1000 Book List

And to think I told myself that when I started this blog I would keep up with it and be "professional." Hah. But here goes again.

About a year ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing how poorly read we were for being English majors. I think most English majors have that discussion at some point or another; you read all those books and feel terribly smug around all your non-English major friends, and then you read some journal article or blog post that compares eighteen different "essential" works that you've never read and you realize that you're ignorant and should just give up and work in fast food for a living, because you'd probably end up making more money anyway and would be more fun at parties. But anyway. We had that talk, and we decided that in order to correct the situation we would start working our way through Editor Eric's "The Greatest Literature of All Time" list of 1000 important works.

Well, she decided to work her way through that list. I decided to spend days trawling the internet for all the "Greatest of All Time" lists I could find, combine them all into a database, and create new lists that would compensate for the biases of the editors of the individual lists (honestly guys, D.H. Lawrence is good, but he's not that great), and work my way through that. Because that's how I roll.

All that is to say, I'm going to be talking about pretentious books on here for awhile, because I spend all my time now a) watching two year olds make a mess (turns out my degree really wasn't good for anything) b) reading pretentious books, and c) stalking people on the internet. And neither a nor c seem like good things to blog about.