1 May
Clifton Fadiman's The New Lifetime Reading Plan [1997] is the fourth, final edition of The Lifetime Reading Plan, originally published in 1960. In this version, John S Major contributes, but it is still overall Fadiman's work. Finished just before his death, this list is one the "big five" of "great books" lists, alongside Charles W Eliot's, Mortimer Adler's, Phillip Ward's, and Harold Bloom's. Adler and Fadiman both attended Columbia University in the early 1920's and generally Fadiman's literary career (editor at Simon and Schuster and the New Yorker and being involved with the Book of the Month Club) reflects the intellectual milieu of elite mid-Twentieth-Century America that produced and supported projects such as these. He also became known as a radio and television host.
For this list, both the authors' commentaries and the bibliography in the back of the book clarify their choices. For example, though Fadiman lists "selected works" for Plato, he explains in the accompanying text that certain works are especially important. At times, the bibliography's recommended edition of an author's collected poems or stories does not exactly match what was listed in the text, most of all their recommendation of Hemingway's complete stories despite only listing "stories," which in this project we would not assume is a "complete" listing. In this case, I go with the relatively-specific listing in the bibliography.
In some cases, such as the Federalist Papers or The Berlin Stories, the authors especially recommend portions of a work; however, these particular references do not discount the recommendation of the work as a whole.
In other cases, Fadiman and Major recommend books other than those in the chapter heading; these are included as well. However, books that are simply noted in the essays--referring to, say, another critic's opinion or general consensus--are not considered part of the list; only those directly recommended, or given high accolades, are included. For example, despite only listing Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Fadiman then notes that many consider the The Charterhouse of Parma to be "equal" to the former, concluding, "Try it." Merely noting that others rank Charterhouse with Red would not suffice; that extra short sentence puts it in the list. In Thomas Hardy's chapter, The Mayor of Casterbridge is the work listed at the top; the other major novels are noted, but only as being "generally admired"--Fadiman says nothing more about them. But he does note earlier that "many rate his verse above his novels" and "he is one of two dozen or so English poets you may wish to read most closely." Having noted "his gigantic cosmic panorama of the Napoleonic wars, The Dynasts," and given those remarks about the high quality of his poetry, I see fit to include it. At other times, the authors recommend further reading if the participants in their reading plan come to especially appreciate a certain author. For example, Major says, "If you find yourself drawn into Mishima's weirdly brilliant mind, you might also want to try The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea and his four-volume masterpiece and final testament, The Sea of Fertility." And sometimes they do both, as with Kawabata Yasunari, in whose entry Major recommends Snow Country despite not listing it, and later adds that those "becoming a fan" should read The Master of Go.
When you reach the Richard Adams listing, you've entered the second part of this list, entitled 'Going Further'. As the authors explain, these works are Twentieth-Century "temporary classics" ("important in our time, if not forever") by authors "whose works [...] will be of interest to readers of The New Lifetime Reading Plan." These authors "fall into at least three subgroups": "acknowledged modern masters"; "writers whom we believe are of the first rank but who so far have not had the widespread recognition they deserve"; and "writers of the post-war period whose books [...] helped to define the literary and intellectual terrain of our time." These entries are included, especially as Harold Bloom's canon has a similar, massive section of contemporary literature.
Anonymous, ca. 2000 B C E (Scribe Sin-Leqi-Unninni, ca. 700 B C E),
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer, ca. 800 B C E,
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Confucius, 551-479 B C E,
The Analects
Aeschylus, 525-456/5 B C E,
The Oresteia
Sophocles, 496-406 B C E,
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Euripides, 484-406 B C E,
Alcestis
Medea
Hippolytus
The Trojan Women
Electra
The Bacchae
Herodotus, ca. 484-425 B C E,
The Histories
Thucydides, ca. 470/460-400 B C E,
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Sun-tzu, ca. 450-380 B C E,
The Art of War
Aristophanes, 448-388 B C E,
Lysistra
The Clouds
The Birds
Plato, 428-348 B C E,
Selected Works
[Apology;
Crito;
Protagoras;
Mento;
Symposium;
Phaedo;
The Republic]
Aristotle, 384-322 B C E,
Ethics [esp. Books I, II, III, VI, and X]
Politics [esp. Books I and III]
Poetics
Mencius, ca. 400-320 B C E,
The Book of Mencius
Attributed to Valmiki, ca. 300 B C E,
The Ramayana
Attributed to Vyasa, ca. 200 B C E,
The Mahabharata
Anonymous, ca. 200 B C E,
The Bhagavad Gita [part of the Mahabharata]
Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 145-86 B C E,
Records of the Grand Historian [esp. chapters 6, 68, and 87 in Volume I and chapters 30, 110, 118, 121, 124, and 129 in Volume II]
Lucretius, ca. 100-50 B C E
Of the Nature of Things
Virgil, 70-19 B C E,
The Aeneid
Marcus Aurelius, 121-180,
Meditations
Saint Augustine, 354-430,
Confessions
K?lid ?sa, ca. 400,
The Cloud Messenger
Sakuntala
Revealed to Mohammed, completed 650,
The Koran
Hui-neng, 638-713,
The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
Firdausi, ca. 940-1020,
Shah Nameh
Sei Sh?nagon, ca. 965-1035,
The Pillow-Book
Lady Murasaki, ca. 976-1015,
The Tale of Genji
Omar Khayyam, 1048-?,
The Rubaiyat
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321,
The Divine Comedy
Luo Kuan-chung, ca. 1330-1400,
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342-1400,
The Canterbury Tales
Anonymous, ca. 1500,
The Thousand and One Nights
Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527,
The Prince
Francois Rabelais, 1483-1553,
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Attributed to Wu Ch'eng-en, 1500-1582,
Journey to the West
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592,
Selected Essays [excerpts from Essais, incl. Apology for Raymond Sebond; That Intention Is Judge of Our Actions; Of Idleness; Of Liars; That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them; That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die; Of the Power of the Imagination; Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law; Of the Education of Children; Of Friendship; Of Moderation; Of Cannibals; Of Solitude; Of the Inequality That Is Between Us; Of Ancient Customs; Of Democritus and Heraclitus; Of Vain Subtleties; Of Age; Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions; Of Drunkenness; Of Practice; Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children; Of Books; Of Presumption; Of a Monstrous Child; Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers; Of the Useful and the Honorable; Of Three Kinds of Association; On Some Verses of Virgil; Of the Art of Discussion; Of Vanity; Of Experience]
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 1547-1616,
Don Quixote
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616,
Complete Works
[incl. The Merchant of Venice;
Romeo and Juliet;
Henry IV. Part 1;
Henry IV, Part 2;
Hamlet;
Troilus and Cressida;
Measure for Measure;
King Lear;
Macbeth;
Antony and Cleopatra;
Othello;
The Tempest;
Sonnets, nos. 18, 29, 30, 33, 55, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 73, 94, 106, 107, 116, 129, 130, 144, 146]
John Donne, 1573-1631,
Selected Works [incl.
Sermons;
Songs and Sonnets;
Elegies;
First and Second Anniversaries;
Holy Sonnets;
Devotions]
Anonymous, published 1618,
The Plum in the Golden Vase (Ching P'ing Mei)
Galileo Galilei, 1574-1642
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679,
Leviathan [esp. Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, chapters 32, 33, 42, and 56 from Parts 3 and 4, Review, Conclusion]
RenÈ Descartes, 1596-1650,
Discourse on Method
John Milton, 1608-1674,
Paradise Lost,
Lycidas,
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,
Sonnets,
Areopagitica
MoliËre, 1622-1673,
Selected Plays [incl.
The Imaginary Invalid ;
The School for Wives ;
The Misanthrope;
Tartuffe;
The Would-Be Gentleman;
The Miser;
Don Juan;
The Learned Ladies]
Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662,
Thoughts (PensÈes)
John Bunyan, 1628-1688,
Pilgrim's Progress
John Locke, 1632-1704,
Second Treatise of Government [second part of Two Treatises of Government]
Essay Concerning Human Understanding*
Matsuo Bash?, 1644-1694,
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731,
Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745,
Gulliver's Travels
Voltaire, 1694-1778,
Candide and other works [incl.
Philosophical Dictionary;
Zadig;
MicromÈgas;
The Age of Louis XIV;
Letters Concerning the English Nation]
David Hume, 1711-1776,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Henry Fielding, 1707-1754,
Tom Jones
Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in, 1715-1763,
The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778,
Confessions
Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768,
Tristram Shandy
James Boswell, 1740-1795,
The Life of Samuel Johnson
Thomas Jefferson and others,
Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay,
The Federalist Papers, 1787, edited by Clinton Rossiter [esp. nos. 1-51, 84, and 85]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832,
Faust
William Blake, 1757-1827,
Selected Works
[incl. Poetical Sketches;
Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience;
The Everlasting Gospel;
Preface to Milton;
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell;
All Religions Are One;
There Is No Natural Religion;
Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses]
William Wordsworth, 1770-1850,
The Prelude
Selected Shorter Poems [incl.
'On the Beach at Calais';
'Tintern Abbey';
'Ode: Intimations of Immortality';
'Michael';
'Resolution and Independence';
'Ode to Duty']
Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834,
'The Ancient Mariner'
Christabel; Kubla Khan
Biographia Literaria
Writings on Shakespeare
Jane Austen, 1775-1817,
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Mansfield Park*
Persuasion*
Sense and Sensibility*
Stendhal, 1783-1842,
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma*
HonorÈ de Balzac, 1799-1850,
Father Goriot
EugÈnie Grandet
Cousin Bette
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882,
Selected Works [incl.
Nature;
English Traits;
'History';
eulogy for Thoreau;
The American Scholar;
'Self-Reliance';
essays on Plato and
Montaigne from Representative Men]
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864,
The Scarlet Letter
Selected Tales [incl.
'Young Goodman Brown';
'The Minister's Black Veil';
'The Birthmark';
'Rappaccini's Daughter']
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859,
Democracy in America
The Old Regime and the Revolution*
John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873,
On Liberty
The Subjection of Women
Charles Darwin, 1809-1882,
The Voyage of the Beagle
The Origin of Species
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, 1809-1852,
Dead Souls
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849,
Short Stories and Other Works [incl.
'The Murders in the Rue Morgue';
'The Purloined Letter';
'The Gold Bug';
'William Wilson']
William Makepeace Thackery, 1811-1863,
Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens, 1812-1870,
Pickwick Papers
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Hard Times
Our Mutual Friend
The Old Curiosity Shop
Little Dorrit
Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882,
The Warden
The Last Chronicle of Barset
The Eustace Diamonds
The Way We Live Now
Autobiography
Charlotte BrontÎ, 1816-1855,
Jane Eyre
Emily BrontÎ, 1818-1848,
Wuthering Heights
Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862,
Walden
'Civil Disobedience'
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, 1818-1883,
Fathers and Sons
Karl Marx, 1818-1883, and Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895,
The Communist Manifesto
Herman Melville, 1819-1891,
Moby-Dick
'Bartleby the Scrivener'
Billy Budd, Foretopman*
George Eliot, 1819-1880,
The Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Walt Whitman, 1819-1892,
Selected Poems [excerpts of Leaves of Grass, incl. 'Song of Myself'; 'I Sing the Body Electric'; 'Song of the Open Road'; 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'; 'Song of the Answerer'; 'Song of the Broad-Axe'; 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking'; 'As I Ebbed With the Ocean of Life'; 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer'; 'By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame'; 'As Toilsome I Wandered Virginia's Woods'; 'The Wound-Dresser'; 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'; 'There Was a Child Went Forth'; 'Proud Music of the Storm'; 'Passage to India'; 'Prayer of Columbus'; 'A Noiseless Patient Spider'; 'Years of the Modern']
Democratic Vistas
Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855)
A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads [preface to November Boughs [1888]]
Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880,
Madame Bovary
Three Tales*
Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, 1821-1881,
Crime and Punishment
Brat'ya Karamazovy
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910,
War and Peace
Anna Karenina*
Henrick Ibsen, 1828-1906,
Selected Plays [incl.
Peer Gynt;
A Doll's House;
Ghosts;
Hedda Gabler;
The Master Builder;
When We Dead Awaken;
The Wild Duck;
An Enemy of the People]
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886,
Collected Poems [incl.
'The Grass So Little Has to Do';
'God Gave a Loaf to Every Bird';
'A Prison Gets to Be a Friend']
Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Through the Looking-Glass
Mark Twain, 1835-1910,
Huckleberry Finn
Henry Adams, 1838-1918,
The Education of Henry Adams
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres*
Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928,
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Dynasts*
William James, 1842-1910,
The Principles of Psychology
Pragmatism
Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Henry James, 1843-1916,
The Ambassadors
A Portrait of a Lady*
The Turn of the Screw*
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844-1900,
Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Genealogy of Morals
Beyond Good and Evil
and other works [incl.
Ecce Homo;
The Antichrist]
Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, Selected Works, including
The Interpretation of Dreams
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Civilization and Its Discontents
[also incl. 190) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
A History of the Psycho-Analytical Movement
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
The Ego and the Id]
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950,
Selected Plays and Prefaces [incl.
