Earlier this year, The Modern Library announced its hundred best novels of the century, a few months before that Waterstone's conducted a poll on the greatest books of the century, and recently Eason's produced a list of the top hundred Irish bestsellers, so it was only a matter of time before someone got round to wondering about the definitive Irish novel.
Or, as Waterstone's asked customers this summer: what's the greatest Irish novel of all time? And yes, you've guessed it - as in the Modern Library list, Joyce's Ulysses came out tops. Joyce, in fact, features three times in the Top 20, with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in sixth place and Finnegans Wake in sixteenth, while John McGahern features twice (Amongst Women at No.4 and The Dark at No.17), along with Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman at No.5 and At Swim-Two-Birds at No.8).
Individual novels by Patrick McCabe, Jonathan Swift, James Plunkett, Edna O'Brien, Oscar Wilde, John Banville, Maeve Binchy, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Deane, Roddy Doyle, Bram Stoker, Brendan Behan and Brian Moore make up the rest of a very eclectic, if not downright eccentric, list.
Where, for instance, is William Trevor, J.P. Donleavy, Jennifer Johnston, Molly Keane, Liam O'Flaherty or Walter Macken? Nowhere, I'm afraid, along with Kate O'Brien, Dermot Bolger, Canon Sheehan, Charles Kickham, Brinsley MacNamara and James Stephens.
This is puzzling, given that the Eason list has Donleavy's The Ginger Man as its seventh highest bestseller and four Walter Macken titles among its top thirty, but to point such matters out is to take these surveys seriously when we all know that their real purpose is to add to the gaiety of the nation and the profits of bookshops.
Staying with Waterstone's a moment or two longer, I welcome its 316-page Guide to Irish Books, which has just been published and is available for a mere £3.99. Edited by Cormac Kinsella of the chain's Dawson Street store, it's a guide to thousands of Irish books in various categories and manages to combine oodles of information with generally sound judgments.
It also features some intriguing essays by well-known Irish writers: Nuala O'Faolain on Angela's Ashes, Colm Toibin on Ulysses, Anne Enright on The Third Policeman, Paul Durcan on Francis Stuart, Roy Foster on F.S.L. Lyons, Ciaran Carson on folk song and Eavan Boland on Yeats.
And while I'm still on Waterstone's (no more mentions for the next four weeks), admirers of the American novelist Robert Stone will want to hear him read from his new novel, Damascus Gate, in the Dawson Street shop next Tuesday at 6pm. He'll be joined by John Banville, who'll be reading from The Untouchable, which has just been published in paperback.
Last week I mentioned that Amy Jenkins, creator of the BBC soap This Life, had picked up a cool £600,000 for the rights to her first two novels, neither of which has yet been written.
However, as I also pointed out, at least she has written 2,000 words of the first novel - the initial chapter, to be precise. That, she declared in an interview this week, took her a mere two days.
Indeed, she seems to regard writing as a bit of a doddle. "The hard part," she says, "is coming up with the idea. Once you have the idea, you're over the tough part." Betja Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce felt the same.
So what exactly was this idea that was so hard to come up with? "It's a Zeigeisty thing, the idea of the damaged, vulnerable but lively and inspirational young woman, which is kind of the voice of the moment. I sort of knew there would be a market for it."
Oh, that idea.
Simon Callow's views on poetry are pretty much the same as mine. "It seems," he writes in the London Independent, "that there is something fundamentally rooted in human experience in our response to rhythm and rhyme: a memory first of the womb, then of the nursery. There is a kind of ache for it.
"Time is the element in which poetry exists, in both the musical and the metaphysical sense, and the restitution of rhythm - even if only for the duration of the poem - is profoundly satisfying, briefly suspending the circumambient chaos. Rhyme has its own satisfaction, the creation of order."
Indeed, he could have added that almost all the poems that stay in our memory do so because of rhyme. So why do so few poets attempt it any more? Could it be that it's too much like hard work?