Am I Literate or Not?

It's not modesty but pride which prevents me from revealing how well read I am, based on a list currently doing the rounds. If Mrs Tilton's lacunae are glaring and Abiola's are unforgiveable then I don't have so much lacunae in my reading as huge gaping chasms. In my defense I must point out that the list itself (I'm not going to bother to reprint it here, you can see it at Abiola's or Mrs T's) is far from exhaustive.

Perhaps I simply demonstrate my own, as Mrs Tilton puts it, "prejudices and preferences" in querying the absence of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom or anything at all by that deeply silly man but great poet W.B. Yeats. I'd wager Dinah Dienstag would also have something to say about the exclusion of such canonical works as Iskander Karamanoglu's 'The Exquisite Melancholia of Persimmon Leaves' and Derrida's 'Qu'est-ce que c'est "qu'est-ce que c'est"?'

Comments

[Abiola Lapite]

The list in question was exclusively of works of fiction, explaining the absence of the titles you mention; still, I'd say any supposedly literate person who hasn't read Darwin, Machiavelli or Adam Smith ought to have his membership in the intellectual class revoked, or at least seriously put in doubt.

I'd bet anything though, that 99 out of 100 "intellectuals" have never even dusted the cover of a copy of "The Wealth of Nations", let alone read "The Road to Serfdom." Hayek's book is probably like Kryptonite to that class of "thinker" to be found inhabiting the pages of the Grauniad and The Nation.