My high school library had one of those 'rock encyclopedia' type books, a thick, glossy, and at the time exhaustive-seeming tome, which I used to browse through in spare periods in those last couple of years at school, as the Cure, the Smiths, Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and various other 'old' bands increasingly imposed themselves on my musical horizons, and pop music itself grew increasingly important to me.
Anyway, I guess that this 'Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide' is kind of a literary equivalent, although with less of a sense of (intended or actual) comprehensiveness. It focuses mostly on 20th century literature (in the broad sense of the term, so that we see Tom Clancy, David Eddings, and others of their cultural-status ilk - though no J K Rowling or Helen Fielding, interestingly) but includes some notable novelists from earlier times - Defoe, Austen, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and plenty of others). Obviously I haven't read it from cover to cover, but it's fab to dip into.
It would be pointless to quibble about the selections and omissions, or to dwell on the values that these reflect - naturally enough, there's a bias towards popular literary authors, both contemporary and relatively recently past (Calvino, Kundera, Atwood, Rushdie, Murdoch, Fowles, etc), but there's also substantial representation for the popular fantasy/sf genres (sf not so surprising - Asimov, Clarke, Gibson - nor some of those at the margins, like Le Guin, but the fantasy entries tend to be blockbuster writers, though I have to say that the compilers have managed to pick all of the best ones, as far as I'm concerned - Eddings, Donaldson, Jordan, Feist...and, in a somewhat different vein, Pratchett...missing only George R R Martin, who at least gets a mention in one of the lists and, again in a slightly different vein, China Miéville). Detective fiction also well represented, which is again not so surprising nowadays.
Also pointless to remark on how many of my favourites are included, though it did make me happy to see a few whose names I wouldn't necessarily have expected to see in a selection as comparatively brief as this one, in Donna Tartt, Kate Atkinson and Haruki Murakami (okay, I know they're not exactly underground, but you still wouldn't confidently bet on them being the ones from the contemporary scene to turn up in a 'good reading guide' - omissions include Franzen, Eugenides, Moody and David Foster Wallace, to name just a few heavy hitters).
Actually, one of the good things about this guide is that it's not limited to author (and 'major work') entries, though they're what I've been referring to in talking about whether given authors were or were not included, and those entries do dominate the book. There are also plenty of 'startpoints' and 'read on a theme' lists (examples of the latter: 'on the edge of sanity', 'dark old houses', 'art for whose sake?', 'good and evil', 'money', etc), and some slightly longer 'pathways' (starting from a particular book - Gormenghast is one, but the paths leading from it, from what I recognised of them, weren't terribly exciting).
Gosh, how nerdy! :)
