Becky is chatting with her classmate Lily in the common room of their dorm.

    Lily: Hey, Becky. Have you ever heard of Jorge Luis Borges?

    Becky: The Argentine man of letters? Sure! I loved his stories "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "The Library of Babel."

    Lily: Me, too. But you know, he was much more than a writer.

    Becky: Sure! He was a critic, translator, and even a librarian.

    Lily: Really? I don't think I knew he was a librarian.

    Becky: Here's another thing: in 1985, a publisher asked him to create "A Personal Library."

    Lily: How did that work?

    Becky: He was to select 100 works of literature, and write introductions for each one.

    Lily: A hundred works? That's a lot!

    Becky: Yeah, it is. Unfortunately, he died in 1988, and the project was never finished.

    Lily: That's too bad.

    Becky: He did manage to choose 74, though. And since some of them included two or more works by one author, there are actually lots more than 74.

    Lily: So what did he choose? I guess it was all like Shakespeare and stuff?

    Becky: Believe it or not, no! Shakespeare didn't even make the list!

    Lily: Why not?

    Becky: Borges enjoyed both "high literature" and what you could call "pop literature." So a lot of his choices were boys' adventure books and things like that.

    Lily: For example?

    Becky: Well, there were books by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells.

    Lily: Like "The Time Machine"?

    Becky: Yes! And since he wrote short stories, it's not surprising that he included Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Franz Kafka, Henry James, and "The Thousand and One Nights."

    Lily: Wow! It really sounds like fun!

    Becky: How about this? A popular "Father Brown" mystery novel, and "The Travels of Marco Polo."

    Lily: I've heard of all of those, and read some of them.

    Becky: Then again, naturally, quite a few of his choices were books written in Spanish, by authors most English speakers aren't familiar with.

    Lily: That makes sense.

    Becky: But there are also works by Russians, Japanese, Germans, French--it's really global.

    Lily: Cool!

    Becky: There are lots of dramatists: George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and Eugene Ionesco.

    Lily: Heavy stuff.

    Becky: Speaking of heavy: religious works like the "Bhagavad Gita"; an Icelandic saga; "The Epic of Gilgamesh"; philosophy books like S?ren Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling"...

    Lily: Stop! You're making my head hurt!

    Becky: I know! He was so widely-read, it's like almost every type of work is represented.

    Lily: This is really a challenging list. I'll have to look it up and try to read some of the books on it.

    Becky: Let's do it together! It'll be fun!