[Prestidigitweeze]

One problem with that list is that it incorporates books which many readers avoid deliberately. Does that make them ill-read or knowledgeable enough to know what they won't like?

I'm not going to be interested in middlebrow books on art and culture even when they include findings which are more accurate than those in older and more idiosyncratic work. Interesting that modern bestseller writers were on the list but not the Kandinsky of Point and Line to Plane, nor Hélène Cixous, Vasari, Julia Kristeva, Roman Jakobsen, Ruskin, Pater or even Lucy Lippard.

I hadn't read about six of the books and/or writers on the list: The generically titled History of Art, two books on American history (since I detest doting on the "Founding Fathers" and tactical accounts of the glorious massacre of Native Americans who were certainly here first), and two novels and a book of poetry which surely date me in terms of my ignorance of all three.

Then again, there was no Tanizaki, no Leopardi, no Khlebnikov, no Proust, no Flaubert, no Aristotle, no Petronius, no Djuna Barnes, no Racine, no John Stuart Mill, no Francis Bacon, no Jules Laforgue, no Mallarme, no Gide, no Celine, no Dante, no Valery, no Tolstoy, no Kobo Abe, no J. L. Borges, no Eugene O'Neill, no Strindberg, no Murasaki Shikibu, no Cavafy, no Chaucer, no Octavio Paz, no Denise Levertov, no Tristan Corbiere, no Virginia Woolf, no Mikhail Bakhtin, no Wallace Stevens, no Anna Akhmatova, no Heidegger, no Paul Celan or Ingeborg Bachmann, no Marinetti, no Robert Desnos or Max Jacob, no Roland Barthes, no Witkacy, no Osip Mandelstom, no Juan Goytisolo, no Rilke, no Robert Lowell, no Clark Coolidge, no Mina Loy, no George Eliot, no Julio Cortazar, no Octavio Paz, no Krasznahorkai, no Cioran, no Pound, no Graves, no Jan Potocki, no Raymond Roussel, no Alfred Jarry, no Baudelaire, no Lautréamont, Gombrowicz, no Jane Bowles, no Joyce or Beckett (of course), no minor neoclassical poets, no metaphysicals but Donne (as if Crashaw, Marvell, Alabaster and Herbert weren't just as important), etc., etc. --

-- all of which tells you the Christian Science Monitor's list reflects a shop clerk's idea of literacy.