Their snickers are at least one reason that Americans are less ardent for books than they should be. Our intelligentsia claim to a very high standard of seriousness regarding writing and reading, a standard that is off-putting. Now the intelligentsia snipe at the Modern Library's listings. The sniping is unjustified and a little silly. No sensible person would think the Modern Library's one hundred books an infallible accounting.
Erudite judges have a sense of the century's best novels.
One could number two hundred or three hundred or a thousand, but one hundred is a start. I myself have joined the army of summertime readers and the book that tops the Modern Library's list is on my menu this week, James Joyce's Ulysses . I have already finished off Paul Johnson's History of the American People , Jonathan Kwitny's Man of the Century , and a new biography of Calvin Coolidge by Robert Sobel, entitled, not surprisingly, Coolidge . Johnson's book is a refreshingly iconoclastic history, an enthusiastic account of America from colonial times to the present. It has minor errors of fact.