SOURCE: "Bookdumb: The List To-Do," in The New Republic, Vol. 219, Nos. 7-8, August 17, 1998, p. 14.

[In the following essay, Wood assesses the weaknesses and strengths of the Modern Library list in terms of aesthetics and literary influence.]

Xerxes wept at the prospect that, 100 years on, not one of his soldiers would be alive. We feel the same, said Schopenhauer, while perusing publishers' catalogs, stunned at the prospect that none of the books before us will last a century. A list of the century's best novels in English, such as the Modern Library published last week, ought to make us feel the opposite of Schopenhauer; here, by some miracle of literary cryogenics, are the books that have lasted a century, and that may frozenly outlast many more.

Yet, oddly, lists are as depressing as catalogs, because both disclose the same thing: that only a very few books are truly great...