The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The first edition of this classic came out in 1960 and I was given a copy the next year as a high school graduation gift. I was an ambitious reader even at eighteen and I tried to read one or another of the included titles every couple of months. There were around 100 authors, from Homer to Orwell, and I reckoned I could finish the list in maybe twenty years. Of course, I never did finish. But I read at least one-third of Fadiman's recommendations and I'm definitely the better for it. This updated, revised, and expanded version drops some authors who simply didn't become as "standard" as Fadiman expected them to, and adds at least a dozen new ones. The latter are a nod (an unnecessary one in my opinion) to Asian, Latin American, and African literary classics. I say they're unnecessary because Western readers always have read certain key authors from non-European cultures. But we still favor authors who write about our own world and our own experiences. The chapters this time are arranged strictly chronologically by author's birth date, which I frankly prefer to the earlier arbitrary topical groupings. Each essay is brief and to the point, which makes for easy serendipitous browsing. I'm apt to dip into this volume whenever I don't know what I feel like reading next. A really nice added feature of this edition is a list of 100 second-level authors just in the 20th century -- those who didn't make the cut for the main list, or who are too recent for their staying power to be predicted. I was pleased to find that there were fewer than ten names on the list with whom I was not at least familiar, but there were perhaps twenty whose work I hadn't yet read. Aha, another list! Still, it was bit sad to note just how many of those hundred who were alive at the list's compilation a dozen years ago are now gone. And I can think of only a couple of new arrivals, people like Nicholson Baker and Jonathan Lethem, who might replace them. If you're a collector, as I am, of "to read"