I'm looking at this list of "50 Books that Shaped the World," and I'm wondering what criteria (other than influentialness) were used, what criteria I would have used, and which I think are appropriate.

Perhaps I'm reflecting on this because it comes in conjunction with a post over on Scott Eric Kaufman's site, in which, on the one hand, I was tempted to say it is always, when confronted with the charge that someone is racist or sexist or distasteful, incumbent upon us to shift the question to why is that so? or what kind of racist, sexist, or distasteful person is s/he? or, in other words, to complicate simplistic allegations. But then I think that's only always the case if we're saying something about the accused, and many times we won't, and I wonder if we should use this reasoning to argue that we should say something about every sexist, racist, or asshole.

As I applied all this to the question of who should we work on or write about, I received the email linked above from Blackwell's. And of course there are some curious choices in the list. About 2/3 of the list is English language books, and indeed, the list was compiled by "Expert Booksellers around the UK."

So, highlights: The Qur'an; The Bible; a small handful of novels (Ulysses, Lady Chatterly's Lover, 1984, Heart of Darkness, Brave New World: overwhelmingly British, interestingly enough); Rushdie and Fanon: surely not tokenism for postcolonials?; political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau (no Locke) to Paine to Mill to Gandhi; Plato, but no Aristotle; Dante, but no Shakespeare; freakin' Stowe (what, now we believe Lincoln’s putative statement about her causing the war?), but no Douglass; Sartre, but no Heidegger; The Wealth of Nations, but no Kapital; but both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (somehow I see those two ridiculously grouped together...); and in the category of critical theory, Orientalism (and Ways of Seeing--does that count?); and Freud and Darwin. Few female authors, though apparently de Beauvoir's and Wollstonecraft are meant to overcome the deficiency. A few bizarre choices--On the Road, are you kidding me? Top 50? Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Hmm. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, a bit of a stretch?

Well, there's a reason I'm not paid to select books (and I always have a hard time narrowing down my reading list for classes); my list would be like... Who'm I kidding? I don't know where I'd put the limit.