Apparently "The Neverending Story" is Modern Fiction but Tolkien is strictly for kids. A couple of genres get shortchanged, most notably Romance (distributed across the categories) and my beloved Fantasy (largely relegated to Children's Fiction(!) but cropping up sparsely elsewhere. This counteracts favouritism and contributes to representativeness across a wide range of noteworthy authors, but leads to oddities such as including "Interview with the Vampire" while ommitting "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Anna Karenina," etc. The Classic Fiction section, for instance, has only one book by Dickens ("Our Mutual Friend")***, only one by Tolstoy ("War and Peace"), etc. It seems there was a self-imposed rule not to select two works by the same author for the same section. Every entry comes with a list of other works by the featured author, which sometimes led me to recognize authors and piqued my interest when otherwise I might have casually passed over it. Any selection of 501 "must-read" books is of course never going to be definitive, but a clear enough effort was made to have the selections be varied and representative that I respect the opinion. Within each section there's a wide range of publication dates (though Classic Fiction is of course generally older), and authors are featured from all over the globe. The volume is nicely categorized into sections labelled Children's Fiction, Classic Fiction, History, Memoirs, Modern Fiction, Science Fiction, Thrillers and Travel Writing.
And now I've entered all 501 titles into LibraryThing's Common Knowledge database and started a group for it.
I've a healthy to-be-read list built up that might be approaching a hundred titles at this point. A few months more and I was becoming seriously engaged, cross-referencing its recommendations with LT and Amazon reviews. Started scribbling a list of some titles I might look into. In the following days, weeks, more leafing. Within the hour, bored, I leafed through it again, but took a bit more time over the entries. It didn't help the impression that I knew it was one in a series of "501" books (movies you must see, places you must go, etc.) I leafed through it, noted the absence of a few of my favourites and dismissed the whole thing. My assumption from the look of it was that its publisher had hastily pulled together a list of 501 easily recommended books to turn a quick buck.
A Christmas gift I received from my wife, which caused me to raise an eyebrow.
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