If Kafka and Beckett are better than Thomas Mann, why is “The Magic Mountain” on this list while “The Trial” and “The Unnamable” are not? “Don Quixote” and “Clarissa” are rightly here - they are foundational novels that shaped a new genre - but where is Madame de La Fayette’s equally foundational “The Princess of Clèves”? One novel by Virginia Woolf and two by Ursula K. I have to admit that it was fun to quarrel with Bloom’s judgments and selections. Some of his criticisms of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa,” for example, will only make sense to those who have read Bloom’s “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.” I also find jarring Bloom’s habit of tossing off as accepted fact assertions that are decidedly not widely accepted, such as the comment that Morton Fullerton, known to literary history as Edith Wharton’s lover, also “liberated Henry James into many subsequent homosexual relationships.” In “The Bright Book of Life,” this is a glaring omission, since Bloom often tosses off judgments that will be incomprehensible to readers unfamiliar with his previous books. But it was evident at least since “The Anxiety of Influence” appeared in 1973 that he viewed literature as a contest, measuring writers against a yardstick of purportedly timeless values without acknowledging that such values might reflect his personal tastes. I wish Bloom, who died in 2019, could have sometimes appreciated writers for what they are rather than grading them on a curve.

Bloom shakespeare