After an extensive search, I have finally found a book list of 'top 100 reads' to be balanced. The winner is from The Telegraph, "110 best books: The perfect library." It divides the plethora into 11 sections that include "Books that changed the world" to "Books that changed your world." Definitely worth a glance.
I have been trolling through lists of best books on the internets, and have been soundly disappointed in how unbalanced these lists appear toward modern and post-modern literature. A celebration of recent fiction is only a natural part of any culture and extremely important in that it continues to emphasize that we must live in the present. For so long, classical education has lauded the past authors as the greatest to such an extent that modern writers have felt themselves unable to write in a contemporary context and voice. Now the pendulum has slowly swung the other way.
The lists of 'Best Books' I trolled through are entirely weighted in the 20th century and beyond, hardly glance over the shoulder to a look past Austen, and rarely a word in favor of Shakespeare. I'm not shocked that people don't love Shakespeare or cry beaucoups over Wuthering Heights-- that's understandable. But what I do fear is a severance, a discontinuity with the past. I'm afraid that when people think of old books, they'll dismiss them as either being too highfalutin for them and they won't understand, or, even worse, that the nature of these books are irrelevant to modern society.
One of the most beautiful things I received from reading the gamut is a clear knowledge of the history of mankind, told from the perspective of those living then. We can know the heartache of the Greeks (through Sappho), the pride of the Romans (through the Aeniad), the miracles behinds the Saints we name our towns after (in The Golden Legend), the love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, the profound agony behind Kind Lear in the Renaissance, the docility of nature from the Romantics, rants against society from the Victorians, and the reexamination of what it means to be human from the moderns. In all of these movements of Western thought we can find some explanation for why we think or perceive (something) the way that we do.
Behind the guise of hundreds of years is yet another facet to what it means to be human, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. This continuous cycle of self-reflection unearths in us the reasons we live.
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