The list, care of Geez Pete.
From the intro...
Knowing that I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a kid, someone recently asked me if I’d read all of the Modern Library’s top 100 list. Hm, never checked. So I took a look. Surprisingly, I’ve done pretty well. Not so surprisingly, that is one fusty, moldy list! Three DH Lawrence titles? Really?
Even worse had to be the “Reader’s List” that the site compiled in reaction to their editor’s list. Any time you have Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard gobbling up the top of both the fiction and non-fiction lists (and I won’t even mention the inclusion of Howard Stern’s Private Parts), skepticism is the best policy.
Then I started to dig around. There’s gotta be a list of essential cool/strange books, right? Wrong. There are lists for just about everything — sci-fi, romance, female authors, young adults, top sellers — but not a list for “us.” Who’s “us”? Well, I’m not sure. I figure if you’re part of “us,” you probably already know.
Aside from the fact that making a top 100 or 50 or 10 of any kind of art is a fool’s errand, I have nominated myself to this task. I’ve come up with 50 non-fiction and 50 fiction titles I think are keystones to understanding subculture. Or counterculture. Or alternative thinking. Or something. In large part, I went with the Supreme Court Justice Stewart method: I know it when I see it.
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