Man and Superman;
Arms and the Man;
Candida;
The Devil's Disciple;
Caesar and Cleopatra;
Major Barbara;
Androcles and the Lion;
Pygmalion;
Heartbreak House;
Back to Methusela;
Saint Joan]
Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924,
Nostromo
Heart of Darkness; 'The End of the Tether'; 'Youth'
Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904,
Uncle Vanya
Three Sisters
The Cherry Orchard
Selected Short Stories
Edith Wharton, 1862-1937,
The Custom of the Country
The Age of Innocence
The House of Mirth
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939,
Collected Poems [incl.
'September 1913';
'Two Songs From a Play';
'Under Ben Buiben']
Collected Plays
Autobiography [this entry is being listed as Autobiographies, the 1955 book consisting of six shorter, monographical works]
Natsume Soseki, 1867-1916,
Kokoro
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922,
Remembrance of Things Past
Robert Frost, 1874-1963,
Collected Poems
[incl. 'Mending Wall';
'After Apple Picking';
'The Road Not Taken';
'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening']
Thomas Mann, 1875-1955,
The Magic Mountain
Death in Venice*
Mario and the Magician*
E M Forster, 1879-1970,
A Passage to India
Howards End*
Lu Hs¸n, 1881-1936,
Collected Short Stories [incl.
'Diary of a Madman';
'The True Story of Ah Q']
James Joyce, 1882-1941,
Ulysses
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941,
Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
Orlando
The Waves
Franz Kafka, 1883-1924,
The Trial
The Castle
Selected Short Stories [incl.
In the Penal Colony
The Metamorphosis]
D H Lawrence, 1885-1930,
Sons and Lovers
Women in Love
Tanizaki Junichiro, 1886-1965,
The Makioka Sisters
Eugene O'Neill, 1888-1953,
Mourning Becomes Electra
The Iceman Cometh
Long Day's Journey Into Night
T. S. Eliot, 1888-1965,
Collected Poems [incl.
"the Prufock poems of 1917" [this entry is assumed to be Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; which, being included in the author's collected poems, has already indirectly been selected];
'The Waste Land';
Four Quartets
Collected Plays
Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963
Brave New World
William Faulkner, 1897-1962,
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
The Reivers*
Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961,
Short Stories [incl.
The Old Man and the Sea;
'The Snows of Kilimanjaro';
'The Undefeated';
'My Old Man';
'The Killers';
'Fifty Grand']
Kawabata Yasunari, 1899-1972,
Beauty and Sadness
Snow Country*
The Master of Go
Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986,
Labyrinths
Dreamtigers
Vladimir Nabokov, 1899-1977,
Lolita
Pale Fire
Speak, Memory
Pnin*
Ada*
The Defense*
King, Queen, Knave*
George Orwell, 1903-1950,
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Burmese Days
Essays
R K Narayan, 1906- ,
The English Teacher
The Vendor of Sweets
Swami and Friends*
Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989,
Waiting for Godot
Endgame
Krapp's Last Tape
Come and Go*
Breath*
Watt*
Molloy*
Malone Dies*
The Unnameable*
W H Auden, 1907-1973,
Collected Poems [incl.
'In Memory of W B Yeats';
'In Memory of Sigmund Freud']
Albert Camus, 1913-1960,
The Plague
The Stranger
Saul Bellow, 1915- ,
The Adventures of Augie March
Herzog
Humboldt's Gift
Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918- ,
The First Circle
Cancer Ward
Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Mishima Yukio, 1925-1970,
Confessions of a Mask
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea*
The Sea of Fertility*
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1928- ,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Chinua Achebe, 1930- ,
Things Fall Apart
--
Richard Adams, 1920- ,
Watership Down
The Girl in the Swing
Kingsley Amis, 1922-1995,
Lucky Jim
Sherwood Anderson, 1876-1941,
Winesburg, Ohio
Margaret Atwood, 1939- ,
The Handmaid's Tale
Louis Auchincloss, 1917- ,
The Rector of Justin
Collected Stories
James Baldwin, 1924-1987,
Giovanni's Room
The Fire Next Time
John Barth, 1930- ,
The Sot-Weed Factor
Tidewater Tales
Simone de Beauvoir, 1908-1986,
The Second Sex
Paul Bowles, 1910- ,
The Sheltering Sky
Fernand Braudel, 1902-1985,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956,
Mother Courage
The Good Woman of Szechuan
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996,
So Forth
Pearl Buck, 1892-1973,
The Good Earth
Mikhail Bulgakov, 1891-1940,
The Master and Margarita
Anthony Burgess, 1917-1993,
A Clockwork Orange
Italo Calvino, 1923-1985,
If on a Winters' Night a Traveler
Truman Capote, 1924-1984,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Breakfast at Tiffany's
In Cold Blood
Rachel Carson, 1907-1964,
The Sea Around Us
Silent Spring
Willa Cather, 1873-1947,
My ¡ntonia
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Shadows on the Rock
John Cheever, 1912-1982,
Collected Stories
Robertson Davies, 1913-1995,
The Rebel Angels
What's Bred in the Bone
The Lyre of Orpheus
E L Doctorow, 1931- ,
Ragtime
Theodore Dreiser, 1871-1945,
Sister Carrie
An American Tragedy
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955,
The Meaning of Relativity: Four Lectures Delivered at Princeton University
Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994,
Invisible Man
F Scott Fitzgerald, 1886-1940,
This Side of Paradise
Tender Is the Night
The Great Gatsby
Ford Madox Ford, 1873-1939,
The Good Soldier
William Gaddis, 1922- ,
The Recognitions
J R
Federico GarcÌa Lorca, 1898-1936,
Collected Poems
[incl. Gypsy Ballds;
Lament for Ignacio S·nchez MejÌas]
William Golding, 1911-1993,
Lord of the Flies
The Spire
Robert Graves, 1895-1985,
I Claudius
Good-Bye to All That
Graham Greene, 1904-1991,
Stamboul Train
The Ministry of Fear
The Quiet American
The Heart of the Matter
Jaroslav HasÍk, 1883-1923,
The Good Soldier Schweik
Joseph Heller, 1923- ,
Catch-22
John Hersey, 1914-1993,
The Call
A Bell for Adano
Hiroshima
Langston Hughes, 1902-1967,
'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' [originally published in Crisis 1921]
Montage of a Dream Deferred [esp. 'Harlem']
Collected Poems
John Irving, 1942- ,
The World According to Garp [1978]
Christopher Isherwood, 1904-1986,
The Berlin Stories (esp. Goodbye to Berlin)
Christopher and His Kind
James Jones, 1921-1977,
From Here to Eternity
Nikos Kazantakis, 1895-1957,
Zorba the Greek
Jack Kerouac, 1922-1969,
On the Road
Lau Shaw, 1899-1966,
Hsiang the Camel
Philip Larkin, 1922-1985,
Collected Poems
John LeCarrÈ, 1931- ,
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Claude LÈvi-Strauss, 1908- ,
Tristes Tropiques
Structural Anthropology
The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology
Sinclair Lewis, 1885-1951,
Babbitt
Arrowsmith
Elmer Gantry
Dodsworth
David Lodge, 1935- ,
Changing Places
Small World
Norman Mailer, 1923- ,
The Naked and the Dead
The Armies of the Night
The Executioner's Song
AndrÈ Malraux, 1901-1976,
Man's Fate
Mary McCarthy, 1912-1989,
The Group
Carson McCullers, 1917-1967,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Margaret Mead, 1901-1978,
Coming of Age in Samoa
Arthur Miller, 1915- ,
Death of a Salesman
The Crucible
Toni Morrison, 1931- ,
Song of Solomon
Jazz
Iris Murdoch, 1919- ,
A Severed Head
The Sandcastle
Robert Musil, 1880-1942,
The Man Without Qualities
Flannery O'Connor, 1925-1964,
Complete Stories
John O'Hara, 1905-1970,
Appointment at Samarra
BUtterfield 8
Collected Stories
JosÈ Ortega y Gasset, 1883-1955,
The Revolt of the Masses
Boris Pasternak, 1890-1960,
Doctor Zhivago
Georges Perec, 1936-1982,
Life: A User's Manual
Harold Pinter, 1930- ,
The Caretaker
Robert Pirsig, 1928- ,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ezra Pound, 1885-1972,
Personae
Anthony Powell, 1905- ,
A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer's Market
The Acceptance World
At Lady Molly's
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1925- ,
This Earth of Mankind
Child of All Nations
Footsteps
House of Glass
V S Pritchett, 1900-1997,
Complete Collected Stories
Barbara Pym, 1913-1980,
Excellent Women
An Unsuitable Attachment
Thomas Pynchon, 1937- ,
Gravity's Rainbow
Erich Maria Remarque, 1898-1970,
Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926,
Duino Elegies
Sonnets to Orpheus
Ole Edvard R¯lvaag, 1896-1931,
Giants in the Earth
Philip Roth, 1933- ,
Goodbye, Columbus
Portnoy's Complaint
Anatoli Rybakov, 1911- ,
Children of the Arbat
Fear
Dust and Ashes
J D Salinger, 1919- ,
Catcher in the Rye
Franny and Zooey
'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters'
Jean-Paul Satre, 1905-1980,
Being and Nothingness
No Exit
Simon Schama, 1945- ,
Citizens
Leopold SÈdar Senghor, 1906- ,
Selected Poems
Upton Sinclair, 1878-1968,
The Jungle
Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1904-1991,
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
The Magician of Lublin
Wole Soyinka, 1934- ,
The Interpreters
Death and the King's Horsemen
Wallace Stegner, 1909-1993,
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Angle of Repose
John Steinbeck, 1902-1968,
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath
Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955
Harmonium
Collected Poems
Lytton Strachey, 1880-1932,
Eminent Victorians
Queen Victoria
James Thurber, 1894-1961,
Is Sex Necessary? (w/ E B White)
My Life and Hard Times
J R R Tolkien, 1892-1973,
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
William Trevor, 1928- ,
Collected Stories
John Updike, 1932- ,
Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
Gore Vidal, 1925- ,
Myra Breckinridge
Burr
Derek Walcott, 1930- ,
Omeros
Collected Poems
Ti-Jean and His Brothers
James D Watson, 1928- ,
The Double Helix
Evelyn Waugh, 1903-1966,
Scoop
Brideshead Revisited
The Loved One
Eudora Welty, 1909- ,
Collected Stories
Rebecca West, 1892-1983,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Patrick White, 1912-1990,
Voss
Riders in the Chariot
Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975,
Our Town
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Tennessee Williams, 1911-1983,
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963,
Collected Poems
Richard Wright, 1908-1960,
Native Son
Black Boy
2 May
The complete discography of The No-Neck Blues Band, available for sale as crappy M P 3's from some crappy online store; the notes and clippings on the following page from De Stijl Records, though, are priceless:
http://destijlrecs.com/124162.html
3 May
W John Campbell's The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics [2000].... Imagine that an English professor decided to do better versions of Cliff's Notes and put them together in a book... well, you don't have to imagine it.
The book's tally of 100 comes from the four Plato Dialogues being grouped together, as well as the Oedipus trilogy; so the total number of entries is 105. However, he only includes Inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy.
Aeneid - Virgil
All Quiet on the Western Front - Eric Maria Remarque
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm - George Orwell
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
As You Like It - William Shakespeare
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Beowulf - Anonymous
Billy Budd - Herman Melville
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
Candide - Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Crucible - Arthur Miller
Daisy Miller - Henry James
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Dante
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
Euthyphro,Apology, Crito, Phaedo - Plato
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Faust, Parts 1 and 2 - J. W. von Goethe
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Hard Times - For These Times - Charles Dickens
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Henry IV, Part 1 - William Shakespeare
House Made of Dawn - N Scott Momaday
The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Illiad - Homer
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Jane Eyre - Charlotte BrontÎ
The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Light in August - William Faulkner
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
Native Son - Richard Wright
1984 - George Orwell
Odyssey - Homer
The Oedipus Trilogy - Sophocles
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Othello - William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost - John Milton
The Pearl - John Steinbeck
The Plague - Albert Camus
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Prince - NiccolÚ Machiavelli
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Republic - Plato
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Richard III - William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
The Stranger - Albert Camus
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare
The Tempest - William Shakespeare
Tess of the d'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
4 May
Further readings from the Nation's 'Books and the Arts' section:
Siddhartha Deb - Galileo's Credo
Paula Findlen - A Hungry Mind: Giordano Bruno, Philosopher and Heretic
Lorna Scott Fox - Possible Humans
Joshua Kendall - A Minor Exception
Maria Margaronis - A Man of Enthusiasms
Miriam Markowitz - The Group
Leo Robson - The Master's Servants
Joanna Scott - A Passionate Reader
Nick Stillman - Doing the Time
Natasha Wimmer - The Cursi Affair
5 May
5 May
John Mark Reynolds, editor of The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization [2011], thankfully takes a fresh approach to the canon-forming/ reading-course literature that has come to be excessively voluminous in the prior two decades, andógiven Reynolds's Christian perspective, however misguided it may have caused him to be on other issuesóthe list drawn from the book is also not excessively present-minded. Instead of focusing the authors' interpretation of the works, or explanation of its significance, the book's primary purpose is to offer excerpts.
