The critics one is decent, if a bit off (Ulysses 1: yes, Great Gatsby 2: hardly), but the Ayn-Rand-meets-L-Ron-Hubbard on the other side always makes me laugh, even though I'm a fan of Rand.
Their popular list suggests they didn't have any technology for discounting the effects of voting blocs. I wonder if to this day they believe they had a representative sample of popular opinion.
If they did, they'd have to be pretty seriously deluded. Atlas Shrugged I can see as #1 popular - there was the poll that said it was second only to the Bible for average Americans - but Hubbard's stuff is incredibly derided. I don't know anybody who's read a single book of his.
I'm sure they released a result more to gain popularity through controversy than they did to get a truly accurate reading. And it worked, since theirs is always the one I've heard named when people discuss "great books," and it always gets people angry.
