This year Penguin Canada is challenging Canadians to read 52 of The Best Books Ever Written. Each week one title will be revealed in the Globe and Mail, and they are being collected at Amazon.ca (where one can conveniently purchase Penguin editions of these classics, of course). I was quite surprised to find I have read 4 of the 9 books assigned so far, but I don't think that percentage will last throughout the year.
Strangely, the Globe and Mail is running a separate profile of the 50 Greatest Books. Apart from their first selection, they've chosen much weightier books than Penguin has, including nonfiction and poetry. Each is accompanied by an article from a leading expert on the book in question. Unfortunately there isn't a master page with links to all the articles, so you'll have to scan the Arts page for the lastest addition, and that will lead to the rest.
Here are the two lists so far:
Penguin
Fifth Business—Robertson Davies
Far from the Madding Crowd—Thomas Hardy
Mansfield Park—Jane Austen
Of Human Bondage—W. Somerset Maugham
Madame Bovary—Gustave Flaubert
Dangerous Liaisons—Choderlos de Laclos
Lady Chatterley's Lover—D. H. Lawrence
Day of the Locust and The Dream Life of Balso—Nathanael West
Anna Karenina—Leo TolstoyGlobe & Mail
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Mark Twain
In Search of Lost Time—Marcel Proust
The Origin of Species—Charles Darwin
The Divine Comedy—Dante Alighieri
The Republic—Plato
Don Quixote—Miguel de Cervantes
Ulysses—James Joyce
Das Kapital—Karl Marx
It's certainly looks as though Penguin is going for enjoyable novels that the average person would consider buying, whereas the Globe and Mail is picking the most august volumes in the canon (I'm not sure how Huckleberry got in there, but then he's always getting into places he doesn't belong!). Penguin's challenge is much more practical, though. I can't imagine anyone reading The Origin of Species or Don Quixote in one week, though Anna Karenina in one week is a lot to ask as well. Still, if either of these projects gets people reading any of these books, that's a good thing.
