By now, I’m sure, many if not most people on FaceBook have encountered the so-called BBC list of books “everyone should read” but likely haven’t. It’s an interesting meme, both for what is on it and for what is not, but also for the apparent idiocies it contains. For example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is listed and then, separately, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. What, is Hamlet suddenly no longer part of the Complete Works? Also, the first book of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series is listed and then—again separately—The Chronicles of Narnia.
Aside from the obvious lack of editing, this raises the number of books (or, in the case of Shakespeare, “books”) quite a bit above 100. …