NPR’s expert listeners tell you what the best Sci-fi/Fantasy books are. Mm-hm.

One of the big problems with crowdsourcing a “best of” consensus list is the fact that you never know if the people voting actually know anything about what they’re voting for.  This is true of pretty much every voting process, of course, and while I don’t want to be all down on democracy, it nettles me when I see things like NPR’s new Top 100 SF/Fantasy list.  NPR has, with the help of readers/listeners and an “expert panel,” selected 100 titles from which every voter will pick 10, culminating in the Ultimate Top Ten, I guess.  There’s nothing wrong with listmaking.  It’s just that I wonder if everyone voting has actually read every book on the list of 100 titles.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only read 23 (more like 30, if you count the series and books of which I’ve only read a part, but not the whole thing).  That’s a very small number.  It’s pathetic.  So I’m not going to vote.  But I’m guessing that of all the people that will vote in this poll, less than half will have read most of the titles.  (By “most,” I mean something like 85 or more.)  Most people will probably have read far less.  They have a right to vote, but that doesn’t mean their votes are informed or meaningful, which means that the eventual top 10 will be neither informed nor meaningful.