CLASSIC BOOKS.

How many people still read the classics these days? I wonder. I know I do. But then, I grew up at a time when many of them were still being taught in our school system, and once introduced to them, I was soon off and running on my own. In school, for example, I studied Dickens's GREAT EXPECTATIONS. But outside of school, I went on to read a great many of Dickens's novels, and my own personal library contains a complete set of his works, all beautifully bound (so I handle them with care). In fact, much of the bookshelf space in my personal library is devoted to the classics, which I continue to reread and enjoy.

Nowadays, however, I often hear Dickens and others of his ilk written off as "bores," and I'm not sure today's school system (in America, at least) places nearly as much emphasis on the classics---or any at all. What I find both fascinating and incongruous about all this is that while, on the one hand, the classics seem to be increasingly relegated to yesteryear, on the other, they invariably top the lists of the best books ever written.

Recently, I came across just such a list, compiled by one hundred noted writers from fifty-four different countries. Having read many of the books on this particular list, I could agree that they belonged on it. Some, however, I haven't read. So I'm keeping this list handy, in order to try to track them down so that I can read them. I want to know why other authors thought those books belonged on this list.

I also wonder what such lists will look like in the future. Will works by authors like Homer and Virgil, for example, still appear simply because they are considered classics---or will they vanish from the ranks because readers no longer know who Homer and Virgil were and what they wrote?

What do you think? How many books on this list have you read? If you have children, how many of the books on this list do you think they have read? I'm pretty sure my son, Shane, has read one or two of them. One or two---out of a hundred. By the time I was his age (nineteen), I had read more than half of them. Granted, my son's not a reader, the way I was. But I do think he should have covered at least more than one or two of them in school, if not on his own.

Some of the books on this list have been considered great books for millennia. They have withstood the test of time. I'm not so sure, anymore, that they will continue to do so.

I hope I'm wrong about that.