8 Easiest Jobs in The World

1. Pro sleeper

    Qunar, a Chinese travel review site, has hiredthree secret reviewers this year to assess the thread count, wi-fi strength, slipper softness, and room service at top hotels throughout the country. Meanwhile, Travelodge employs a full-time bed guru to nap in all of the national hotel chain's rooms, testing the quality of each mattress. In 2006, that guy earned close to six figures. Generally, expect to earn $1,500 a month.

2. Chocolate eater

    At Godiva, chocolate testers are trained likesommeliers for the job, learning to inspect for sheen and cracks, taking "bunny sniffs" for aroma notes, and savoring the texture of up to 50 bonbons a day. Food testers can earn anywhere from $24,000 up to $70,000, depending on the company. It may sound easy to do, but it's a hard job to get. Godiva tasters go to "chocolate school" to qualify, while other companies require "super-tasters," those born with uniquely potent taste-buds.

3. Cute pet aggregator

    For most of us, kitten ogling is for break-time. But if you're a web editor for Cute Overload or a casting agent at True Entertainment, the production company behind Animal Planet's "Too Cute" you have to comb through adorable footage and photos of sloths, kittens, and puppies for a living. The average salary of an entry level staffer for a cute-animal site can range from $10 an hour to $40,000

a year depending on location, company and responsibilities.

4. Mansion sitter

    It's actually possible to live like a millionaire on $10,000 a year. One couple spent winter in the Pyranees and summer in Antibes, skimming leaves from their private pool, walking dogs, and chasing away burglars by simply occupying one mansion or another. Veteran house-sitters with killer reputations can charge around $200 a week to mind the mansion, that's in addition to room and board. For newbies,there's Luxuryhousesitting.com, a site that connects wanderers with high-end property owners in Florida, California, even Malta and the Virgin Islands.

5. TV watcher

    There's a solid market for this gig. Fast-typing fingers can earn you a starting salary of $25,000 to caption TV shows for the hearing impaired as you watch them. Production assistants for clip shows like "Talk Soup" spend their days flipping channels in search of potential segments to pass along to producers, earning a few hundred a week. At Nielson, a team of media researchers stay glued to the tube, 8 hours a day, $10 an hour, watching out for any product placements across networks.

6. Professional know-it-all

    YouTube's partner program has turned self-made DIY videos into cash-money. The trick is to anticipate the things people want to know but afraid to ask. Can you draw a decent smokey eye? How well can you fold a paper airplane? Can you whistle? Super 'clicky' web tutorials on absurdly simple tasks can bank their makers up to $100k. "It's nice to get paid for doing absolutely nothing," the guy behind the popular "how to tie a tie" video told NPR.

7. Spa critic

If you're going to have strong opinions, why not use them to get massages? Susie Ellis, C.E.O of Spafinder, has gotten thousands in her 20-year career. She's traveled the world as an intrepid reporter, testing back rubs and aromatherapy rituals for her online spa directory. Freelance writers and editors forspa sites and magazines can get all the same massage perks without any of those C.E.O. headaches, and earn between $20,000 and $90,000 a year.

8.Resort consultant

    

    According to one branding website, a popular mommy blogger was hired by a family resort to spend four days as a V.I.P. guest and offer feedback on how to improve their kid-friendly features. In addition to an all-expense paid vacation, she earned $1,200 for her time. Nice work if you can get it. Too bad the easiest jobs are the hardest to find. 

1. Photo by: Reuters/Jason Lee

   Pro sleeper

   Qunar, a Chinese travel review site, has hiredthree secret reviewers this year to assess the thread count, wi-fi strength, slipper softness, and room service at top hotels throughout the country. Meanwhile, Travelodge employs a full-time bed guru to nap in all of the national hotel chain's rooms, testing the quality of each mattress. In 2006, that guy earned close to six figures. Generally, expect to earn $1,500 a month.

   less 

2. Photo by: Rebecca Sapp/Wire Image

   Chocolate eater

   At Godiva, chocolate testers are trained likesommeliers for the job, learning to inspect for sheen and cracks, taking "bunny sniffs" for aroma notes, and savoring the texture of up to 50 bonbons a day. Food testers can earn anywhere from $24,000 up to $70,000, depending on the company. It may sound easy to do, but it's a hard job to get. Godiva tasters go to "chocolate school" to qualify, while other companies require "super-tasters," those born with uniquely potent taste-buds.less 

