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Once again, I went out for the day and I took with me, Harold Bloom's, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds (2002). I went from page 36 to page 80. 

I was struck by how little I've read of the works and writers that Bloom talks about in this book. I have read some of them, but a lot of those I've covered so far, I know of them, but I haven't actually read them. So far, in Genius, I've covered Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, John Milton, Tolstoy, Lucretius and Vergil.....and coming up is Augustine, Dante, and Chaucer. 

Yes, I've read some Shakespeare, I've read Don Quixote by Cervantes, I've read Tolstoy's 2 major novels - War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I've read a tiny bit of Chaucer. But out of the genii in the first 80 pages, I haven't read Montaigne, Milton/ Paradise Lost, Lucretius, Virgil, Augustine, and Dante. I have their works - Montaigne's essays, Virgil's Aeneid, Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I have them all, because I know they're good, but I haven't read them. 

and the same goes for the rest of the 100....I've read a few here and there, but there are many that I haven't. Some authors I've read a few books....like, I've read quite a lot of Dickens....actually, I think he's the author that I've read the most works of. That's partly because Dickens wrote more than most novelists - although, not crazy amounts like Balzac and Trollope (none of whose works I've read :-( ) - but it's also because I really like Dickens. But for me, nothing surpasses David Copperfield, even though the experts prefer Bleak House. And I've read a couple of Dostoevsky's novels, and, as with Dickens, I disagree with the experts. The Idiot and The Possessed are like distilled fire, and The Brothers Karamazov - which the experts say is his best, is....I dunno....it's OK. 

I like Bloom's idea of his 100....he points out that they are not the 100 best, according to anyone, including him...they're just the ones he wanted to write about. I like that about Bloom, He's such a contrarian. Even his theory - his criticism - his original contribution to the field...he calls it an antithetical criticism. He's fully committed to ranking authors - and his criterion is aesthetic power - but he seems to be equally committed to resisting that tendency. The hallmark of genius, according to Bloom is strangeness. Like, how unsystematic can you get?