1001 Before You Die

The changes between this and the list posted over on listology, which I assume is from the printed list, are strange.

Some are obvious, like the addition of Genji and the classic Chinese novels.

But some of the removals are genuinely puzzling. The list as it stands at present has four Don DeLillo novels, and [i]one[/i] Faulkner novel, thanks to the removal of The Sound and The Fury, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet! Personally, if anything the original list didn't have enough Faulkner, since it excluded As I Lay Dying and Light in August, considered two of his major works (and As I Lay Dying, at least, is a great novel). But now you're basically saying that Don DeLillo is a much more important novelist than Faulkner, which is just completely absurd. Hell, even Paulo Coelho gets more novels on the list than Faulkner. This is just indefensible. If anyone is going to get four novels, Faulkner seems like a very strong candidate. You also seem to have removed Hemingway entirely

I'm also puzzled by the continuing strange treatment of short stories. Poe short stories, for some reason, get individual entries - why use up two spaces on them when you could just do "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" and get another space. Then you have a collection for Borges. You don't have short stories by Joyce or Hawthorne or Hemingway, and Chekhov is missing from the list entirely. Given that you clearly include the Borges short story collection, as well as including poems like the Lusiads, it makes very little sense to me that you would exclude Dubliners, or some selection of Chekhov's short stories, or what not.

More broadly, I'm not sure I understand the genre requirements here. It seems to largely be novels, but then you have a few short stories, some poems, and so forth. What possible genre requirements would include the Lusiads and exclude the Odyssey? They're both epic poems! There's also a fair amount of autobiographical stuff, but then some obvious stuff is missing - St. Augustine, Cellini, Franklin. Also, it's not clear why autobiographies and memoirs count as "books" but historical works or biographies do not.

As with the original list, I have to say that I generally disagree with the heavy emphasis on post-world war II literature. Obviously, there's more of that that we're reading right now, but it seems likely that a great deal of it is not going to stand the test of time. "Barchester Towers," or "The Pickwick Papers," have been read and enjoyed for a century and a half now. Will we be able to say the same of "Mao II" or "Everything is Illuminated"?