50 greatest books (available in English, by dead white men whom you've all heard of)

I have been following with increasing dread the Globe and Mail's Book section series of the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Not because I don't think people should read (of course I do!) or that lists like this seem rather arbitrary (they will at least spur discussion). But frankly, the list has been kind of... predictable.

Let's see: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, James Joyce's Ulysses, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Marx's Das Capital, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Dante's Divine Comedy. Bonus points for Origin of Species, but points taken away for another famous dead white guy (Charles Darwin).

Okay, fine, yes. I'm going to rehash the "dead white guy" argument. Look, I know that one reason a disproportionate number of books are written by dead white men is because the number of educated white men has historically been high compared to educated women and/or minorities. (I also know that there are currently more dead authors than live authors.) But my issue with the list isn't that the books so far have been written by dead white guys, but what the preponderonce of dead white male authors suggests—that the list will tell us nothing new or encourage us to re-think what it means to be a "great" book. Many of the chosen books are of great historical import, but any undergraduate student currently making his/her way through a liberal arts degree will encounter many of them in time. In fact, an undergrad student of 40 years ago would have encountered many of these books in time. At the rate the exercise is going, the list is beginning to look like the "great hits of the Western canon."

Every week, I have greeted the announcement of the next "great book" with a deflated resignation and a touch of resentment. Oh, Machievelli's The Prince! How original! How exciting! How daring to select a book by an author whose name has entered everyday vocabulary, becoming synonymous with ruthless dictatorial actions, on the basis of this book.

There are any number of "great books" lists in the world, fiction and nonfiction, all easily found on Google. There is even a list of great books lists! Considering all of this, the Globe and Mail list seems redundant at best and frankly, a little wanky at worst.

And to test my precognitive abilities, herewith are my guesses for books that will appear on the Globe's list of the 50 Greatest Books E-VAH:

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (unles Dante's Divine Comedy cancelled it out in the balloting?)
The Republic, by some guy named Plato
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes
The Cantebury Tales, by Chaucer
something by Nietzsche
War and Peace

Some off-the-wall guesses:
Johnson's Dictionary (or possibly the Oxford English Dictionary, but Johnson's came first)
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style
Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

And if an Austen novel does make the list, I hope it's the superior Emma, rather than the go-to Pride and Prejudice.