So depressing...

There is nothing I love better than a good list*. Seriously, want me to do something that I hate, stick it on a list and your chances increase tenfold (how else do you think I get any housework done at all?). So, as you may imagine, books full of lists - and, even moreso, books of book lists are a huge winner with me.

I'm working my way slowly through the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (as well as the movie edition), BBC's The Big Read: Book of Books, and Voyages of Imagination: the Star Trek Fiction Companion ... oh, and a whole pile of the annual top-lists that I pick up from teh local bookstores. What can I say? I've come to terms with my obsession.

All this is my way of justifying the fact that I once again broke my self-imposed book buying ban (who am I kidding, really?) by buying yet another list/companion book: The Literature Lover's Companion.

Covering a huge range of authors, from Homer to Stephen King, each entry gives a brief bio of the author and a list of their major works. Douglas Adams, for example:

But of course, the fun in having a list (or book of lists) is in the crossing off. So - after a great deal of working myself up to it - I grabbed a hilighter and went at it.

Despite being a pretty speedy reader, I know that I'm the most well-read person in the world; I'm not even the most well-read person I know but even so, I had been maintaining the somewhat naive self-delusion that I had read reasonably widely ... I have since learnt that the quickest way to dispel this belief is to sit down with a book like this. There is a depressingly little amount of blue highlighting in this book.

Oh well.

*Every one of my friends just rolled their eyes and died from the complete understatement of that sentence.