Nobody was ever going to make a list of currently available books that satisfied everyone else. I have to say that the inclusion of Alice Sebold, from all I have heard, strikes me as nearly as bad, as does the near total absence of classics - Homer and Virgil, let alone Kalidasa or Li Po, do not exist - and genre fiction of every kind - no Agatha Christie, HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov or ER Burroughs; not even Kipling, Poe or Jules Verne. And Verne reminds me that there is a grave shortage of European classics: where are Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Balzac, Goethe, or Dante? Where are CS Lewis and GK Chesterton? And if we are talking about books as such, how about history, biography, or science? Gibbon, Mommsen, Favre, Galileo, Feynman, Lingard, Dumezil, Braudel, or Michelet? and all the lives of great or little men and women from Thayer's Beethoven to St.Therese of Lisieux' Autobiography? How about philosophy? Is any person educated if they haven't read Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas? How about even the much-advertised Enlightenment? Whatever happened to Voltaire, Rousseau, Herder, Beccaria, Diderot (even the dirty bits)?
In short, this lists represents a narrow, ultimately rather undemanding pundit's view of reading from exactly the modern-lit point of view I do not approve of. It does little to broaden the mind or take it beyond one particular subject, namely highbrow modern fiction.
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Date: 2008-06-27 03:51 am (UTC)In short, this lists represents a narrow, ultimately rather undemanding pundit's view of reading from exactly the modern-lit point of view I do not approve of. It does little to broaden the mind or take it beyond one particular subject, namely highbrow modern fiction.