"Which book should every adult read before [he or she dies]?" *

Of the the thirty, I've missed only three:

Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

These choices baffle me:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
The Prophet (Khalil Gibran)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

These omissions concern me:

Hamlet or King Lear (Shakespeare)
The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
Main Street or Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

Lists like this are an exercise in frustration. I mean, The Time Traveller's Wife? Ergh. If a title like that were in the running, how 'bout The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)? Um, and don't most folks get The Prophet out of their systems by, oh, twenty-three? The Alchemist was an annoying book on too many levels to list. Instead of that, how 'bout, oh, I don't know... Atonement (Ian McEwan)? The Deptford Trilogy (Robertson Davies)? And who came up with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time? Eh. I would have recommended Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem) or And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie).

But that's just me.

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* It actually read, "The Pulitzer prize-winning classic has topped a World Book Day poll conducted by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in which librarians around the country were asked the question, 'Which book should every adult read before they die?'" [Emphasis added.]

ARGH!

And ARGH! again.