Homer - The Odyssey
Plato - The Republic
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
Virgil - The Aeneid
Augustine - Confessions[ in Thirteen Books]
Boethius - Consolation of Philosophy
Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
Desiderius Erasmus - In Praise of Folly
John Calvin - The Institutes of the Christian Religion
Edmund Spencer - The Faerie Queen
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
Rene Descartes - Meditations
John Milton - Paradise Lost
Blaise Pascal - PensÈes
John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke - Two Treatises on Government: Second Treatise
Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
John Wesley - Sermons
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) - Communist Manifesto
Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
Leo Tolsoy - Anna Karenina
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Friedrich Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals
G K Chesterton - Orthodoxy
6 May
6 May
Martin Seymour-Smith's The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought From Ancient Times to Today [1998] is one of the best list of "great books," and perhaps the most provocative. Moreover, the book makes for an excellent read in and of itself. Clifton Fadiman's, also a list-as-book, is a fine read, but Seymour-Smith challenges received wisdom, addresses complex philosophical and scientific issues in depth, and takes the task he sets out—defining the "most influential" of books—very seriously. As with Kanigel's inclusion of Mein Kampf (which Seymour-Smith argues is actually not especially influential), books most humans would not want to read are included. As Seymour-Smith notes in his Introduction, "what is evil has on the whole, though by no means always or unequivocally--a balance is somehow achieved--been more influential than what is, shall we say, better."
Only a few works of fiction are included. Seymour-Smith's explanation of this, again, rests on the question of influence, but he falters in focusing on Gone With the Wind as an example of fiction's deficiency in this regard and in not considering serious countering arguments (we know at least that Harold Bloom, with his notion of Shakespeare's "invention of the human," would disagree). Seymour-Smith argues, "If some women thought they modeled themselves on Scarlet O'Hara [...] then, since Scarlet O'Hara was herself based [...] on a stereotype rather than on a real character, those women would have modeled themselves on another version of that stereotype." First, the term, "real character," is awkward: is he suggesting all non-fiction makes characters out of persons, yet whom remain real? More important, what of fictional characters not based on stereotypes (that is, why the hell did he choose Gone With the Wind as his example)? Also, what of poetry, largely ignored here?
The few works of fiction he does include, Seymour-Smith acknowledges, "changed or colored the way in which people, even whole nations--as well as individuals--think of themselves." Ultimately, though, he sees philosophical and religious texts as primary: "Writers of imaginative literature are themselves, in any case, inevitably, initially influenced by a certain sort of predecessor." A supposition fair enough, but again his brief exposition does not satisfy. Such predecessors (Plato, Kant, etc.) "made ii their first purpose not to express their personal vision but to determine what kind of a world it is that we live in." But that is precisely what poets and novelists do. If anything, in this day of a glut of non-fiction titles from university presses (even in the liberal arts)--not to mention the post-structuralist, "deconstructionist" perspective on philosophical texts, countering their non-personal, objective nature--Seymour-Smith's position is in the minority. Still, the short essays accompanying each entry I've read so far serve as excellent overviews of their many pertinent subjects, and one only has to review the list below to see the breadth of Seymour-Smith's knowledge.
Unlike Van Doren's, Fadiman's, Dirda's, and Newman's list-as-book projects, in his explication of each choice Seymour-Smith does not recommend other works; when others are mentioned, they are meant to explain the author's overall work or context. In a few instances, Seymour-Smith does suggest that other works are superior. For example, the Evgeny Zamyatin novel We "is far above even Nineteen Eighty-Four at an imaginative level," but he's not satisfied with its translations to English. He acknowledges that Thoreau's Walden might be as important as 'Civil Disobedience' "in the long run"; Jan Amos Komensky's The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart [1631], compared to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, is a "priceless masterpiece"; and Anna Karenina "is perhaps a greater novel than War and Peace." He too speaks very highly of Sartre's Nausea and Cervantes's Exemplary Novels. However, given the book's purpose, the inclusion of these other works is not appropriate. Van Doren's, Fadiman's, Dirda's, and Newman's lists, first of all, do not give a precise number like Seymour-Smith does; and, compared to other listmakers who give a precise number to their lists, Seymour-Smith mostly actually lists books, not vague selections of texts or excerpts. Second, the works not listed in Van Doren's, Dirda's, or Newman's chapter or section headings that I've included in the transcribed lists here are often recommended as highly as the works those four authors do list. Seymour-Smith, on the other hand, lists, for example, Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson instead of P D Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, and Spinoza's Ethics instead of his correspondence, precisely because of his focus on the question of influence; We is not picked for the same reason, as Orwell's novel has obviously been more influential.
The I Ching
c. 1500 B C E
The Old Testament
c. 1500 B C E
Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey
c. 9th century B C E
The Upanishads
c. 700 B C E-400 B C E
Lao-Tzu
The Way and Its Power
3rd century B C E
The Avesta
c. 500 B C E
Confucius
Analects
c. 5th-4th century B C E
Thucydides
History of the Peloponnesian War
5th century B C E
Hippocrates
Works [the Hippocratic Corpus is being counted as a single work]
c. 400 B C E
Aristotle
Works
4th century B C E
Herodotus
History
4th century B C E
Plato
The Republic
c. 380 B C E
Euclid
Elements
c. 280 B C E
The Dhammapada
c. 252 B C E
Virgil
The Aeneid
70-19 B C E
Lucretius
On the Nature of Reality
c. 55 B C E
Philo of Alexandria
Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws
1st century C E
The New Testament
c. 64-110 C E
Plutarch
Lives
c. 50-120 C E
Cornelius Tacitus
Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus
c.120 C E
The Gospel of Truth
c. 1st century C E
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
167 CE
Sextus Empiricus
Outlines of Pyrrhonism
c. 150-210 C E
Plotinus
Enneads
3rd century C E
Augustine of Hippo
Confessions
c. 400 C E
The Koran
7th century C E
Moses Maimonides
Guide for the Perplexed
1190
The Kabbala
12th century C E
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologiae
1266-1273
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy
1321
Desiderius Erasmus
In Praise of Folly
1509
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
1532
Martin Luther
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church
1520
Francois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel
1534 and 1532
John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion
1536
Nicolaus Copernicus
On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs
1543
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Essays
1580
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615
Johannes Kepler
The Harmony of the World
1619
Francis Bacon
Novum Organum
1620
William Shakespeare
The First Folio [because Seymour-Smith designates this particular edition instead of a general "complete works" or "plays" entry, all of the plays in the First Folio are being counted here]
1623
Galileo Galilei
Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems
1632
RenÈ Desartes
Discourse on Method
1637
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
1651
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
Works
1663-1716
Blaise Pascal
PensÈes
1670
Baruch de Spinoza.
Ethics
1677
John Bunyan
Pilgrim's Progress
1678-1684
Isaac Newton
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
1687
John Locke
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1689
George Berkeley
The Principles of Human Knowledge
1710, revised 1734
Giambattista Vico
The New Science
1725, revised 1730, 1744
David Hume
A Treatise of Human Nature
1739-1740
Denis Diderot, ed.
The Encyclopedia
1751-1772
Samuel Johnson
A Dictionary of the English Language
1755
FranÁois-Marie de Voltaire
Candide
1759
Thomas Paine
Common Sense
1776
Adam Smith
An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
1776
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
1776-1787
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason
1781, revised 1787
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions
1781
Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France
1790
Mary Wollstonecraft
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1792
William Godwin
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
1793
Thomas Robert Malthus
An Essay on the Principle of Population
1798, revised 1803
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Phenomenology of Spirit
1807
Arnold Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Idea
1819
Auguste Comte
Course in the Positivist Philosophy
1830-1842
Carl Marie von Clausewitz
On War
1832
S¯ren Kierkegaard
Either/Or
1843
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Manifesto of the Communist Party
1848
Henry David Thoreau
'Civil Disobedience'
1849
Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
1859
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
1859
Herbert Spencer
First Principles
1862
Gregor Mendel
'Experiments With Plant Hybrids'
1866
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
1868-1869
James Clerk Maxwell
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
1873
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra
1883-1885
Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams
1900
William James
Pragmatism
1908
Albert Einstein
Relativity
1916
Vilfredo Pareto
The Mind and Society
1916
Carl Gustav Jung
Psychological Types
1921
Martin Buber
I and Thou
1923
Franz Kafka
The Trial
1925
Karl Popper
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
1934
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
1936
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness
1943
Friedrich von Hayek
The Road to Serfdom
1944
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
1948
Norbert Wiener
Cybernetics
1948, revised 1961
George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four
1949
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson
1950
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations
1953
Noam Chomsky
Syntactic Structures
1957
T S Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1962, revised 1970
Betty Friedan
The Feminine Mystique
1963
Mao Zedong
Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung
1966
B F Skinner
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
1971
7 May
As noted previously, a novel, novella, or novelette originally published in a periodical but subsequently published on its own is included in our "great books" master list, as compared to the sub-master list of non-monographical works, excerpts, and indeterminate selections. One difficult case is that of Heart of Darkness, originally published in a periodical, then included in an anthology entitled Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories--those two other stories being Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether. However, for most editions since then, Heart of Darkness has been published on its own, or as the main work in an anthology (Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary, etc.). On the other hand, though it was the lead story in that early collection, 'Youth' remains a non-monographical work, having always since been published as part of story collections. Another example of a potential monograph is John Updike's Rabbit Remembered, so far only been published as part of an anthology; because of its place as the last of the "Rabbit" works, perhaps it will eventually take the form of its own book, in which case the lists in this project that include the "Rabbit" series as a whole would need to be renumbered.
The numbering of items will not be especially important to most users of the Greater Books site. It is meant largely to eliminate over-lapping selections of works within the master list. (For example, several listmakers only choose the second of Locke's Two Treatises of Government, so having those excerpts in the sub-master list eliminates over-lapping between those entries and those who selected the entire book.) A short poem published as a distinct work can count as a book, as does a pamphlet (however one may define that word), or a play. As noted previously, a problem with "great books" lists has been the sloppiness of their creators in not taking these cataloging and indexing issues seriously. Reading plan, or course, and canon are better terms, if only because they do not inaccurately imply that all the entries are books. Still, the creators of such lists often ignore questions of publication and format.
We should note too that the date listed for plays is that of its first performance, or publication--whichever comes first. (Needless to say, for earlier plays, including many of Shakespeare's, the date of first performance is not known.) The only exception to this rule comes with a few Yeats plays (At the Hawk's Well, considered part of The Wild Swans at Coole, and the two plays counted as part of Last Poems and Two Plays: The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory); this just reflects the relative complexity of Yeats's body of work. A few books consisting mostly of his poetry have been demoted, if you will, to non-monographical status because they also included a play, which was usually later printed on its own or in another collection.Though two listmakers, Bloom and Fadiman, include both Yeats's collected plays and his collected plays, meaning that they indirectly selected the entirety (or nearly all) of those books, for the sake of uniformity with the two listmakers who only include the collected poems (the Telegraph and the Globe and Mail), those books are not included, even in the sub-master list.
Why? Because, when a collection like Yeats's collected poems is listed, I draw out the monographical works, so as to include them in the master list, but any anthology or non-monographical work or excerpt included in such collections is not listed separately. At least not for now. To make this clearer, though Eudora Welty's collected stories includes all four of her short-story collections, those four are not listed separately because they are not considered monographical works, consisting as they do of stories originally published in periodicals.
This Welty example brings to mind another complicated matter in arranging the master and sub-master list. Because of their relative brevity, generally, poems are both more likely to be originally published in periodicals and to be moved around among an author's books of poems and selected and collected anthologies of those books. Thus, some of the collected poems included end up with quite unwieldy bibliographic notes. More importantly, for now a book consisting of poems previously published, but which is the first publication in book form of most of those poems, counts as a monographical work. This is done, first of all, so that writers who principally write poetry are not under-represented in the master list. Only a few fiction writers focus more on short stories than novels, whereas many poets only write poetry. Secondly, again because of their brevity, poems rarely stand on their own like a short story does. They leave a greater impression as part of a book than in a periodical.
A final note about the differences between the master and sub-master lists.... In determining the number of entries counted in the case of excerpts of monographical works, a short dictum applies: "entry over excerpt." That is, if a listmaker includes two or more selections from a book, those selections constitute a single entry for our purposes, even though in other lists an entry may be a single excerpt from that same book. The reason for this rule is best shown in Clifton Fadiman's listing of certain essays from Montaigne's Essays. Instead of listing each one as an excerpt, leading to a larger number of non-monographical entries, those excerpts constitute a single entry. The problem with this approach comes with the lack of uniformity it will create in the eventual sub-master list of non-monographical works and indeterminate selections. That is, over-lapping will occur, as with the two Montaigne excerpts and the two excerpts of Shakespeare's sonnets.
