If you've browsed around my Classic Literature in Translation site recently, you've probably noticed that I've been cooking up reading lists. Lots of them. I've got a list of humorous books. A list for romance, marriage, love. A list of books that center on families and family histories. Science fiction, philosophical novels, adventure stories, dark comedy, you name it. I'll be adding more (many, many more), but today I'd like to take a look at a few of the most famous reading lists around. Not that About.com isn't famous, but some of these others have been around for decades. And my site has been around for what, five months?
One of the most ambitious lists is the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die". By all means, you can try to read all of them. But even for somebody who eats, sleeps, and breathes literature, this isn't easy. (I read somewhere between fifty and a hundred books every year. Which means it will take me 10-20 years to read all the books on the list. Yikes.) Perhaps the better way to go about this is to take the list as a source of inspiration, a way into literature rather than a literary eating contest. I'd go with that.
Then there are reading lists that are more like insiders' weapons. Perhaps the most renowned of these is the list that experimental author and writing professor Donald Barthelme put together for his advanced students. There's a lot of Beckett, a lot of Borges, and a fair number of Barthelme's friends. In short, there aren't many (or any?) surprises. Still, if you want to get inside an intellectual moment in American writing that, in truth, we aren't quite past, you couldn't do better.
Do reading lists like these provide good guidance, or do you have other, better methods for deciding what to read? Send along your own recent lists, if you want. Who knows? Maybe you'll come up with a better one than Barthelme's.