I love the humbleness that runs through this post that sets up to list some great books of the 20th century with the subtitle “mimetic desire in list making”: the (so-called) lists of films & books have always felt off to someone like myself who knows well that tastes are socially mediated, and people tend to defer to canon or critical consensus, and yet there’s a mimetic touch in this list’s aesthetic preference, one that at least reaches past a purely Anglo-American canon toward Japan and Latin America (even as the list’s own footnote admits it stays within a western-plus-northeast-Asia frame).