This piece is a nice one offering 100 books to read for everyone age 1 to 100.  It's fine, except it's missing, so far as I can see, anything about religion.  There's the "Autobiography of Malcolm X", a book by Pema Chödrön, the desultory "Gilead," by Marilynne Robinson (a good book but eminently predictable, esp for age marker 77), that's pretty much it.  

I don't mind lists like this.  I understand everyone will have a different list.  Mine would have more space for less fiction, more non-fiction (esp history), maybe some more essay collections (nothing from the Eastern Europeans?), more poetry.  But what I mind about this list is two things: (a) its overwhelming, smug, snug, contemporary-ness, its sense that the vast majority of our needs (and wisdom) will be met by books published in the past few decades; and, and not entirely unrelated to that I think, (b) its overwhelming, one might almost say fideistic, secularity, the sense that the immanent is what matters.

I don't think that's true, and I don't think it's true for most of us today.  There are a few books here that get close to this, particularly through the confrontation with mortality--Julian Barnes's "Nothing to be frightened of" the best of that lot--but there's next-to-nothing here about living life in the now, while seeing that life transfigured by significances not rooted in the present moment, but giving that life a place in a larger narrative shape.  It's like we're all too afraid to lift our eyes up from where we're placing our feet next.  Perhaps there's a better way to do this.  Perhaps we can pause on our walking and look up, from time to time.  The better to get a sense of where you're going.

Anyway, just a thought for the day.