Thus The Guardian today. “Ten authors choose books not of an age, but for all time,” explains the newspaper. And the authors in question are Helen Lewis, Xiaolu Guo, Rebecca Stott, Alex Bellos, Darian Leader, Paul Kingsnorth, Paul Mason, Bonnie Greer, Jonathan Bate, and Tom Holland. The books they respectively chose are Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949); Confucius’ Analects (500BC); Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859); Euclid’s Elements (300BC); Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949); Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies (1623); and Scripture (100BC). Now, I have heard of Paul Mason among the authors enlisted by the newspaper, but only just. And I have never heard of Aldo Leopold and Toni Morrison among the authors of books that supposedly changed the world. But I could not stop shaking my head in disbelief as I kept trying to understand the article, as well as each of its ten disparate entries. Is this a joke of some kind? Or is it idiocy pure and simple? In the end, I went for the latter option, for jokes ought to be funny at least. And the shame is squarely with the newspaper. The whole exercise is no less than ludicrous in its brazen simplicity of both conception and execution. To begin with, books that changed the world are many more than ten. More important, their identification has nothing to do with the opinion of a haphazardly selected bunch of so-called authors. It must rest on carefully conceived and executed study of all the books ever written. Enough, though. Shame on The Guardian!