A major exception to this rule is the Bible. A few listmakers prefer to list several books of the Bible instead of the entire work, appropriate enough given its origins. Each book of the Bible chosen by these listmakers is listed separately. The same exception applies to the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, both parts of the Book of Rites and both listed by the Guide to Oriental Classics. The same exception would apply in the case of similar entries of parts of other ancient texts, assuming the entry is not two particular excerpts of, say, the Great Learning or the Book of Job.
8 May
The entries for nine of the "great books" lists posted so far have been compiled into a single document. Ten more lists will be complete by the end of the month; I'll have also started a piecemeal transcription of Harold Bloom's canon, hopefully to be done in June. First, lists one through nine (the lists are being transcribed in random order) with a brief tag next to them, to be used to note which lists the highest-ranking books appear on:
Arthur Waldhorn, Olga S Weber, and Arthuer Zeiger, eds. - Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd ed. - 1990 *Good*
The Learning Channel - Great Books - 1993-2002 *Learning*
Robert Kanigel - Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury, A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books - 1998 *Kanigel*
The Norwegian Book Club - World Library - 2002 *Norway*
The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Picks - J Peder Zane - 2007 *Zane*
The Guardian - Books You Can't Live Without: The Top 100 - 2007 *Guardian*
The Globe and Mail - 50 Greatest Books of All Time - 2008 *GlobeMail*
The Daily Telegraph/ The Sunday Telegraph - 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library - 2008 *Telegraph*
The Harvard Book Store - Top 100 Books - 2010 *Harvard*
The books that have appeared on more lists out of these first-ten:
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (8)
*Good* *Learning* *Kanigel* *Norway* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph* *Harvard*
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (8)
*Good* *Learning* *Kanigel* *Norway* *Zane* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
George Eliot - Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (7)
*Good* *Norway* *Zane* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph* *Harvard*
Homer - The Odyssey (6)
*Good* *Learning* *Norway* *GlobeMail* *Harvard* *Telegraph*
Herman Melville - Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (6)
*Good* *Learning* *Norway* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Harvard*
Leo Tolstoy - Voina i Mir (6)
*Good* *Norway* *Zane* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
Gabriel García Márquez - Cien Anõs de Soledad (6)
*Good* *Norway* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph* *Harvard*
Dante - Divina Commedia (5)
*Good* *Norway* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph* *Harvard*
Niccolo Machiavelli - Il Principe (5)
*Good* *Learning* *Kanigel* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
Jonathan Swift - Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships (5)
*Good* *Learning* *Norway* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (5)
*Good* *Learning* *Kanigel* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (5)
*Learning* *Kanigel* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Harvard*
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (5)
*Good* *Learning* *Norway* *Zane* *GlobeMail*
Marcel Proust - À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (5)
*Good* *Norway* *Zane* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
James Joyce - Ulysses (5)
*Good* *Norway* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
Vladimir Nabakov - Lolita (5)
*Norway* *Zane* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Harvard*
Homer - The Iliad (4)
*Good* *Norway* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph*
Herodotus - Histories (4)
*Kanigel* *GlobeMail* *Telegraph* *Harvard*
The Bible (4)
*Good* *Learning* *Guardian* *GlobeMail*
Michel de Montaigne - Les Essais (4)
*Good* *Kanigel* *Norway* *GlobeMail*
William Shakespeare - Hamlet (4)
*Norway* *Zane* *Guardian* *Harvard*
Miguel de Cervantes - El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (4)
*Good* *Learning* *Norway* *GlobeMail*
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights (4)
*Learning* *Kanigel* *Norway* *Guardian*
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (4)
*Good* *Learning* *Guardian* *Harvard*
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Prestupleniye i Nakazaniyne (4)
*Learning* *Norway* *Guardian* *Harvard*
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (4)
*Norway* *Zane* *Guardian* *Harvard*
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (4)
*Learning* *Zane* *Guardian* *GlobeMail* *Harvard*
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four (4)
*Learning* *Norway* *Guardian* *Telegraph*
We should note that Shakespeare, as an author, has been on two lists (Good Reading, The Guardian); and that Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones has made three lists, his Labyrinths one--yet the latter consists partially of stories also included in the former.
9 May
Utne Reader magazine devised The Loose Canon: 150 Great Works to Set Your Imagination on Fire [1998]. The list consists not just of books, making room for music, cinema, and televisionó--a commendable approach, especially given that, like Kanigel's Vintage Reading or Dirda's Classics for Pleasure, the project seems driven by a goal of offering an addendum to lists of "great books" and other canons. The original article should be read, at least for the relatively-obscure entries. It is replicated here from the magazine's web site (the pages at their site are not well maintained; the text for the Jane Jacobs and Pattern Language entries somewhere got lost). As with the magazine itself, we can predict the lazy critiques that have come its way, probably all making use of the word, "hippie," but the connections between the paired works are generally quite compelling.
What follows is a smorgasbord of books, movies, plays, television shows, and works of music that broaden,deepen, or define the experience of being alive.
They will stretch your thinking, stir your soul, and maybe even offer some startling insights on what to cook for dinner tonight. We created this list out of thousands of recommendations from authors, activists, professors, book club members, spiritual teachers, and bemused observers of the human condition. It's offered not as a checklist to measure your intellectual standing, but as an inspiration, to give you an incentive to pursue your own blissful course of study.
The real value of self-learning is that it connects you with a whole web of knowledge, each new discovery moving you in the direction of further insights. That's why every one of the main selections here points to another work we've listed, which of course will lead you to more and more. Please let us know where this list takes you, and what else you would include.
--Jay Walljasper and Jon Spayde
150 GREAT WORKS...
The Book of Isaiah (ca. 8th - 2nd centuries B.C.E.). The fieriest of the Hebrew prophets zaps the rich, the greedy, and the unjust as well as the ungodly, and calls eloquently for an end to war. The Zohar (ca. 1275) The most beloved and influential of all kabbalistic books, finding magical, mystical meaning at the heart of the Torah.
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (3rd century B.C.E.). A political treatise as much as a spiritual text, but readers in China and the West have long been fascinated by its enigmatic doctrine of wise compliance with nature's way. Chuang Tzu: Chuang Tzu (3rd century B.C.E.) The other classic of Taoism is full of delightful stories that illustrate the vast mystery of the world.
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 B.C.E.). The story of antiquity's Vietnam: a punishing conflict between Athens and Sparta that ripped the Greek world apart. Hesiod: Works and Days (ca. 700 B.C.E.). While his contemporary, Homer, sang of battles and wanderings, Hesiod stayed home and penned hymns to the seasons and the right way to live on the land.
Mahabharata (ca. 400 B.C.E. - 200 C.E.). The Iliad on acid. This vast, fantastically elaborate Indian epic of warfare is also a profound meditation on duty; it contains a religious allegory (The Bhagavad Gita) that has shaped Indian culture as no other book has. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: I Am That (1983). Brilliant teachings on the true nature of the self and other tenets of Eastern mysticism from a simple Indian householder.
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations (ca. 2nd century). Somber and eloquent musings on human community, duty, and fate by one of the few Roman emperors who wasn't a murderer or a moron. Lucins Apuleius: The Golden Ass (ca. 2nd century). The opposite side of the Roman mind. Irrepressible high spirits fill this picaresque tale of an apprentice magician who gets turned into a donkey and is rescued by a goddess.
Hildegarde of Bingen: Scivias (1141 - 1151). The mystical visions of a Christian seer who was also the enemy of ecclesiastical and political corruption. Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Gospels (1979). An insightful exploration of the spiritual fluidity of New Testament times and the various forms of Christianity that existed then -- including doctrines of God the Mother.
Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi: The Divan of Shams-i-Tabriz (13th century). Passionate poems by the greatest Sufi master. In Rumi, earthly love, including sexual desire, always joins the great river of love that flows to God. Margaret Smith: R‚bi`a (1994). A biography of the greatest female saint in Islam, an eighth-century Sufi teacher whose spiritual passion recalls the great women mystics of the West.
FranÁois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1546). In this baggy monster of a book, giants cavort, defecate, fornicate, and celebrate the forces of the Renaissance unleashed: human power and passion. Wu Ch'eng-en: Monkey (or, Journey to the West) (1592). Buddhism goes Rabelaisian in this Chinese tale of a monkey with superpowers and his mind-blowing adventures with gods, demons, and the King of Death.
William Shakespeare: Coriolanus (1608). This story about the fall of a Roman general isn't the Big Bard's most famous tragedy, but it is unmatched as a study of what happens to heroism when it's forced to confront political reality. Akira Kurosawa: The Seven Samurai (1954). Out-of-work samurai defend a village against bandits in the greatest action movie ever made, resonant with the noblest themes: justice, loyalty, love, memory, and the resilience of the downtrodden.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Suites for Solo Cello (1720). Bach's magnificent genius shines no matter who's performing -- Pablo Casals, Yo-Yo Ma, or (our favorite) Mstislav Rostropovich. Arvo Part: Te Deum (1993). Spiritual wonder at the immensity of existence still lives in our age, as seen in the majestic work of this Estonian composer.
Samuel Johnson: Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler Essays (1750 - 1760). None of the mundane emotions of daily life -- boredom, embarrassment, daydreams, vague dissatisfaction -- was too trivial for Johnson to take on and ennoble with his rolling ocean of prose. Freya Stark: The Journey's Echo (1920s - 1960s). Excerpts culled from the many books of an extraordinary Englishwoman who camped with desert nomads, explored forbidden cities, and crafted one of the 20th century's finest writing styles.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni (1787). Breaking musical rules, flaunting moral conventions, Mozart's opera was hailed as a masterpiece opening night -- and ever since. Alban Berg: Wozzeck (1922). Berg translated opera for the 20th-century sensibility: a hapless soldier in place of romantic heroes, flourishes of dissonance and atonality on top of arias.
William Blake: The Book of Urizen (1794). One of the most accessible of the poet-visionary's books, this is the story of Urizen ('your reason'), a chilly deity whose kingship over human beings keeps the imagination on the defensive. Allen Ginsberg (with Eric Drooker): Illuminated Poems (1996). A late collection that matches some of the Blake-loving New York poet's best works with Drooker's gritty-but-grandiose illustrations.
Jane Austen: Persuasion (1818). A serene story of love regained between two proud people, written by a novelist for whom the comedy of manners is a way into deeper truths. Lady Murasaki: The Tale of Genji (ca. 1000). The world's first novel of manners (the world's first novel, period) is a Japanese tale of a supremely attractive prince whose lovers form an unforgettable gallery of female sensibilities.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Ninth Symphony (1824). Reaches for the heavens, and gets as close as any music ever written. Gustav Mahler: Fourth Symphony (1902). Another musical imagining of life beyond this realm, joyous but with the recognition of loss.
Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854). Thoreau is as much a satirist as a nature rhapsodist in this famous memoir as he mixes serene reflection with political and social zingers. Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems (1992). Nobody puts fewer human beings in her poems than this singer of the magnificence and cruelty of nature. For Oliver, the world of moles, bears, and lilies is a vehicle for understanding deeper truths.
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself (1855). The greatest long poem in American English -- an epic that imagines a human self that's as vast as our landscape. Muriel Rukeyser: A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1935 - 1976). This poet, activist, and explorer of the American psyche was probing the relationship between sexuality, history, the body, and politics decades before the advent of feminist cultural studies.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1875 - 1877). Tighter and more tragic than War and Peace, this story of doomed adultery is no less of a panorama of the corruption and idealism of Russian society. Alexander Herzen: My Past and Thoughts (1852 - 53). The most humane of Russian socialist revolutionaries tells, in prose as vivid as the great Russian novelists', the story of his adventures as a thorn in the czar's side.
Mohandas Gandhi: The Gandhi Reader (1900s - 1950s). No one in the 20th century more profoundly nor successfully challenged the prevailing order -- it's a life well stocked with lessons and inspiration for those seeking to change the world. Paulo Freire & Myles Horton: We Make the Road by Walking (1990). A seminal Brazilian educator trades ideas about social change and education with a legendary American organizer.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1910). The classic edition, acclaimed for its fine writing, offers a window on the world as it existed before the shiny-new, high-speed values of the 20th century took over. Bill Bryson: Made in America (1994). A riotous and grandly researched romp through the history of English that also serves as handy revisionist history of our land.
Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (1913 - 1927). The Everest of novels, offering a similarly spectacular view of nature -- in this case, human nature. E.M. Forster: Howard's End (1910). Even better than the movie, a story of how modern society muscled out the traditional ways of English culture.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies (1923). The greatest spiritual poet of the century shows the beauty and the terror of wrestling with all that's unfathomable in life. Tu Fu: Poems (8th century). Somber and reflective, Tu Fu lived in a turbulent era of Chinese history and wrote political poetry of a beauty and density rarely equaled anywhere.
Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (1926 - 1937). An Italian Marxist martyr whose keen thinking on the role of mass media, civil society, and power politics in society is still important in the postcommunist world. Subcomandante Marcos: Shadows of Tender Fury (1995). Communiqu*s from the masked rebel who speaks for the insurgent Mexican peasants of Chiapas: 'We are nothing if we walk alone; we are everything when we walk together in step with other dignified feet.'
