[In the following essay, Yardley decries the prominence of "otherworldly fantasies and ideological potboilers" in the on-line readers's list of novels, disparaging the business of list-making.]

From somewhere out in cyberspace a desperate reader, hair so high on end it's "like a fright wig," prayed last week for an inquiry into the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. No, not the list compiled by its "board" of lit'ry eminences—that's already been taken to the cleaners in this space—but the counter-survey of ordinary readers conducted by the Modern Library on its Web site, http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best/.

It took approximately 1.46 seconds to see that my correspondent, hair so magnificently on end, had if anything under-reacted. The vox pop list—Readers' 100 Best, as the Modern Library calls it—brings whole new universes of meaning to the word "bubbleheaded." If this be democracy, what, pray tell, can we do to hire a monarchy?

You think Barnum was wrong when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute"? You think Texas Guinan was fooling when she welcomed customers to her speakeasy with the acerbic greeting "Hello, suckers?" You think Mencken was just being snotty as per usual when he said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people"?

If that's what you think—if you think vox pop is the distillation of wisdom, taste and common sense—then let me direct your attention to the Reader's 100 Best list. There you will find that, in their collective wisdom, the common readers of these United States have declared the best novel in English of the 20th century to be—are you sitting down?—Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. The rest of the Top 10, when last I looked, were as follows:

1. Dune, by Frank Herbert
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
3. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
4. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
5. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
6. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
7. The Stand, by Stephen King
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
9. And Trail Mix Rained From the Sky, by Philip Travisano

And so it goes, in the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, No. 57, Cat's Cradle, No. 75): an interminable parade of science fiction, fantasy, romance, sentimentality and—all praise be to Ayn Rand—objeclivist claptrap. Not until positions 15 (Ulysses, by James Joyce) and 16 (The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner) does the voice of the people get around to choosing books that actually have some claim to belonging there, and these are immediately followed by—saints preserve us, Lord have mercy—Tek War, by William Shatner!

Onward: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams! Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard! Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn! Continental Drift, by Russell Banks! The Source, by James Michener! Underworld, by Don DeLillo! One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey! The Color Purple, by Alice Walker!!!!!!!!!

As the late Jack Benny would have put it: Well. As the immortal Charlie Brown would put it: Arrrrggghh!! All of a sudden the original list, whatever its faults and however suspiciously the Modern Library may have jiggered the figures, starts to look rather good.

Good, that is, in the circumstances. If the readers' list is dreadful, and Heaven knows it is, this no doubt has more to do with the willingness of certain people to e-mail the Modern Library over and over again on behalf of Ayn Rand than with the collective reading tastes of the American public, which are probably, in truth … even worse than this list suggests. By the same token, if the original list is bad, and Heaven knows it is, it reflects not merely the idiosyncratic judgments of the panel but also the inescapable truth that English-language fiction of the 20th century just isn't half so good as we 20th-century folk like to think it is.

That point was made a few days ago by Richard Bernstein of the New York Times in the most trenchant commentary I have seen to date on this whole silly business. Not merely does the original list make all the obligatory, tedious bows to modernism and experimentalism and the avant-garde—the Holy Trinity of contemporary highbrow culture—but it reminds' us, however unwittingly, how much meatier and durable is the greatest English-language fiction of the 19th century.

Mister Dickens, he dead. This is cause for celebration among the illuminati and despair among the ordinary readers upon whom they gaze so condescendingly. Over the years yours truly has argued, ad infinitum and ad nauseam, that the reason why so many readers are alienated from contemporary "literary" or "serious" fiction is its willful inattention and hostility to the daily lives of ordinary readers. If readers are starved for serious novels about people like themselves living in worlds they can recognize, who can blame them for turning to the otherworldly fantasies and ideological potboilers that are, as the Readers' 100 Best list suggests, the chief diet now available to them?

Enough. Let's say the last rites over these lists, sprinkle the grave with holy water and ship them six feet under. Lists are hogwash, words I write full knowing that I have compiled more than my share and that the pearly gates surely will be closed against me as punishment. Lists remind us that people are sheep—why else would Ulysses, numero uno on the first Modern Library list, now be a bestseller?—and that popular taste unerringly gravitates to the lowest common denominator.

So what else is new?