According to Emma Roberts, who put this list together: “°µÍø³Ô¹Ï’s blog Three Percent combines reviews, news, and a bevy of fantastic insight into the world of international literature.”

“Bevy of fantastic insight” is my new motto. (Well, that and Be like Stevens.)

It really is cool to be honored on any list that includes Publishers Weekly, Complete Review, New York Review of Books, Guardian Books Blog, ReadySteadyBook, Bookslut, Maud Newton’s Blog, Salonica, and dozens of other interesting sites.

This really is a solid list of book-centric websites. Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for new places to visit.

9: Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien

The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ I knew I would have nothing in common with anyone who had read it. Their taste in music, clothes, television, everything was predetermined by their devotion to Gandalf. Without a shadow of a doubt, in a few years, these people would be going to Peter Gabriel gigs and reading Dune.

3: War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Way, way too long.

2: The Iliad — Homer

The very idea that you are somehow culturally incomplete without knowledge of Homer is ridiculous. The Iliad is one of the most boring books ever written and it’s not just a boring book, it’s a boring epic poem; all repetitive battle scenes with a lot of reproaching and challenging and utterances escaping the barrier of one’s teeth and nostrils filling with dirt and helmet plumes nodding menacingly. There’s a big fight between Achilles and Hector and that’s about it.

That said, the recent list of strikes me as unbelievably provincial, and well, just plain bad.

There are a handful of great books here—out of the top 25, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Blindness, Watchmen, Love in the Time of Cholera, all jump out at me—but there are also some terrible ones—The Da Vinci Code?! even at number 96 it severely mars this list—and a ton of mediocre to decent books—such as The Road, which was selected as the best “new classic.”

The main purpose for lists is to stir up debates, and I feel like I’m playing in to Entertainment Weekly‘s hand even by posting this, but really, what a disappointment. (I suspect there will be two comments to this post, one calling me an elitist for dissing Dan Brown, the other wondering what I really expected from EW, America’s Greatest Entertainment News Source.)

All 100 Titles can be found via the link above; here’s the Top 25:

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)

Seriously, this thing is 28 pages online and completely useless.