Marx Brothers & Leo McCarey: Duck Soup (1933). Amidst all the hilarious mayhem, the brothers Marx offer trenchant commentary on the all-out idiocy of war. Stanley Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove (1964). Not only the best (and probably only) comedy about nuclear war, but also one of the funniest satires on any subject.
Robert Johnson: Complete Recordings (1936 - 37). Haunting distillations of hard living from the most legendary blues singer of them all. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five: The Message (1982). Stark scenes of ghetto life comin' at ya in a riveting rhythmic recitation -- rap music at the peak of its powers.
Pablo Neruda: Canto General (1938 - 1950). In this book-length epic, the towering Chilean leftist poet explores the geography, history, and troubled fate of Latin America from a life-affirming point of view. Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star (1977). In exquisitely simple prose, this Brazilian Jewish novelist turns the heartbreakingly ordinary life of a forgettable young girl of the slums into heroic poetry.
Duke Ellington: In a Mellotone (1940). In the absence of a royal family, America created an aristocracy of jazz -- in which the Duke always holds court. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (1964). The giant of free jazz saw playing the saxophone as a form of prayer.
Billie Holiday: Lady in Autumn (1940s - 1950s). Pain crackles through her voice, but there's also a deep passion and poignance that may be unsurpassed in recording history. Amalia Rodrigues: Monitor Presents . (1960). Fado is Portugal's blues -- sad and stirring sounds rising out of slums and shanties -- and Rodrigues' powerful voice makes her the master of the form.
Hank Williams: 40 Greatest Hits (1940s - 1950s). Although he's worshipped as the patron saint of Nashville, Hank goes further than anyone in country music at evoking both the sorrow and joy of being alive. Johnny Cash: The Sun Years (1950s). A sharecropper's son with his hand on the pulse of American music -- call it country, rock, or folk, it's all Johnny Cash.
James Agee & Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). A roving reporter and photojournalist find poetry as well as pain in the lives of Depression-era cotton farmers. John Berger: Pig Earth (1979). A celebration of French peasants living close to the land, sparing none of the blood, sweat, or splendor.
Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941). This echt-American tale of the making of a capitalist titan gets better with every viewing. Robert Altman: Nashville (1975). Altman's chaotic, everybody's-talking style meshed perfectly with the theme in this country-music saga: America adrift socially, sexually, and politically -- and looking for a reason to believe.
Gore Vidal: United States: Essays (1951 - 1990). Elegant and incisive analysis of American literature, politics, and history from our most brilliant wit. His patrician bearings don't stop him from exposing the darkness lurking in the heart of the American dream. Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States (1980). From Columbus to corporate power, here's what your high school history teacher glossed over: bare-knuckled injustice and ruthless class bias that has sparked an impassioned tradition of resistance.
Howlin' Wolf: His Best (1950s - 1960s). Rawboned, wailin' Chicago blues with undertones of pride, hope, and even joy. Los Lobos: Just Another Band from East L.A. (1980s - 1990s). A wonderful blend of bar band boogie, Mexican folk styles, mythic borderland themes, and serious dedication to rock 'n' roll artistry.
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (1952). In the opening volley of the modern struggle for women's rights, Beauvoir portrays women as a distinct class in need of economic freedom. Mary Daly: Gyn/Ecology (1978). A radical feminist combines theology, mythology, philosophy, history, and biology in her examination of centuries of sexism.
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952). This stark parable illuminates the plight of African Americans by way of existentialism, absurdism, and other currents of international postwar thought. Nathaniel Mackey: Bedouin Hornbook/Djbot Baghostus's Run (1986-1993). Avant-garde literature you can love: an evolving multivolume novel of the jazz world that plays with language and ideas the way Thelonious Monk plays with flatted fifths.
James Baldwin: Collected Essays (1955 - 1986). Angry and eloquent, Baldwin expresses the complicated experience of being black before, during, and after the civil rights movement. Cornel West: Race Matters (1993). A preacher and Harvard professor looks deep into the soul of contemporary American culture in search of ways to overcome racism and the self-destructive impulses that racism spawns.
Satyajit Ray: The Apu Trilogy (1955 - 1959). Effortlessly told, luminously portrayed, this growing-up story of a Bengali boy insists that life's simplest truths are always its most resonant ones. Abbas Kiarostami: Where Is My Friend's Home? (1995). This Iranian director is often called the heir to Ray -- and his quiet film about a little boy trying to return a notebook to a friend has a lot of the Indian master's less-is-more sense of conviction.
Naguib Mahfouz: The Cairo Trilogy (1956 - 57). In a leisurely, sensual family saga, the Arab world's first Nobel laureate tells the story of modern Egypt from street level. Pramoedya Ananta Toer: The Buru Quartet (1969 - 1979). Deprived of paper in prison, this often-jailed Indonesian novelist dictated his multivolume masterpiece of anti-colonialism (and veiled anti-Suharto-ism) to fellow prisoners, who kept it alive in their memories till he could write it down.
Ingmar Bergman: The Seventh Seal (1957). A gripping philosophical inquiry into whether God exists played out in the story of a medieval knight home from the Crusades. John Sayles: The Secret of Roan Inish (1995). An enchanting fairy tale about family secrets and the endurance of tradition set among the myth-lush scenery of Ireland's west coast.
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Verve Recordings (1956 - 57). Two vocal masters at the height of their powers make this roster of standards, including all of Porgy and Bess, completely their own -- a truly joyful occasion. Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1922 - 1934). Few CD box sets could live up to this title, but this collection captures the young Armstrong at his most inspired, creating the music that turned the jazz age inside out.
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1958). This saga of a Nigerian villager torn from his past by missionaries and colonialists, yet unwilling to 'modernize,' sums up the central spiritual dilemma of the 'developing' world. Edward Said: Culture and Imperialism (1993). Palestinian-born critic Said wants us to understand the colonialism implicit in many of the great 19th-century works of literature -- not just to be PC, but to make them richer reading experiences.
Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Christopher Alexander et al.: A Pattern Language
Francois Truffaut: Jules and Jim (1961). Everybody's favorite m*nage-?-trois movie follows the story of three bohemian friends in World War I-era France. Swift changes of tone from sadness to whimsy keep you guessing -- and remind you what life is really like. Jean-Luc Godard: Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). Godard's deadpan mock-documentary about a prostitute is full of ironies that stand for the deeper disorders of modern life.
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring (1962). The famous wakeup call about the dangers of pesticides. What makes the book still compelling is the clarity of Carson's ecological vision and her ominous warnings about unchecked corporate power. Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan: What Is Life? (1995). This beautiful large-format book uses design and image as well as language to show how biological cooperation works alongside competition in the process of evolution.
Thelonious Monk: Monk's Dream (1962). Monk is one of the masters of modern composition and, in the words of critic Martin Williams, 'a virtuoso of the basic materials of jazz: time, meter, accent, space.' Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959). Davis is the Chartres cathedral of jazz improvisation, or maybe Chartres is the Miles Davis of Gothic architecture.
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn made paradigm into almost a household word, and he brings a new understanding of the dynamics of intellectual development in science -- and, by implication, all other fields of knowledge. James Gleick: Chaos (1987). Charting the seeming randomness of weather patterns and traffic jams, chaos theory reminds us that the universe does not behave according to our best calculations; something more complicated and interesting is at work.
Kenneth Rexroth: An Autobiographical Novel (1965). The elder statesman of the Beat Generation vividly narrates wild tales of his bawdy, boho youth in jazz-age Chicago. Harvey Pekar: New American Splendor Anthology (1991). The real world that you never see on TV. An engrossing comic book series about the everyday life of a working-class comic book writer in Cleveland.
Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (1965). 'How does it feel?' Dylan sang -- and pop music (and numerous other things) would never be the same again. Iris DeMent: The Way I Should (1996). A honky-tonk singer-songwriter, full of rollicking good-time rhythms and twanging hard-luck stories, but also outrage at America's escalating injustice.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Garcia Marquez' saga of a Colombian family introduced something new to the modern novel: a fusion of political concern, exquisitely inventive fantasy, and a sense of the immortality of human desire. Tony Kushner: Angels in America (1993). In this magical multilayered play about a gay man dying of AIDS, Kushner widens the American mind and heart.
Aretha Franklin: Queen of Soul: The Very Best Vols. 1 & 2 (1960s-1990s). Franklin's ecstatic renderings brought the sweet soul of gospel music into R&B. Marion Williams: Surely God Is Able (1989). This superb gospel singer -- called 'America's greatest living singer' by rock critic Dave Marsh -- gives a powerful, rollicking voice to the Holy Spirit.
Michael Murphy: Golf in the Kingdom (1972). Carlos Castaneda with a nine iron: a mystical fantasy of one man's quest for perfect golf -- and inner peace -- under the tutelage of Shivas Irons, the Don Juan of the driving range. Steve James, Fred Marx, & Peter Gilbert: Hoop Dreams (1994). Visions of NBA stardom and the realities of life in Chicago's inner city shape the lives of two black high school stars in this poignant documentary that raises serious questions about the American sports machine.
E.F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful (1973). A surprise best-seller from an English economist making the simple but exceedingly radical observation that large-scale projects tend to turn into disasters. Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality (1973). A maverick thinker takes aim at the institutions of modern technological society, from medicine to transportation, convincingly showing that most of them offer us far less than is commonly assumed.
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed (1974). A science-fiction journey to an anarchist utopia filled with intriguing theories about society, science, and spirituality. Starhawk: The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). A thought-provoking novel about an ecotopian society of the future forced to defend its green lands and gentle ways against an invading technofascist army.
Federico Fellini: Amarcord (1974). A bittersweet, slightly surreal, and altogether engaging comedy of Italian village life, focusing on a gang of schoolboys hungry to figure out the meaning of sex, religion, family, and politics. Edgar Reitz: Heimat (1984). The evolution of the modern world from World War I to the Cold War of the '80s as seen through the eyes of one German village -- a masterful, completely captivating 16-hour saga that makes most other films feel like mere anecdotes.
Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom (1960s - 1970s). Not just the giant of reggae but also a music master whose social commentary matches that of any of his rock 'n' roll peers. I.K. Dairo and His Bluespots: JuJu Master (1960s). One of the grandparents of today's world beat music, Dairo added electric guitar and accordion to traditional Nigerian rhythms, spawning the dazzling JuJu sound and setting the stage for the emergence of African pop.
Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony (1977). The odyssey of an American Indian World War II veteran from shell shock and drunken madness to redemption through the healing power of Native ritual. John G. Neihardt: Black Elk Speaks (1932). The profundity of a Lakota holy man's teachings, as revealed to a white writer, transformed the wider culture's image of Native spirituality.
AnaÔs Nin: Delta of Venus (1977). Underrated as a fiction writer, the famous memoirist is also a splendid erotic writer whose lyrical turn-ons prove that there's as much sexual excitement in a perfectly shaped phrase as in a hot body part. Margo Anand: The Art of Sexual Ecstasy (1989). A Tantric sex manual showing how spiritual awareness can channel the body's pleasures to enlighten the heart and build mature love.
The Clash: London Calling (1979). Smarts, spunk, overflowing creativity, and a sharp political edge made these boyos into one of the greatest rock bands ever. The Pogues: If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988). Punk bumps into traditional Irish music late one night in a smoky pub, with utterly exhilarating results.
Dario Fo: Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1980). A radical jester but nobody's fool, this Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright deploys comedy, absurdity, and slapstick sabotage to undermine authoritarian power. Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine (1981). Merry mischief on stage as all the political and personal parameters surrounding sex, class, and the fall of the British Empire are turned upside down.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poems (1982). The great filmmaker is also a great poet: a singer of the forgotten poor on the dirty edges of Italy's postwar economic recovery, a stunning nature poet, and a relentless examiner of his own troubled life. Kenji Miyazawa: Spring and Asura (1924). Miyazawa is a rarity: a brilliant avant-garde poet who was also a dedicated helper of the poor. These poems from once-impoverished northern Japan crackle with visionary intensity and Buddhist clarity.
Riane Eisler: The Chalice and the Blade (1987). Eisler relates how critical the roles of cooperation and sexual equality have been in the evolution of human culture -- not only to correct the idea that might-makes-right makes history, but also to point out the direction humankind might follow from here. Susan Griffin: Woman and Nature (1978). A powerful exposition of how women and the natural world have been seen as versions of each other -- and violated in strangely similar ways.
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987). An escaped slave murders her baby to save the child from being returned to bondage under the Fugitive Slave Act. From this terrifying true story Morrison fashions a lyrical, ghostly novel of love and remorse. Zora Neale Hurston: Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). The spirited autobiography of the Harlem Renaissance novelist and anthropologist who enshrined the poetic genius of black folklife.
August Wilson: Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1987). A revealing portrait of the African American extended family and the role mystical belief plays in it -- not just as picturesque 'hoodoo,' but as a very real tool of survival in a world that often makes no sense. Anna Deavere Smith: Twilight, Los Angeles 1992 (1994). The pioneer of documentary theater, Deavere Smith interviewed 200 people involved in some way with the Rodney King case and incorporated their words into a riveting one-woman show.
Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place (1988). Read this unrelenting essay on the psychological effects of Caribbean colonialism and tourism and you'll understand why the guy serving you rum punches in your favorite island paradise does not like you. Gloria Anzald˙a: Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). The Chicana poet and critic uses her own life as a springboard for a freewheeling, poem-enriched collage of reflections on being Latina, being queer, and the postmodernity of the Aztecs.
Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman: Manufacturing Consent (1988). An eye-opening account about why media propaganda is subtler yet more prevalent in America than in other nations. Rick Goldsmith: Tell the Truth and Run (1996). An entertaining documentary about George Seldes, a legendary foreign correspondent of the '20s and '30s who became the granddaddy of the alternative press.
Charlotte Joko Beck: Everyday Zen (1989). Zen never seemed less like an endurance contest and more like a path to genuine healing than in this down-to-earth, plainspoken guide. Sogyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1993). A Tibetan answer to The Divine Comedy complete with mind-boggling stories and the real deal on living your dying.
Matt Groening: The Simpsons (1989-). An 'anti-sitcom' that shishkabobs every shabby contemporary trend from infomercials to 'safe' nuclear power without a whisper of political correctness. Ernie Kovacs (1951-1962). This small-screen pioneer created a surreal world of sight and sound gags -- women disappear as they take off their clothes, hula hoops cut people in half, typewriters tap to music all by themselves -- that stretched and celebrated the new medium.
Viana La Place: Verdura -- Vegetables Italian-style (1991). Earthy recipes for fulfillment -- one of the easiest and most rewarding vegetarian cookbooks around. Erich Schiffmann: Yoga -- The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (1996). A guide to inhabiting your body in new ways. This accessible, clearly written book opens a doorway to yoga for newcomers and jaded veterans alike.
Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way (1992). It's not about how to paint or write or dance -- it's about how to nurture the part of you that's afraid to paint or write or dance. Cameron's pathway to creativity is through health and fulfillment, not purgatorial pain. Brenda Ueland: If You Want to Write (1938). Shining with the visionary high-mindedness of the old American avant-garde, this classic on unblocking your inner writer recommends watchful laziness, cheerful egotism, and flat-out joy.
Dorothy Allison: Bastard out of Carolina (1992). In the turbulent Southern-poor-white world of this novel, incest isn't a joke -- it's a powerful, brutal family reality, movingly and convincingly portrayed. Sharon Olds: The Dead and the Living (1984). No-holds-barred poems about Olds' own abusive family risk self-indulgence in order to deliver a knockout emotional punch.
James Hillman & Michael Ventura: We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy -- and the World's Getting Worse (1993). Enlightening conversations on the nature -- and limitations -- of therapy, especially the danger of cordoning off psychology from the gritty world of civic and political life. Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child (1983). A bad title but a good book, which explores the hollowness within people whose parents instill in them an insistent and urgent expectation of success.
Rupert Sheldrake: Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1995). Empirically probing the mysteries of life that the scientific establishment refuses to acknowledge, the celebrated biologist invites us to share in the creation of a New Science. Wim Wenders: Wings of Desire (1987). A profound, non-sappy exploration of the interplay between the angelic realm and earthly desire.
Cesaria Evora: Cesaria Evora (1995). A barefoot diva who touches the whole world with her stirring interpretations of Cape Verde's melancholy morna music. Umm Kulthum: Al-Atlaal (1966). This beloved Egyptian singer sent audiences into frenzy with love songs that hover between despair and ecstasy.
David Abram: The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). There's far more to the world than science can measure, says anthropologist and magician Abram, proving his point with a rich helping of examples from indigenous cultures. Robert Flaherty: Nanook of the North (1922). A still-fascinating portrait of the life and traditions of the Itivimuit people of Hudson's Bay that helped launch documentary filmmaking.
Fritjof Capra: The Web of Life (1996). Challenging all who think the world functions like a machine, Capra examines the new science of life and explores possibilities for an emerging ecological politics. Paul Hawken: The Ecology of Commerce (1993). At last -- a business guru who talks about something other than fatter profits. A calm and illuminating discussion of how the economic order must adapt to environmental realities.
10 May
Masterpieces of World Literature [1989], edited by Frank N Magill, was both a revival and culmination of Magill's earlier Masterplots series, which seemed to have set the template for student-oriented plot summaries and brief analyses of literary works published in pamphlet form, a market later dominated by Cliff's Notes. Masterplots itself continues on in the form of large reference books, the third edition published in 1996, the fourth in 2010. In the 1990's came the dual multi-volume works, Magill's Survey of World Literature and Magill's Survey of American Literature (in other words, the United States is set apart from the Worldóquelle surprise!). These two series don't qualify for the "great books" project documented on this site. Not only do they present a larger, and thus less discerning, selection of books than found in Masterpieces, but they're organized by author, not literary work, with each author having two to four works analyzed; that is, they're more like a directory of authors, more of a reference work than a refined selection. Two other works that I recently came across while at the library, and I'm definitely excluding, are Asa Don Hutchinson's The World's Best Books, Homer to Hemingway: 3000 Books of 3000 Years, 1050 B C to 1950 A D, Selected on the Basis of a Consensus of Expert Opinion [1953]; and What to Read [1929] by Thomas H English and Willard B Pope. The long list of works discussed in these two books, again, look, and read, more like directories, quite distinct from a canon or reading plan.
Four of the works by "unknown" in this list ('Hercules and the Twelve Labors', 'Jason and the Golden Fleece', 'Orpheus and Eurydice', 'Reynard the Fox', and 'Robin Hood's Adventures) are not literary works per se. Rather, Magill and his collaborators describe the story, or fable, more broadly, not emphasizing a specific work. Versions of the stories, or works in which they stories play some role, are mentioned, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Euripides' Alcestis for Hercules and the Twelve Labors. For Jason and the Golden Fleece, it is noted that Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica gave the myth its first "formal expanded treatment." "The first known compilation of prose and poetry of the Robin Hood legend came in 1490 with the publication of the Lytel Geste of Robin Hood, by Wynkyn de Worde, a noted British printer." And, "the longest and most familiar version of [Orpheus and Eurydice] is found in Ovid's Metamorphoses (c. A D 8), and Ovid may well have been inspired by Vergil's less florid account, carefully placed at the dramatic end of his Georgics (c. 37-29 B C)." Furthermore, "this myth became the subject of the first secular drama in vernacular, Orfeo (1480; Orpheus), composed in the era of the Medicis by Angelo Poliziano (Politian). In 1600, the first Italian opera, Euridice, was composed. Christoph Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice (1762) is considered the first "modern" opera for its balance of music and tragic drama." None of these works are included in the list here; to include them would misrepresent the nature of the original work, much like I'm not including additional works in the Seymour-Smith list.
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Aeneid - Vergil
The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
The Alchemist - Ben Jonson
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
All's Well That Ends Well - William Shakespeare
The Ambassadors - Henry James
Andersen's Fairy Tales - Hans Christian Andersen
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Antigone - Sophocles
Antony and Cleopatra - William Shakespeare
The Arabian Nights' Entertainment - Unknown
Areopagitica - John Milton
Ars Poetica - Horace
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
As You Like It - William Shakespeare
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of William Butler Yeat
Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis
The Bacchae - Euripides
Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
Benito Cereno - Herman Melville
Beowulf - Unknown
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Billy Budd, Foretopman - Herman Melville
Biographia Literaria - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Birds - Aristophanes
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
Candide - Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Cantos - Ezra Pound
The Captain's Daughter - Alexander Pushkin
The Castle - Franz Kafka
The Cid - Pierre Corneille
Collected Poems, 1934-1952 - Dylan Thomas
The Comedy of Errors - William Shakespeare
Confessions - Saint Augustine
Confessions - Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Count of Monte-Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, pËre
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
Cyrano de Bergerac - Edmond Ronstand
Daphnis and ChloÎ - Longus
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
The Dialogues of Plato - Plato
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
Don Juan - George Gordon, Lord Byron
Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel de Cervantes
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Dramatic Monologues and Lyrics of Browning - Robert Browning
Dream of the Red Chamber - Ts'ao Hs¸eh-ch'in
Duino Elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
The Education of Henry Adams - Henry Adams
Electra - Euripides
Emma - Jane Austen
An Enemy of the People - Henrik Ibsen
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume
The Epic of Gilgamesh - Unknown
Essais - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - John Locke
Essay on Man - Alexander Pope
The Essays of Emerson - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Essays of Thoreau - Henry David Thoreau
Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
Ethics - Benedictus de Spinoza
Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
EugÈnie Grandet - Honore de Balzac
The Eve of St. Agnes - John Keats
Everyman - Unknown
A Fable- William Faulkner
The Faerie Queen - Edmund Spenser
The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
The Father - August Strindberg
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Flowers of Evil - Charles Baudelaire
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Four Quartets - T S Eliot
Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Gargantua and Pantagruel - FranÁois Rabelais
Germinal - …mile Zola
The Golden Bowl- Henry James
The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
The Grapes of Wrath- F Scott Fitzgerald
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - William Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Hedda Gabler - Henrik Ibsen
Henry the Fourth, Part One - William Shakespeare
Henry the Fourth, Part Two - William Shakespeare
Henry the Fifth - William Shakespeare
Hercules and His Twelve Labors - Unknown
The History - Herodotus
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
Iliad - Homer
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
In Memoriam - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
Jane Eyre - Charlotte BrontÎ
Jason and the Golden Fleece - Unknown
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
Das Kapital - Karl Marx
Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
Kim - Rudyard Kipling
King Lear - William Shakespeare
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Lazarillo de Tormes - Unknown
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
Life Is a Dream - Pedro CalderÛn de la Barca
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - James Boswell
Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain
Ligeia - Edgar Allan Poe
The Lyric Poetry of Lord Byron - George Gordon, Lord Byron
The Lyric Poetry of John Milton - John Milton
Lysistrata - Aristophanes
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
Mahabharata - Unknown
Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
Measure for Measure - William Shakespeare
Medea - Euripides
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius Antonius
The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
Metamorphoses - Ovid
Middlemarch - George Eliot
A Midsummer's Night Dream - William Shakespeare
The Misanthrope - MoliËre
Les MisÈrables] - Victor Hugo
Miss Julie - August Strindberg
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Le Morte d'Arthur - Sir Thomas Malory
Mourning Becomes Electra - Eugene O'Neill
Much Ado About Nothing - William Shakespeare
My ¡ntonia - Willa Cather
Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
New Atlantis - Sir Francis Bacon
The Nieblungenlied - Unknown
Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
'Ode to Aphrodite' - Sappho
Odyssey - Homer
Oedipus at Colonus - Sophocles
Oedipus Tyrannus - Sophocles
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
On the Nature of Things - Lucretius
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Orations - Cicero
Oresteia - Aeschylus
Orlando Furioso - Ludovico Ariosto
Orpheus and Eurydice - Unknown
Othello - William Shakespeare
The Overcoat - Nikolai Gogol
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Parzival - Wolfram von Eschenbach
A Passage to India - E M Forster
Penguin Island - Anatole France
PensÈes - Blaise Pascal
Pere Goriot - Honore de Balzac
Phaedra - Jean Racine
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
The Pioneers - James Fenimore Cooper
The Plague - Albert Camus
Poem of the Cid - Unknown
Poetics - Aristotle
The Poetry of Basho - Matsuo Bash?
The Poetry of Blake - William Blake
The Poetry of Dickinson - Emily Dickinson
The Poetry of Donne - John Donne
The Poetry of Frost - Robert Frost
The Poetry of Yeats - William Butler Yeats
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
The Possessed - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Pragmatism - William James
The Prelude - William Wordsworth
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus
Prometheus Unbound - Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ramayana - Valmiki
The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
Republic - Plato
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Reynard the Fox - Unknown
Richard II - William Shakespeare
Richard III - William Shakespeare
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
'Rip Van Winkle' - Washington Irving
Robin Hood's Adventures - Unknown
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Scepticism and Animal Faith - George Santayana
She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith
The Sickness Unto Death - S¯ren Kierkegaard
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Unknown
Song of Roland - Unknown
Sonnets From the Portuguese - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Spoon River Anthology - Edgar Lee Masters
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Summa Theologica - Thomas Acquinas
The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki Shikibu
The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare
Tartuffe - Moliere
The Tempest - William Shakespeare
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Thyestes - Seneca
The Time Machine - H G Wells
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Tristan and Isolde - Gottfried von Strassburg
Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
The Trojan Woman - Euripides
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology - Carl G Jung
The Two Gentleman of Verona - William Shakespeare
Ulysses - James Joyce
Utopia - Sir Thomas More
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Volpone [1606] - Ben Jonson
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Waste Land - T S Eliot
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
The Winter's Tale - William Shakespeare
Works and Days - Hesiod
Wuthering Heights - Emily BrontÎ
11 May
The New York Public Library Desk Reference, 3rd ed. [1998] included The Great Books: A Reading List, devised by the Great Books Foundation, the same organization founded by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, authors of the original Great Books of the Western World set. This list seems to be the only recent list published by the organization, whose efforts in recent years have been more directed toward the Common Review, a magazine that was supposed to be in transition from print to online but appears to be defunct.
