Score

Reese,

Wanted to vote for "A Prayer for Onan Meany," but couldn't find it!

Also,

A shame "The Cain Mutiny" was never written, with or without an apostrophe.

I thought I had removed Japheth before, and have tried again removing it as well as CME.

By the way, do books written Onanymously count?

There is an alarming amount of biblical paranormal romance out there.

Deleted.

I have never heard of this book. Is it well known? Part of the prepubescent canon?

My reasons for casting votes often differ from list to list, so I'm afraid I can't claim to be consistent...

Sorry to say, Reese, that I never heard of A&N, even in the days I was finding and selecting books to read to my little dinosaur eggs as they were hatching.

As to the bigger question, my votes on these lists are all over the place. Sometimes I make serious value judgments, listing only books I know well, in the exact order of their perceived merit. Other times, where the list seems to call for it, I go scrounging around the internet to add titles with which I'm completely unfamiliar but which fill the bill, to help fill out an interesting list. If someone wants a list of books with the greenest covers, or with a Biblical name in the title, I don't feel I'm being asked to list the greatest literary work in that category, just something that will generate a diverse, relatively complete and in any case interesting list. In the case of those kinds of lists, I usually (but not always) try to find books no one else has listed, and am not prone to vote for someone else's book unless it strikes me at the second as a particularly clever, amusing or otherwise striking choice.

I'd say that if you're really itching to receive serious literary judgments about the"best" or "greatest" books in a particular category, you should be very specific in how you define your list.

where do i fit or when are you going to aknowledge me

I hadn't heard of A&N either.

And I'll echo Harold's explanation -- if the list doesn't indicate a value judgment (best, worst, favorite, etc) I try to add things that aren't on it or are less known.

I have read (and loved) A&N; I'll give it a vote here. Read it only once, in middle school (quite some time ago) and I still remember it and how emotionally powerful it was. It might have been one of the greats that was forgotten-- don't think it won many awards, although it should have.

But I'll say this: if you hadn't said something, I wouldn't have voted for it here. Not because it isn't one of the best books on the list, but because the whole prospect of listing books based on whether a characters' name correlates with the OT strikes me as mildly humorous. So, when I vote, it's more likely to be based on 1)is the OT reference deliberate? or 2) is it any fun to point out that it IS an OT reference?

Also... Ethan Frome? Where is there an Ethan in the Old Testament? Or a Zenobia? A Mattie?

A&N is an excellent book that I've been meaning to re-read.

And I'd completely forgotten about Ethan the Ezrahite! Thanks for the pointer...