Reboot

Hey. I've been pretty disappointed at this list so far. Mainly it is caused by it's extreme Anglo-Centrism and Euro-Centrism. Stuff like Euphues or the Pilgrim's Progress have no place in any reading list of quality, I'm sorry.

That was why I was excited, when I was in Portugal recently, to find an international version of the list. This immediately got my attention, a lot of books which were inexcusably left out were now a part of the canon, a lot of these are now representing literatures absent from the English version of the list. A lot of Chinese and Japanese literature for example, as well as Portuguese, Spanish and German language texts as well as a much wider selection of Eastern European texts. So now things like Tale Of Genji, the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms and my favourite writer in the Portuguese language, Antonio Lobo Antunes are in, as are some of Vanda's favourite writers like Eça de Queiroz. Don Quixote is finally put into context with the addition of chivalry romances like Amadis Of Gaul and Tirant Lo Blanc. And a lot of crap which was was really not looking forward to has been dropped, as well as the crappy Greek melodramas.

So we agreed to reset the project and start from the beggining; a lot of the books are the same we have already read, and Roxana by Defoe, one book I actually liked, was dropped. The gains greatly outweigh the losses, however. The previous reviews are left here for posterity but we're restarting from number 1.