Saturday, January 17, 2009

1000 books to read

The idea of lists is something that is always a good one to provoke thoughts and arguments and The Guardian is bound to do both with its 1,000 books recommendations which started today with love.

There is no problem with recommending books, in fact good can come of it, but I would question the way these have been categorised. The 1001 Books to Read before You Die approach is to do it in terms of centuries. But Penguin opted to code its Classics range by the greatest love, crime etc so maybe that was the inspiration.

Best to suspend judgement till the end of the series but if one of the aims of the exercise was to get people talking about it then it can already be qualified a success.