As with the other lists presented at this blog, the list below is presented as it is originally printed, with only the slightest changes in lay-out. Not only are there a few apparent mistakes in this list, but the many excerpts are at times vague. The listing of a Darwin essay supposedly drawn from two of his books makes me think that list originally accompanied a reader/ anthology.
Adams, Henry - The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Aeschylus - Agamemnon (458 B C)
Aristotle - Politics
Aristotle - 'On Happiness' (excerpt from Nicomachean Ethics)
Aristotle - 'On Tragedy'
Augustine, St. - The City of God (413-26)
Bible - Genesis; Exodus; Job; Ecclesiastes; The Gospel of Mark
Burke, Edmund - Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Chaucer, Geoffredy - The Canterbury Tales (after 1387)
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich - Rothschild's Fiddle (1894); Uncle Vanya (1896)
Clausewitz, Karl von - 'What Is War?' [excerpt from On War (1833)]
Conrad, Joseph - 'Heart of Darkness' [story in Typhoon and Youth (1902)]
Dante, Alighieri - 'The Inferno' [canticle in Divine Comedy (c. 1310-20)]
Darwin, Charles - 'The Moral Sense of Man and the Lower Animals' [excerpts from On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)]
Dewey, John - 'The Virtues' [excerpt from Ethics (1908)]; 'Habits and Will' [excerpt from Human Nature and Conduct (1922)]
Diderot, Denis - Rameau's Nephew (posthumously published in 1805)
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich - Notes from the Underground (1864)
Euripides (5th century B C) - Medea
Euripides (5th century B C) - Iphigeneia at Aulis
Flaubert, Gustave - 'A Simple Heart' (short story, c. 1850)
Freud, Sigmund - 'On Dreams' [excerpt from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)]
Gibbon, Edward - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776, 1781, 1787-88)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust, Part 1 (1808)
Gogol, Nikolai - 'The Overcoat' (First part of novel Dead Souls)
Hamilton, Alexander; Jay, John; Madison, James - The Federalist (1787-88)
Herodotus (5th century B C) - 'The Persian Wars' (excerpt from his History)
Hobbes, Thomas - Origin of Government [presumably Leviathan]
Homer (8th or 7th century B C) - The Iliad
Hume, David - 'Of Personal Identity' [excerpt from A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40)]
Hume, David - 'Of Justice and Injustice' [excerpt from Essays, Moral and Political (1741-42)]
James, Henry - The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis (1915)
Kant, Immanuel - 'Conscience' [presumably an excerpt from The Critique of Practical Reason]
Kant, Immanuel - 'First Principles of Morals' [excerpt from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)]
Kierkegaard, Soren Abaye - 'The Knight of Faith' [excerpt from Fear and Trembling (1843)]
Locke, John - 'Of Civil Government' [excerpt from the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1690)]
Machiavelli, Niccolo - The Prince (1513)
Maimonides - 'On Evil' [excerpt from Guide for the Perplexed]
Marx, Karl - 'Alienated Labour' [excerpt from Das Kapital (1867)]
Melville, Herman - Billy Budd, Sailor (1924)
Mill, John Stuart - On Liberty (1859); Utilitarianism (1863)
MoliËre - The Misanthrope (1666)
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de - 'Of Experience' [Book III, Chapter 13 (1578) of his Essays]
Montesquieu, Baron de - 'Principles of Government' [excerpt from The Spirit of the Laws (1748)]
Nietzsche, Friedrich - Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-92)
Plato (4th century B C) - The Republic; Symposium; The Crito; The Apology
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - The Social Contract (1762)
Schopenhauer, Arthur - 'The Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature' [excerpt from The World as Will and Representation (1818)]
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet (1600-01); Othello (1604); King Lear (1606); Anthony and Cleopatra (1607-08); The Tempest (1611)
Shaw, George Bernard - Caesar and Cleopatra (1899)
Simmel, Georg - 'Individual Freedom' [excerpt from The Philosophy of Money (1900)]
Smith, Adam - Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
Sophocles (5th century B C) - Antigone; Oedipus the King
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Thoreau, Henry David - Civil Disobedience (1849)
Thucydides (5th century B C) - History of the Peloponnesian War
Tocqueville, Alexis de - 'The Power of the Majority' [excerpt from Democracy in America (1835, 1840)]
Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich - The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886)
Weber, Max - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920)
12 May
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die doesn't quality for this project, as it doesn't appear to include any theatrical or non-fiction works. It professes only to cover novels; the question of whether certain works it includes are defined as novels is beyond my pay scale. Moreover, the second edition only includes one work from ancient times, The Golden Ass; the first edition included five. The next oldest in both editions is the Arabian Nights.
13 May
The German weekly Die Zeit created a Library of 100 Books in the form of a series of essays, begun in 1978, lasting two years. The essays were compiled in a book. In 1984, an accompanying non-fiction list was published. Because it includes epic poetry, but not other poetry, and completely excludes theatre, these lists are not included in the "great books" project. That said, they're certainly worthy of consultation. More recently, the same publication created a German-language canon of fifty works. The German-language Wikipedia page covering both of these projects is linked-to below.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZEIT-Bibliothek_der_100_B%C3%BCcher
14 May
Back to my expanding list of music albums.... The difference between a studio album of original material and an album that largely consists of previously-released singles needs further clarification. The first area is that of the transition in the U S from a singles-dominated industry to an album-oriented market, roughly spanning the years 1960-1967. Two case studies from Motown artists: first that of the Temptations and the Supremes, then the Miracles. As noted previously, The Temptin' Temptations [1965] and the Supremes's Where Did Our Love Go [1964] (as well as another worthy of consideration, More Hits by the Supremes [1965]) largely consist of tracks previously released on singles. Temptin', though, is only a slim-majority previously-released; that is, seven of its 12 tracks had been released on singles before the album's release. Where Did Our Love Go, on the other hand, only features one track that had not been available on a single, 'Your Kiss of Fire'. 'More Hits' features seven tracks that had been on a single; one of the remaining five tracks would be used as a B-side later, a practice not uncommon throughout the music trade's history. Especially after singles became less significant in the U S market, the singles promoting an album would just feature another album track on their B side.
Another complication that appears throughout the music album's history is that of singles from an album released just prior to that album's own release. One of the singles and B-side on Temptin' Temptations, My Baby b/w Don't Look Back, for example, was released a little more than a month ahead of the album. Overall, in the case of such singles, writers tend to ignore them when stating that a particular album is a studio recording consisting of previously-unreleased material; listeners understand that the first single from the album perhaps was released before the album, so there's no need to persistently point out that the album is not made up entirely of new material. But, given this custom, perhaps The Temptin' Temptations can be said only to have included five previously-released tracks instead of seven. Even so, we can claim probably with little disagreement that it doesn't qualify as a major studio album of previously-unreleased tracks. Five tracks is nearly an entire side of an L P in this case.
15 May
An annoying tendency among music-album listmakers is their defining lists by decades: the best albums of the 1970's, the best singles of the 1960's, and so on. Even worse, though, are lists of the best artists of a decade. These lists will tend to ignore artists who emerged toward the end of one decade, and yet produced their best work before the mid-point of the next decade. Plenty of Punk-era artists are good examples of this problem at work; that is, are Elvis Costello or The Ramones going to make many lists of the best artists of the 1970's or 1980's? A better approach is shown below: overlapping lists, set at five-year intervals instead of ten years. The lists still cover an entire decade, but the five-year spans allow for greater nuance in historical understanding of the music
1950-59:
Tony Bennett
The Clovers
Miles Davis
Fats Domino
The Dominoes
Ella Fitzgerald
Bill Monroe
Pete Seeger
Frank Sinatra
Sarah Vaughn
1955-65:
Chuck Berry
Johnny Cash
Ray Charles
Patsy Cline
Bo Diddley
The Everly Brothers
Howlin' Wolf
Little Richard
Elvis Presley
Link Wray
1960-70:
Joan Baez
The Beach Boys
The Beatles
James Brown
The Byrds
Bob Dylan
Aretha Franklin
The Rolling Stones
The Supremes
The Temptations
1965-75:
Black Sabbath
The Doors
The Grateful Dead
Merle Haggard
Jimi Hendrix
King Crimson
Led Zeppelin
The Stooges
The Velvet Underground
The Who
1970-79:
David Bowie
Bob Marley
Elton John
Curtis Mayfield
Joni Mitchell
Willie Nelson
Pink Floyd
Stevie Wonder
Neil Young
Frank Zappa
1975-85
Blondie
The Clash
Elvis Costello
Echo and the Bunnymen
The Fall
Emmylou Harris
Kraftwerk
The Ramones
Talking Heads
Van Halen
1980-89:
Michael Jackson
Madonna
Prince
R E M
Run-D M C
The Smiths
Sonic Youth
Bruce Springsteen
George Strait
U 2
16 May
16 May
Sandra Newman's The Western Lit Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, From Homer to Faulkner [2012] traverses the entirety of Western literature quickly, with little thought, other than in crafting persistent awkward maybe-jokes and coy metaphors.
Newman's selection of books suggests considerable breadth of knowledge hidden behind a misguided attempt to appeal to book-club members and other readers of popular fiction, or perhaps recent students still angry at an English teacher who gave them a bad grade but who want to know the basics of literary history (usually just its personalities)--all of whom we can't but believe that Newman and her editors and publicists look upon with scorn. I have difficulty believing any reader would leave this book wanting to read the works discussed here. Newman mocks many of the authors, especially the eccentric and those with apparent mental problems. She more often than not wants to deflate the genius of the works discussed; in the other words, she's committing a cardinal sin of criticism: not actually being interested in the subject at hand. Her efforts at concisely capturing the essence of various literary movements or broad trends of her own design (such as Nice Realism and Unwelcome Realism) are entertaining at times, but either way suggest the jaded experiences of Cliff's Notes readers, not readers.
One might think at first that, once past her comedic routine and persistent repetition of every cliche about certain periods of history or literary movements one would ever want to remember, Newman at least provides quick overviews of a great deal of fine literature. Unfortunately, the cliches and the jokes, presumably there as a source of dismissive comments to make at social gatherings when the topic of literature surfaces and the conversation doesn't seem like it's going to turn back to television or politics anytime soon, completely ruin the text. If you don't believe me, read her entries for a few works you're familiar with. You'll see they add little but jokes and, at times, insults of the people who read these works. Look to the first page of the book, no less, for a an example: persons who learn Ancient Greek apparently are "a disturbing asexual presence." I like crude jokes as much as anyone, but you need to be smart also. Newman wouldn't get an interview if she applied to write headlines for the Onion. The rub, of course, is that those who read these works won't be reading this book. Then again, even the "creative class" buffoons who might enjoy the dismissive comments aren't going to want to trudge through lines like the following: "The detached elegance of his mind also makes us feel that Flaubert inhabits a purer sphere, until we remember that he lived with his mother, when he wasn't at a brothel getting icky diseases." Yes, this is the same person who wrote a book called How Not to Write a Novel.
Other aspects suggest sloppiness in the book's construction, most of all in that Newman rates the works on three different scales of 0 to 10. Obviously that's supposed to be 1 to 10, but don't tell the author that or she'll accuse you of being a no-fun fuddy duddy. Those three areas are Importance, Accessibility, and Fun. Accessibility, one would think is easy to define; indeed we're not surprised to see James Joyce's Ulysses getting a 1. But every Rudyard Kipling work mentioned gets a 0, despite her noting that some of them are now classed as children's literature. She does not explain this apparent discrepancy. Or is it a typo?
The book's stated geographical limitation does not disqualify it from this project, because "great books" lists began with such restrictions, just implicitly so. Again, the only limitations that warrant a list's exclusion are genre restrictions (as with the Die Zeit), chronological restrictions (as with the many lists of Twentieth-Century works), and relatively-strict geographical restrictions, especially by nation (such as Modern Library's recent famous lists of U S works).
My list of the works discussed in this book will be posted over the course of three days. As with other lists-as-books, such as Fadiman's, works other than those formally listed are included. In this case, the formal list consists of those works listed in tables throughout the book with their three scores in columns to the right. Given that some of these works don't exactly receive a "thumbs up" from Newman (who might not even have opposable thumbs--a joke that'll surely have Newman forgetting the scholar of Ancient Greek she once failed to bed), and she rates some of the works not in those tables quite highly, I've no criteria to exclude works mentioned in text; they're all included--and, if not found in the tables, have asterisks by them. I begin with the first-fifth chapters (Greece: Cradle of Greek Civilization; Rome: When the World Was Ruled by Italians; The Middle Ages and Points Between; The Renaissance: Back to the Future; and William "Look at Me, I Get My Own Chapter" Shakespeare) and the last chapter (The Messy Twentieth: Finally Over--that subtitle applying equally well to Newman's book).
