Classic Books not equal to Good Books

So, I read the series of books recommended by Asimov which included books on robots leading up to and including the Foundation series. Very good. Anything by Asimov is good in my opinion.

Then I got this reading list of the "best" by random house Board. Going down the list, I read Anna Karenina and Middlemarch. Tolstoy is quite worthy of his position as a great writer, George Eliot is appropriately placed as a minor figure in literature. Then I picked up Ulysses by James Joyce and quickly returned it to the library without finishing it. What a piece of crap.
Then I read Brave New World. That one was tolerable. It has survived the test of time by criticizing social issues which still exist now. One must forgive those dead authors for their lack of tech savvy since there is no way anyone could predict the path of science and technology.

The Sound and the Fury is another overrated novel probably only appreciated by Lit majors who believe what their professors and other "experts" tell them. IMHO, another piece of crap.

I think I'll switch to the Reader's list of the top 100, or at least be a lot more selective by researching the books before ordering them from the library.

Given that I am most comfortable in worn, unstarched, and often unwashed cotton, and can often be found with a tool of some sort in my hand instead of a piece of paper, I still aspire to consume things of the world of starched linen and dark wood boxes entombed in stone buildings.
Shit is shit, however, no matter the container or the status of those who recommend it. There is no need to get sick with intellectual cholera by eating something based on the "status" of the ones proffering.
We should be reinforced in that lesson by the current generation of Harvard post-graduate professionals and politicians who continue to drive our economy to utter ruin by their total lack of a sense of reality.
You might even be able to say that traditional higher education is limited by its incestuous relationship to itself, and if we as a culture wish to go to a more perfect social order we should be extremely critical and continually force a re-examination of all prior knowledge and expertise, judging harshly on criteria of practical and measurable benefits. Yes, I know that's also BS on all but an individual basis. But then all human culture extends from the individual. So even though it takes a lot of time, judging others is probably a good survival strategy.
My judgment: Random House's Best of list sucks. Mostly. Except for the ones I like.

gay marriage, healthcare, households

The root cause of the marriage debate is that marriage is mixed in with the definition of a household, which has tax, benefit, and inheritance (money and assets) issues attached to it.
This root issue needs to be talked out.
A household under the legal definition is at odds with the natural or functional definition of a household.
A household should be allowed to be children supporting parents or parents supporting dependent children regardless of age, or a legally declared household (i.e. two or more adults, etc.).
Government should be structured under the principle that it will free the people to organize themselves as they need to, not as the government dictates.
A change in the legal definition of household could help relieve the health coverage problem we currently have, especially the very critical elderly care problems that are bound to get more critical.