You must have seen these lists going around: “100 Books To Read Before You Die”, “100 Must-Read Classics” or “100 Essential Novels”. Those lists are everywhere and urge us to read what is considered the most important works of literature in the world.

It turns out that I have some issues with those lists, and with what is considered a “Classic” in general.

I started going down a rabbit hole on this after reading my first Jane Austen novel. I read Northanger Abbey and I hated it. I hated the shallow talk, I hated the predictable outcome, I hated the forced plot twist so the two of them could be together. That’s because Romance novels are not really my thing and definitely, Jane Austen is not my thing.

There, I’ve said it.

Even though I was bored to my bones, I persisted and finished the book. Then I thought that maybe this wasn’t a good place to start Jane Austen and got some of her most famous works: Pride & Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, etc. Those books sat on my shelf for months. I was dreading it, but committed to reading them because, you know, it’s Jane Austen.

And then it dawned on me: why am I doing this? There are so many other books I’m excited to read, why am I lending space on my shelf to an author that I don’t like, just because she’s on some list?

And now you see my friends: that’s the power of lists.

We read the #classics because they’re in many “books I should read” lists, and they remain classics because so many people read and talk about them. In short, they’re so discussed because so many people read them, and so many people read them because they’re so discussed.

Of course, I know, there’s more to it than that. No author reaches the “Essential Novels” list with mediocre work. Every one of those books exceeded expectations and continues to delight some readers with every reading. But in my opinion, there are so many other books that get overlooked to give space to these classics.

I also suspected that the subjective selection of what is an indispensable book is embedded in prejudices of who is a good author and who is not, with criteria that include how they look like and where they’re from.

But you know me, I needed data to prove me right. So I got one of these lists, opened my Google Sheets and set to work.

The Data

The list I chose to analyze is the “100 Essential Novels” poster from Pop Chart. You can buy this online and scratch the books you read, one by one. I thought this would be a pretty standard list since they’re selling it as a poster. The full list can be found here.

I copied all the authors to a sheet and googled every single one of them, looking for nationality, gender and race. As there are 97* of them, I mostly went with first impressions and place of birth, mostly. I gathered all the information in a spreadsheet (you can see a copy here) and started to look at the data patterns. And what I discovered was even more shocking than I was prepared for.

Finding 1:

I first looked at the data at the continent level and discovered that the vast majority of authors were born in Europe or North America. Yes, I understand that this is a list that was created in the U.S. and is circling mainly in the U.S., but 94%???

Things got a little more clear when I started to look at the country level.

Finding 2:

You can’t deny that America loves itself. Of the 100 books, 52 are from U.S. writers. Some people will say that it’s expected that the people who created the list will inevitably include more people from their own country in the list.

That’s mostly true, but I have two problems with this argument. 1 – This list is not called “100 Essential American and British Novels”, it’s supposed to be universal, the best of all time, everywhere. And 2 – These lists are replicated everywhere. We follow them in Brazil, they’re are shown in schools in India, discussed in universities in South Africa. The names on that list go around and are considered “essential” all over the world.

If you don’t find that disconcerting, I have some more data for you. Let’s talk about gender.

Finding 3:

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. We expected that since women have had historically fewer opportunities in the publishing industry and when they had they were taken way less seriously. But this is a list being passed around in 2024. We have books in there published in 2021. Considering that we’re already in the third feminist wave, isn’t it time for things to get a little more balanced?

Apparently not.

And then there’s the race criteria, and by this time you can already brace yourselves for disappointment.

Finding 4:

Yep. That was another punch in the gut. I thought that by the volume of American authors, we would get some higher numbers on Black and Brown authors here, but no. Of the 52 American authors, only 6 were people of colour. But if it wasn’t for the U.S., we would only have 2 people of colour on this list, a Nigerian and an Indian.

This makes sense when you think about how many predominantly White countries were involved in this list. And here you can notice that I made a distinction between the authors’ origin and their ethnicity. For instance, I consider Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Bollano as White, because despite being Indian, Colombian and Chilean, they’re considered White in their countries of origin. Ask me how I know.

And there are no Asian authors here, in the sense of race. The only authors “from Asia” are from India, and the other one of them is Brown.

This is all already very alarming, but wait until we put the 3 criteria together: nationality, gender and race.

Finding 5:

The majority of this list showcases the work of a very specific type of individual: the White American/British man. The individuals in this select group represent 1.8% of the population in the world, and yet, they get 54 of the seats. Black women from any nationality, for instance, represent a much larger group, but only get 3 seats.

The bottom line is: I’m not criticizing the books, I’m criticizing the list. These collections of what is essential in the literary world are obviously crooked and out of alignment with reality. I can’t believe that, with a current population of 1.4 billion people, there isn’t a single Chinese author who produced a book worthy of being called a classic.

It just doesn’t make sense.

So here is my rant against the classics. Or better yet, against the list of classics. I’m sure the majority of books on that list are noteworthy and will bring joy to a lot of people, including the works of Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice is on the list).

But for me, from now on, I need more than “it’s a classic” to convince me to read a book.

In time: Jack Edwards made a great video about the problem with the “100 best books of the century” list (as someone who contributed to it). It’s worth watching.

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*some authors have more than one book on the list, but I’m counting each entry as an individual writer. I’m saying 77% of writers, but I actually mean 77% of books.