You put the Bhagavad Gita under fiction? That's rather offensive.

It wasn't meant to be. In fact, its presence in the list is a mistake.

I began by composing a list of books in general. I tried to cover as many genres as possible, since someone inevitably complains that something is missing... and because it's fun to have interesting choices. Amongst the titles on the original list were Gödel, Escher, and Bach, The Bible, Programming Perl, A Brief History of Time, The Federalist Papers, and Manufacturing Consent, each of which I imagined would be of interest to some significant number of people here.

Allowing for non-fiction, though, really threw the gates too wide. History, Philosophy, Art, Religion, Psychology, and innumerable other fields all deserved representation, many of which were too difficult to represent succinctly in any case.

So, not long before I posted the poll, I began to consider how to bring it back under control. After chatting with ailie for a bit (who also was very helpful in bringing balance to the list) I chose the word 'fiction', elided a bunch of choices, and posted it.

As is now clear, I missed a few. While I don't think anyone's likely to take strong exception to Njal's presence on the list, I would really be inclined to remove the Bhagavad Gita. However people have already voted for it, which makes that awkward, too. I could, I suppose, change the poll topic... but I'm not yet sure to what. 'Epics' certainly doesn't describe the whole list, and a fair number of people have already said, 'Ew!' to fiction.

In any case, more than a few of these were chosen because, as well as being good representatives of a genre, I like them... including the two you mention. I suppose I may have slipped on The Gita because I tend to think of it as I do The Iliad... as an epic. Of course, it's considerably more than that for many of its readers. My intention was to bring a good piece of literature up for discussion, not to disparage it.

If I have offended anyone, I apologize. I am open to suggestions as to how best to handle this faux pas. Perhaps this clarification will suffice. Perhaps not. It's yet early in the life of this poll, and all things are possible.