Sometimes it’s fun to argue about lists. These rankings tackle novels, albums, and artists with both seriousness and play—countdowns that spark conversation as much as they offer perspective.
The Byrds are one of those bands people think they understand after “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn, Turn, Turn”. You hear the Rickenbacker jangle, the high harmonies, and there it is: folk-rock, done. A beautiful sound, a historically important band, a few giant singles, cue the warm glow of 1965. Not entirely inaccurate of course,…
Gabriel García Márquez is one of those writers people think they know because they know the tag on the museum wall. Magical realism. Yellow butterflies. Impossible ascensions. Macondo. A family tree that looks like it should be sold with a magnifying glass, a priest, and maybe a stiff drink. The label helps and it’s not…
Most groups spend their careers guarding the thing that made people love them. De La Soul spent theirs sneaking out the back door before that thing learned how to charge rent. That’s the secret hiding in the crates. They were never just the happy, quirky, daisy-age crew from your cooler cousin’s milk crate. Playful? Absolutely….
Ann Patchett is one of those writers who gets praised in ways that are accurate and slightly misleading at the same time. Warm. Wise. Humane. Generous. Comforting. All true, but not quite accurate overall. Those words can make her sound softer than she really is, as if her novels are mainly tasteful little sanctuaries for…
Aretha Franklin is very easy to praise and surprisingly hard to sort. Praising her is the easy part. You hear the voice and the discussion is basically over. There are great singers, and then there are singers who make greatness sound like a physical force. Aretha could take one line and make it feel like…
Patricia Highsmith gets called a crime writer, a suspense writer, a psychological thriller writer. None of those labels are wrong exactly, they’re just too neat for what she actually does. At her best, Highsmith is not mainly interested in puzzles, reveals, or the clean machinery of “what happens next.” She is much better at something…
Ranking Lana Del Rey gets much more interesting once you stop asking which album has the best aesthetic and start asking where the writing feels most alive inside the aesthetic. Because the early Lana construction was powerful for a reason. Born to Die didn’t just introduce a singer. It introduced one of the strongest pop…
I don’t think Roberto Bolaño is a writer people read in a calm, orderly way. You can discuss him calmly, maybe. You can teach him calmly, assign him, historicize him, line up the usual phrases: exile, violence, poetry, failure, drifting men, literary obsession, fascism, Mexico City, Europe, the whole ruined republic of letters. All of…
The trick with ranking The Cure is that you are never ranking just one band. You are ranking at least two bands that keep haunting each other. There’s the Cure of empty rooms, slow dread, cold air, spiritual depletion, mascara running through the wallpaper. The Cure who can make despair sound architectural. The Cure people…
Ranking Salman Rushdie is really a matter of deciding which kinds of excess you’re willing to trust. I don’t mean that as a joke. Or not only as a joke. Because once you get past the obvious summaries — the verbal fireworks, the historical sweep, the satire, the mythology, the formal swagger, the sheer unstoppable…