self-interest. The Modern Library, after all, has published many of the titles on its list and would like to sell more. The bulk of the readers' list could be bought at the local 7-11.

The real sport of the readers' poll site is found in the forum, where readers defend their choices, attack other people's choices and murmur darkly about Random House's attempt to filter out votes for Howard Stern. (An unsuccessful attempt, apparently: Private Parts was as high as No. 20 at one point.)

In the forum is the kind of passion for literature that Random House must have hoped to inspire with its Modern Library list. Internet readers tend to be cranky, argumentative, a little perverse and full of resentment toward the crushing weight of history and good taste—the attributes that were once ascribed to modern literature.