Folks who are hard pressed for time to build a private library often look for shortcuts. Because they can't devote hours to perusing standard bibliographies about a particular subject (which bibliographies often run hundreds of closely typed pages), or the time to research particular authors of interest, they seek out quick & dirty guides to whatever it is they are collecting. This is neither good or bad...it simply is a fact of modern life, especially in the industrialized nations of the world.
One of the shortcuts that harried collectors use to guide their collecting is lists. These lists come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some of the most popular lists are those that that feature award winners in various types of literature. If one collects science fiction, for example, the focus normally is on Hugo and Nebula Award winners. If one collects modern Western fiction, the focus might be on winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or the Booker Prize. Other such lists (they number in the dozens) are nicely set forth here:
Nebula Award (1965), Hugo Award (1966) Booker Prize (2002)
The problem with these types of lists is that, just like the Academy Award for Best Picture, the best book does not always win. Which is why some harried collectors prefer a different type of list, such as The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels or The Times Literary Supplement (London) 100 Most Influential Books Since World War II. The problem with these latter types of lists is that no one ever agrees with all (or even most) of the choices, and such lists understandably tend to be very Eurocentric.
This last point cannot be overstated. Much of the world's great literature is unknown to readers in industrialized nations because so little of this literature has been translated into the world's major language of bookselling, English. Entire swaths of great Latin American literature, for example, suffer from this oversight, as does much Arabic literature, African literature and so on. In short, if one must use such lists to guide one's collecting, do so with full knowledge of what you may be missing out on....
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