books you can’t live without
I was over at the blogher site tonight, and saw this post about the 10 books you can’t live without, which led me to this list of the 100 books you can’t live without, and it made me wonder, what does it mean to say you can’t live without a book? Does it mean that your life would be different if that book had never been written, and you had never read it? Or that if that book ceased to exist on earth, you would stop living? I confess, I’ve read only 68 of the books on the Guardian’s list. Does that mean that I’m only 68% alive?
Tangentially, it doesn’t seem entirely fair that they list The Complete Works of William Shakespeare at number 14, and then Hamlet all by itself at number 98. Does that mean you have to read Hamlet twice? Or do you get double credit for reading it once?
