Nom de Plume

I’m usually flummoxed by questions like “What’s your favorite book?” or “What’s your favorite CD?” Honestly, I don’t know what to say. After all, one’s taste changes, just as one reads or listens to new things. Ultimately, it seems to be that being able to give an answer to questions like these is tantamount to saying, “I am a deeply unimaginative and stagnant person.” Okay, okay, maybe I am — but please, please let me labor under my delusions.

So it is with deep suspicion that I regard all these top book lists. Top books of 2005! Top books of the 20th century! And now, there’s the What Books Should Everyone Read Before They Die List..

Talk about raising the ante.

Here it is:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quite [sic] on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time? The Time Traveller’s Wife?!? Come on. Not one, not two, but count ‘em THREE novels by Dickens? Yet not a single one by Edith Wharton? I would take The Last Samurai over The Lovely Bones any day. And then there’s the top of the list, To Kill a Mockingbird, which, in my opinion, is a charming novel for younger readers, but has somehow been elevated to cult status and the very pinnacle of high litrachooer.

See, this is a popularity contest. Which is fine. Except for the fact that a popularity contest is subjective — and these lists are so very definitive.