ODDS & ENDS.

The number 100 always catches our imagination. Learning to count to 100 was a big deal in grammar school. A $100 bill, often called a C-note, not so many years back was a rarity. Whose visage graced that bill was a great trivia question. Today, of course, Franklin's face isn't so unknown; the C-note barely gets a small family through a modest night out anymore.

Honoring this intriguing, almost magical number and linking it to this recent turn of the century, various lists of the best 100 books of these past 100 years have emerged. It started last summer when the Modern Library issued its list of the century's best 100 novels in English. When two of the books on the list were discovered to have been written in languages other than English, some people wondered about quality control. Then came other lists: the century's 100 best nonfiction books and, now, the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century."

This list of spiritual gems was compiled by Philip Zaleski at HarperSanFrancisco with the aid of a nominating committee. It's a religiously eclectic list embracing books from many faith traditions and some books outside any faith tradition, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Many of the books are theoretical, some are not. For example, The Plague (Vintage) by Albert Camus, The Power and the Glory (Penguin) by Graham Greene, The Dharma Bums (Penguin) by Jack Kerouac, and Lost in the Cosmos (Noonday) by Walker Percy are novels. The Four Quartets (Harcourt Brace) by T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems (Scribner) by William Butler Yeats, and another Collected Poems (Oxford University Press) by Gerard Manley Hopkins further reflect how religion and spirituality are powerfully and best articulated through artistic expression.

Many students groaned when I told them that H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (HarperCollins) was on the list--a dense but important book they had been slogging their way through when this list first appeared.

Dorothy Day, Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II, Thomas Merton, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Mother Teresa are but some of the notable Catholics whose books appear on this list.

I was delighted to see some of my own personal favorites make this book list, among them: Black Elk Speaks (Fine Communications), The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton Press) by Mircea Eliade, Siddhartha (Bantam) by Hermann Hesse, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (African American Images), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Bantam) by Robert Pirsig, and Night (Bantam) by Elie Wiesel.

You can check out the entire list on the Internet at www. harpercollins.com/imprints/harper_sanfrancisco/spiritbooks.htm. Next time you find some change left over from a C-bill, stop by a bookstore near you and stimulate the local spiritual economy by purchasing one of these books. Or, if you don't get change when you cash in Franklin's face, go to the library and check out some of these 100 top spiritual books.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.