Emma Beare

Solid compilation of movies to see with only a few clunkers in the bunch--some of the more contemporary choices are a bit strained (Young Guns is not a classic western). But on the whole, well chosen and a nice intro for film novices and even for more flick savvy folks like myself there were a few surprises--films that I may have been only vaguely aware of are now on my watch for list (Dead of Night, The Iron Horse, Run of the Arrow). Broken in film genre's (Western, Romance, Sci-Fi, Mystery/Thriller), each film is given a tight synopsis with credits and academy award nominations and wins. Nice to have laying around for the occasional dip or dive into.… (more)

A Christmas gift I received from my wife, which caused me to raise an eyebrow. My assumption from the look of it was that its publisher had hastily pulled together a list of 501 easily recommended books to turn a quick buck. It didn't help the impression that I knew it was one in a series of "501" books (movies you must see, places you must go, etc.) I leafed through it, noted the absence of a few of my favourites and dismissed the whole thing. Within the hour, bored, I leafed through it again, but took a bit more time over the entries. In the following days, weeks, more leafing. Started scribbling a list of some titles I might look into. A few months more and I was becoming seriously engaged, cross-referencing its recommendations with LT and Amazon reviews. I've a healthy to-be-read list built up that might be approaching a hundred titles at this point. And now I've entered all 501 titles into LibraryThing's Common Knowledge database and started a group for it. Needless to say, I'm hooked.

The volume is nicely categorized into sections labelled Children's Fiction, Classic Fiction, History, Memoirs, Modern Fiction, Science Fiction, Thrillers and Travel Writing. Within each section there's a wide range of publication dates (though Classic Fiction is of course generally older), and authors are featured from all over the globe. Any selection of 501 "must-read" books is of course never going to be definitive, but a clear enough effort was made to have the selections be varied and representative that I respect the opinion. Every entry comes with a list of other works by the featured author, which sometimes led me to recognize authors and piqued my interest when otherwise I might have casually passed over it.

It seems there was a self-imposed rule not to select two works by the same author for the same section. The Classic Fiction section, for instance, has only one book by Dickens ("Our Mutual Friend")***, only one by Tolstoy ("War and Peace"), etc. This counteracts favouritism and contributes to representativeness across a wide range of noteworthy authors, but leads to oddities such as including "Interview with the Vampire" while ommitting "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Anna Karenina," etc. A couple of genres get shortchanged, most notably Romance (distributed across the categories) and my beloved Fantasy (largely relegated to Children's Fiction(!) but cropping up sparsely elsewhere. Apparently "The Neverending Story" is Modern Fiction but Tolkien is strictly for kids. Now you know.)

While I wouldn't expect it to be worth anyone's time to track down and read every title (much less expect you to enjoy the process), if you can withstand the cold shoulder given to some of your own favourites and the occasional odd categorization, you're sure to find something here - probably multiple somethings - that you've not previously heard of and are intrigued by.

***Edited (Dec 2011): in fact there are two Dickens in this section, since the Christmas Books are also listed. But I think this is the sole exception to the "one citation per author, per section" approach.… (more)