Which brings us to a major fact about this project: I don't tend to read anything that's absolutely current. With 25 centuries of important books to savor in a brief lifetime of seventy or eighty years, I'm not addicted to New York Times best-sellers or the latest fads of scholarship (Someone please assure me that Jacques Derrida is no longer in fashion.)
Glancing through a pile of books on international relations that I hope to include on The List, I see copyright dates of 1994 for Henry Kissinger, 1996 for Samuel P. Huntington, and 2002 for Philip Bobbitt. Okay that last one is cutting it a bit close, but maybe it will seem more distant in time by next summer. (I certainly anticipate feeling much older.) So if you're reading this blog with hopes of getting a review of a current book, you're out of luck.
In fiction, I think twenty years or so will be the cut-off, or even further back if A Confederacy of Dunces fails to make it. But I intend to vary The List of novels by both by era and country of origin: not more than two novels from the same century and country in a row, and the 50 novels displaying a wide diversity of provenance when taken as a whole. The same diversity will manifest itself among the works of scholarship through a diversity of subject matter rather than era or country of origin.
After all, the ultimate object of this project is to plug the woeful gaps in my apparently dreadful education. (More on that to come.)
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