Although I’ve stuck to my beliefs in terms of avoiding the New York Press for firing John Strausbaugh on Christmas Eve . . . I have to admit that the is actually really intriguing . . . (Sorry Ed!)

Similar to the one from The Guardian—and unlike the anonymous Top 100 list of the New York Times—this is a list of 20 books recommended by 20 different Voice writers.

And on the whole, it’s pretty impressive. There as some “to be expected” titles, like Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, but also included are Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing and Lydia Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance.

The big winner is NYRB though, with All About H. HAtterr by G. V. Desani, Ice by Vladimir Sorokin, and Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon all making the list.

The Voice did recently review The Assistant by Robert Walser though, which is saying something.

Sure, Giles Harvey does poke a bit of fun at the jacket copy (which includes the line, “if one read one 20th-century novel, there is a case to be made for it being The Assistant,” but hell, overblown is what jacket copy is) and brings home the criticism with an overwritten statement of his own—“Indeed, from one perspective, Walser’s prose is a tepid slurry of solecism, platitude, and tautology force-fed to the reader in large, grim spoonfuls.”

Solecism. Nice.

Anyway, Harvey ends up liking the book:

The Assistant is a marvelous book, and I would be surprised if 2007 sees the appearance of a stranger, more inexplicably compelling piece of fiction. If it isn’t already clear, Walser belongs not just to the history of literature, but to literature itself.

So conflicted. . . . Silly review from someone who relies on the tried and true, and tired comparisons to Kafka and Beckett in talking about Walser’s aesthetic—but still, it is a review of Walser.