3. Photo by: Discovery/Animal Planet

   Cute pet aggregator

   For most of us, kitten ogling is for break-time. But if you're a web editor for Cute Overload or a casting agent at True Entertainment, the production company behind Animal Planet's "Too Cute" you have to comb through adorable footage and photos of sloths, kittens, and puppies for a living. The average salary of an entry level staffer for a cute-animal site can range from $10 an hour to $40,000 a year depending on location, company and responsibilities.less 

4. Photo by: luxuryhousesitting.com

   Mansion sitter

   It's actually possible to live like a millionaire on $10,000 a year. One couple spent winter in the Pyranees and summer in Antibes, skimming leaves from their private pool, walking dogs, and chasing away burglars by simply occupying one mansion or another. Veteran house-sitters with killer reputations can charge around $200 a week to mind the mansion, that's in addition to room and board. For newbies, there's Luxuryhousesitting.com, a site that connects wanderers with high-end property owners in Florida, California, even Malta and the Virgin Islands.less 

5. Photo by: thinkstock

   TV watcher

   There's a solid market for this gig. Fast-typing fingers can earn you a starting salary of $25,000 to caption TV shows for the hearing impaired as you watch them. Production assistants for clip shows like "Talk Soup" spend their days flipping channels in search of potential segments to pass along to producers, earning a few hundred a week. At Nielson, a team of media researchers stay glued to the tube, 8 hours a day, $10 an hour, watching out for any product placements across networks.less 

6. Photo by: YouTube

   Professional know-it-all

   YouTube's partner program has turned self-made DIY videos into cash-money. The trick is to anticipate the things people want to know but afraid to ask. Can you draw a decent smokey eye? How well can you fold a paper airplane? Can you whistle? Super 'clicky' web tutorials on absurdly simple tasks can bank their makers up to $100k. "It's nice to get paid for doing absolutely nothing," the guy behind the popular "how to tie a tie" video told NPR.less 

7. Photo by: thinkstock

   Spa critic

   If you're going to have strong opinions, why not use them to get massages? Susie Ellis, C.E.O of Spafinder, has gotten thousands in her 20-year career. She's traveled the world as an intrepid reporter, testing back rubs and aromatherapy rituals for her online spa directory. Freelance writers and editors forspa sites and magazines can get all the same massage perks without any of those C.E.O. headaches, and earn between $20,000 and $90,000 a year.less 

8. Photo by: Think Stock

   Resort consultant

   According to one branding website, a popular mommy blogger was hired by a family resort to spend four days as a V.I.P. guest and offer feedback on how to improve their kid-friendly features. In addition to an all-expense paid vacation, she earned $1,200 for her time. Nice work if you can get it. Too bad the easiest jobs are the hardest to find

The 10 Greatest Books of All Time

Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list.

(See the 100 best novels of all time.)

Yes, it would probably still be an obscenity. But it would be a pretty interesting obscenity. And that's what we have in J. Peder Zane's The Top 10 (Norton; 352 pages).

Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing.

There's plenty of canon fodder on the lists. Zane, who's the books editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, has done a statistical breakdown of the results, so we know, for example, that Shakespeare is the most-represented author (followed by Faulkner, who ties with Henry James; they're followed by a five-way tie, which you can read about for yourself). But I'm more interested in the dark horses, the statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of the literati. Douglas Coupland puts Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers at number one, blowing right byBreakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman Mailer revives John Dos Passos's out-of-fashion U.S.A. trilogy for his #6 (and shows uncharacteristic forebearance by leaving his own works off the list). And so on. (At times one reads in the knowledge that one is being messed with. There's an outside, screwball chance that David Foster Wallace really reveres C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters above all other books, but I feel comfortable asserting—having read Infinite Jesttwice—that Wallace does not feel that way about Stephen King's The Stand (at #2) or The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy (#10).)

(See the top 10 books you were forced to read in school.)

There are several lifetimes' worth of promising literary leads here—544 books in all. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mentioned is worth the price of admission all on its own. But to get you started, here, in all its glory, is the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the top 10 lists of 125 of the world's most celebrated writers combined. Read it and— well, just read it.

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

         

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

        

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

       

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

          

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
         

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
        

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

           

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
       

9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
            

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot