Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like so many bad, bad movies, this book is a beautiful production. It features slick, heavy paper; a million color pictures; attractive, readable typeface; witty contributors. Its proportions seem just right for its weight. But unless you just love grazing on hors d'oeuvres (and many do), you're likely to be disappointed by this beautiful but cynical exercise in marketing to the culturally insecure. As somebody has already noted: No Iliad. No Odyssey. No Aeschylus. No Euripides. No Boccaccio. No Chaucer. No Dante. No Machiavelli. No Shakespeare. No Marlowe. No Old or New Testament. No Q'uran. No Lao-tse, Confucius, Bhagavda-Gita (really short and really good). No Beowulf. No Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In fact, only 13 works from before 1700 make the cut - and lest you think fun is the criterion, one of them is John Lyly's Euphues long regarded as one of the most unreadable and, shall we say, "affected" works in English literature. You get John Lyly instead of John Milton. On the other hand, you do get 69 titles of books that have appeared since 2000. That's a lot of "classics" in record time. How did they pick these? And there's another 700 - out of 1001, if you can dig it, "you must read before you die" written in the 20th Century. The 19th Century is well represented, I'll grant. Huck Finn is here - but not Twain's more complicated Letters from the Earth, The Mysterious Stranger, A Connecticut Yankee, or Pudd'nhead Wilson. They also felt it necessary to fill out the list with a few short stories like Lovecraft's "The Mountains of Madness" and Gogol's "The Nose." Great stories, but two actual books had to go to make room for them. Books like The Red Badge of Courage, for example. Or maybe The Red Badge got crowded out by Justine or American Psycho. This is a book for people who like to read about books in snappy reviews, and look at color pictures of books. You'll find some titles worth pursuing, but you could do better, for starters, just by getting a list of Cliff's Notes titles and going on from there. You can do that for free.