Of the various dorm-room pastimes that divert the adolescent mind in its occasional attempts at sublimity, making up lists of "the greatest writers of all time" is one of the most gratifying. What could be more enjoyable than to assemble, from the comfort of a decaying thrift store chair, your own personal Literary Rotisserie team, each author appearing on a baseball card with his or her lifetime stats printed on the back?

The charms of Literary Rotisserie are as endless as they are mindless. Should you trade franchise player Will Shakespeare, the Willie Mays of English letters (.354, 708 HRs, 1770 couplets batted in) for a blockbuster package including brilliant but neurotic closer Franz Kafka (45 saves and an earned-angst average of 1.09), dependable second baseman Jane Austen, and fleet-footed but erratic center fielder Henry "Tropical Heat" Miller?

Of course, those sophomoric arguments about whether Hemingway or Faulkner was a better writer can never be settled -- that's what makes them fun. And the publication of "The New York Public Library's Books of the Century," even though it only fitfully addresses questions of literary supremacy, should lead to plenty of table-pounding in bookish circles.

"Books of the Century" is a compilation, based on a 1995 exhibition curated by Elizabeth Diefendorf, the New York Public Library's research chief and editor of the book, of what the institution deemed to be the books that would best "recall this past century and its tremendous changes." Not the best books, be it noted, or even the most influential, but simply those that "recall" the salient events of the 20th century. If a major social movement or phenomenon or genre or psychological state or ethnic group didn't happen to produce any major works, no problem -- minor ones will do. (In fact, books suitable for conveniently "recalling" historical events are often minor -- as some of these selections prove.) The overriding concern here is to represent important 20th century events and historical changes, not to honor the best or most important books or writers. This leads to certain awkwardnesses.

What kind of events and changes do New York's librarians (the list was drawn up by soliciting suggestions from librarians throughout the city) deem important? In her introduction, Diefendorf proclaims that "our choices, though certainly diverse, represent a perspective that is urban, American, and profoundly concerned with issues of social justice and freedom of expression."

This sounds unobjectionable, and if the editors had been allowed to choose 500 books, they probably could have gotten away with some of the feeble titles on their list. They only had 175, however, and so this becomes a stark zero-sum literary game: every mediocre work selected because it recalls "issues of social justice and freedom of expression" takes a slot that could otherwise have gone to a magisterial work that had a significant impact on 20th-century literature, thought or society.

The book is divided up into 12 sections, including "Landmarks of Modern Literature," "Nature's Realm," "Women Rise," "Protest and Progress" and "Optimism, Joy, Gentility." These wedges make up a respectable enough combo pizza, but it's a Procrustean one: literary works are repeatedly shoved into categories that are too small for them. Are Conrad's "Lord Jim" and Camus' "The Stranger," for example, best described as novels about "Colonialism and Its Aftermath"? Is it really appropriate to place "The Age of Innocence" in the "Women Rise" chapter?

The impression of didacticism is only furthered by the disproportionate attention paid to certain subjects. The "Women Rise" chapter includes not just such reasonable selections as Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and Zora Neale Hurston's "Dust Tracks on a Road," but also such dubious selections as "Sisterhood is Powerful," "Against Our Will," and "The Color Purple." The point is not that the issues addressed in those books are unimportant: it is that mere association with important issues should not be sufficient reason to canonize books of limited influence and literary merit. In a related vein, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On" was chosen not on its merits but because the AIDS crisis "needed" a book.

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