for a few reasons. now that we've kept this going for a few months (altho it looked iffy this month) and we've gotten some of the obvious classics out of the way, i think it would be good to show some love to some of the more unheralded classics. and to not keep the focus to a narrow 'old white guys and harper lee' type thing. surely there is a classic work of fiction from turkmenistan.

as the native american dude i should be pushing the classic native american fiction but i am not sure as to what would constitute a classic. i read moderen people like alexie and erdrich but would the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven be considered a classic? i figure if the authors dead or the book is over thirty or forty years old it can be called a classic. this is not rigid criteria though.