Via Miss Snark, the news that The New York Public Library has compiled a list of 25 books from 2005 that we’re all supposed to remember. And read, presumably.

I haven’t read any of them, so I’m heartened that many of the commenters on Miss Snark’s blog, who tend to be an erudite bunch, haven’t read any of them, either.

Anyway, I still qualify for a snob, I think. Off the top of my head, I know I read Fielding’s Tom Jones last year. And London, A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd, and 1491 by Charles Mann. And after I picked up (and read) an amazing 1932 edition of A Shropshire Lad in a junky antique co-op, I bought a copy of The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose by Housman, only I didn’t read all of that. So, half a snob, then.