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hesiod - Theogony
Hesiod - Works and Days
Sappho
Pindar
Aeschylus - Prometheus Bound
Aeschylus - The Oresteia
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles - Antigone
Medea - Euripides
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Aristophanes - The Clouds
Aristophanes - The Frogs
Menander - Dyskolos*
Menander - The Woman From Samoa*
Catallus
Propertius
Tibullus
Virgil - Eclogues
Virgil - Georgics
Virgil - Aeneid
Ovid - The Art of Love
Ovid - The Metamorphoses
Horace - Epodes
Horace - Satires
Horace - Odes
Martial*
Juvenal*
Lucan - Pharsalia*
Seneca*
Lucian - A True Story*
Lucian - The Passing of Peregrinus*
Longus - Daphnis and Chloe*
Heliodorus - Aethiopica*
Petronius - Satyricon*
Apuleius - The Golden Ass*
St. Augustine - Confessions
Beowulf
Other Anglo-Saxon Poetry (incl.
The Wanderer
The Dream of the Rood)
The Song of Roland
Geoffrey of Monmouth - Historia Regum Brittanniae*
Chretien de Troyes - Perceval, le Conte du Grail*
Chretien de Troyes - Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette (The Knight of the Cart)
Thomas Malory - Le Morte d'Arthur
Peter AbÈlard - The History of My Misfortunes; Peter AbÈlard and HÈloÔse d'Argenteuil - Letters
Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose)
Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde
Geoffrey Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante - La Vita Nuova
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Petrarch - Il Canzoniere
Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
Benvenuto Cellini - Autobiography
FranÁois Villon - Poems (incl.
Testament)
FranÁois Rabelais - Gargantuela and Pantagruel
Michel de Montaigne - Essais
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - Exemplary Novels
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - Don Quixote
Christopher Marlowe - Dido, Queen of Carthage
Christopher Marlowe - Tamburlaine the Great
Christopher Marlowe - The Jew of Malta
Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe - Edward II
Christopher Marlowe - The Massacre at Paris
Christopher Marlowe - 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love'*
Sir Walter Raleigh - 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd'*
Sir Thomas Wyatt*
Sir Philip Sidney - Astrophel and Stella*
Sir Philip Sidney - Arcadia*
Sir Philip Sidney - The Defence of Poesy*
Edmund Spenser - The Faerie Queen
Ben Jonson - Volpone
Ben Jonson - The Alchemist
Ben Jonson - Bartholemew Fair
William Shakespeare - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
William Shakespeare - King Lear
William Shakespeare - Macbeth
William Shakespeare - Othello
William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare - Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare - Cymbeline
William Shakespeare - Coriolanus
William Shakespeare - Richard II
William Shakespeare - King Henry IV Part One
William Shakespeare - King Henry IV Part Two
William Shakespeare - King Henry V
William Shakespeare - The Life and Death of King Richard III
William Shakespeare - A Midsummer's Night Dream
William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare - The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare - The Tempest
William Shakespeare - The Comedy of Errors
William Shakespeare - The Merry Wives of Windsor
William Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost
William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare - As You Like It
William Shakespeare - Measure for Measure*
William Shakespeare - Troilus and Cressida*
William Shakespeare - All's Well That Ends Well*
William Shakespeare - Titus Andronicus*
William Shakespeare - Timon of Athens*
William Shakespeare - Pericles*
William Shakespeare - Henry VI Part I*
William Shakespeare - Henry VI Part II*
William Shakespeare - Henry VI Part III*
William Shakespeare - Henry VIII*
William Shakespeare - The Two Noble Kinsmen*
William Shakespeare - The Winter's Tale*
William Shakespeare - The Two Gentlemen of Verona*
William Shakespeare - Sonnets
William Shakespeare - Other Poems (incl.
The Rape of Lucrece;
Venus and Adonis;
'The Passionate Pilgrim')
--
Charles Baudelaire - Fleurs de Mal
Charles Baudelaire - Journaux Intimes
Arthur Rimbaud - Early Poems
(incl. 'The Stolen Heart';
'The Drunken Boat')
Arthur Rimbaud - A Season in Hell
Arthur Rimbaud - Illuminations
Comte de Lautreamont - Poems
(incl. Chants de Maldoror)
Gerard Nerval - Poems
Tristan CorbriËre - Poems
Paul Verlaine - Poems
Jules Laforgue - Poems
Stephane MallarmÈ - Poems
(incl. 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune';
'Un Coup de Des')
Alexander Blok - Poems
(incl. 'Twelve')
Andre Breton - Surrealist Manifesto*
F T Marinetti - 'Futurist Manifesto'*
Guillaume Apollinaire - Poems*
Guillaume Apollinaire - The Poet Assassinated*
William Butler Yeats - Poems
(incl. 'The Second Coming';
'For Anne Gregory';
'Meditations in Time of Civil War';
'Among School Children')
Henry James - The American
Henry James - The Europeans
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James - The Bostonians
Henry James - The Spoils of Poynton
Henry James - The Turn of the Screw
Henry James - What Maisie Knew
Henry James - The Wings of the Dove
Henry James - The Ambassadors
Henry James - The Golden Bowl
Gertrude Stein - The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
Gertrude Stein - Three Lives
Gertrude Stein - The Making of Americans
Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons
Gertrude Stein - Geography and Plays
Franz Kafka - Stories
(incl. The Metamorphosis)
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Franz Kafka - The Castle
Franz Kafka - Amerika
T S Eliot - 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock'
T S Eliot - 'The Waste Land'
T S Eliot - 'The Hollow Men'
T S Eliot - Ash Wednesday
T S Eliot - Four Quartets
William Carlos Williams - Spring and All
William Carlos Williams - Paterson
William Carlos Williams - 'The Red Wheelbarrow'*
William Carlos Williams - 'This Is Just to Say'*
William Carlos Williams - 'The Descent'*
Ezra Pound - A B C of Reading
Ezra Pound - Guide to Kulchur
Ezra Pound - Cantos
Ezra Pound - Cathay*
Ezra Pound - Short Poems
James Joyce - Dubliners
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce - Ulysses
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own*
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse*
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway*
Virginia Woolf - The Waves*
Virginia Woolf - Orlando*
E M Forster*
Ernest Hemingway - Stories
(incl. 'Hills Like White Elephants';
'Big Two-Hearted River';
'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber';
'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place';
'Mr. and Mrs. Elliot')
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway - Death in the Afternoon*
F Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and the Damned
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Last Tycoon
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Pat Hobby Stories
F Scott Fitzgerald - 'A Diamond as Big as the Ritz'*
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom
William Faulkner - Light in August
William Faulkner - Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion)
17 May
Perhaps when Americans have stopped obsessing over the latest televisual screens duping them into redundant purchases, our society will come to appreciate older styles of Web/ computer-interface design. Indeed, the only excuse for such a large number of individuals being convinced that Apple's i-Phone and i-Pad interfaces are visually appealing is simply lack of thought given to aesthetics. The following sites offer both a significant amount of information about music and, regardless of their date of construction, effective designs that recall the early days of the Web.
The Archive: U K Rock Festivals 1960-90 and U K Free Festivals 1965-90
Deep House Page [given a hip new (unfortunate) redesign in 2018]
Inner City Sound
Juneberry 78s
The Red Hot Jazz Archive
Tinfoil
18 May
The works discussed in Sandra Newman's The Western Lit Survival Kit, continued (here, chapters 10, We Also Begin to Have Americans, 11, Nice Realism: The Novel Novel, and 12, Unwelcome Realism: The French and the Russians Team Up to Depress Mankind):
Washington Irving - A History of New York
Washington Irving - Tales of the Alhambra
Washington Irving - Other Tales
(incl. 'Rip Van Winkle';
'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow')
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays
(incl. 'Self-Reliance';
'The Over-Soul';
The American Scholar)
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Poems
(incl. 'The Humble-Bee')
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Edgar Allan Poe - Gothic Stories
(incl. 'The Pit and the Pendulum';
'The Premature Burial';
'The Fall of the House of Usher';
'The Tell-Tale Heart';
'The Black Cat')
Edgar Allan Poe - Auguste Dupin Stories
(incl. 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue')
Edgar Allan Poe - Poems
(incl. 'The Raven';
'Annabel Lee' )
Edgar Allan Poe - Arthur Gordon Pym
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson - Poems
(incl. 'It Was Not Death, I Stood Up';
'She Died--This Was the Way She Died')
Emily Dickinson - Letters*
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Stories
(incl. 'Young Goodman Brown')
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne - A Blithedale Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Marble Faun
Herman Melville - Typee
Herman Melville - Oomo
Herman Melville - Mardi: A Trip Thither
Herman Melville - Whitejacket
Herman Melville - Redburn
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Herman Melville - Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Herman Melville - The Confidence Man
Herman Melville - Billy Budd, An Inside Narrative
Herman Melville - The Piazza Tales (esp. Bartleby the Scrivener)
Herman Melville - Poetry
Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain - Roughing It
Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain - The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain - Letters From the Earth
Stephen Crane - Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane - Stories
(inc.. 'The Open Boat';
'The Blue Hotel')
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen - Emma
Jane Austen - Persuasion
Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Charlotte BrontÎ - Jane Eyre
Charlotte BrontÎ - Shirley
Charlotte BrontÎ - Villette
Emily BrontÎ - Wuthering Heights
Emily BrontÎ - Poems*
Anne BrontÎ - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall*
Anne BrontÎ - Agnes Grey*
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto*
Charles Dickens - The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens - Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
Charles Dickens - Bleak House
Charles Dickens - Hard Times
Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Charles Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop*
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol*
William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray - Barry Lyndon
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - Middlemarch
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - Daniel Deronda
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - Silas Marner
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) - Adam Bede
Thomas Hardy - Far From the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy - The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy - Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes*
Rudyard Kipling - 'If--'
Rudyard Kipling - Other Poems
(incl. 'Gunga Din';
'The White Man's Burden')
Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Books
Rudyard Kipling - Kim
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest*
Oscar Wilde - An Ideal Husband*
Oscar Wilde - Lady Windmere's Fan*
Oscar Wilde - A Woman of No Importance*
Oscar Wilde - Salome*
Oscar Wilde - The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Oscar Wilde - De Profundis*
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome
D H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers
D H Lawrence - The Rainbow
D H Lawrence - Women in Love
D H Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
D H Lawrence - Aaron's Rod*
D H Lawrence - The Plumed Serpent*
D H Lawrence - The Escaped Cock*
D H Lawrence - Kangaroo*
D H Lawrence - 'The Rocking Horse Winner'*
D H Lawrence - 'The Odour of Chrysanthemums'*
304) Stendhal - The Red and the Black
305) Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma
306) HonorÈ de Balzac - EugÈnie Grandet
307) HonorÈ de Balzac - PÈre [sic] Goriot
308) HonorÈ de Balzac - Lost Illusions
309) HonorÈ de Balzac - A Harlot High and Low
310) HonorÈ de Balzac - Cousin Bette
Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo
Gustave Flaubert - The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert - A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert - Bouvard and Pecuchet
Emile Zola - Germinal
Emile Zola - Nana
Emile Zola - La BÍte Humaine
Emile Zola - L'Assomoir
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad - Nostromo
Joseph Conrad - The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'
Joseph Conrad - 'An Outpost of Progress'*
Nikolai Gogol - Stories
(incl. 'The Nose' [originally published in Sovremennik 1836];
'Diary of a Madman')
Nikolai Gogol - The Government Inspector
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Poor Folk*
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Double*
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The House of the Dead*
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Possessed
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen - An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen - The Wild Duck
Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler
August Strindberg - Miss Julie
August Strindberg - The Ghost Sonata
August Strindberg - A Dream Play
Anton Chekhov - The Seagull
Anton Chekhov - Uncle Vanya
Anton Chekhov - The Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov - Short Stories
(incl. 'Ionich';
'Anna on the Neck';
'Big Volodya and Little Volodya';
'The Grasshopper';
'Rothschild's Fiddle';
'In a Country House';
'Ward Number Six')
--
continued at the 19 May post
19 May
Newman's book is somewhat troublesome for our "great books" project because it is author-centric, generally giving brief summaries (plus the bad jokes) of the major works by an author, even if certain of the works are not considered by Newman to be important or reading-worthy. Newman's view of the canon is at least not excessively present-minded: farther-past authors once commonly taught but now obscure, and authors mostly important for understanding the history of literature, are included, but many modern authors are not. The introduction to the Twentieth-Century chapter claims that only "authors who have been properly canonized" are discussed, without explaining who defines this proper canon. Even casual readers will find it odd that Gertrude Stein or several Symbolist poets make the cut, but not Vladimir Nabakov.
However, the advantages of this approach are, first, the sections providing historical background, such as that on Grub Street or Restoration Drama, where genuine interest in the subject matter peeps out behind Newman's shroud of sarcasm (in her six paragraphs on Grub Street, she only attempts one joke) and, second, the reader gets a broader view of famous authors. Knowing that the authors so often spoken of as geniuses also wrote unremarkable early novels [Dostoevsky] or by-the-numbers political journalism [Defoe] helps place literature in its proper place: the authors' daily lives, careers, and slowly-developing artistry.
Transcribed below are the works discussed in chapters 6, Here Come the Puritans: Parade, Meet Rain, 7, France and England in the Seventeenth Century: The Shallows, 8, The Age of Reason: When People Wised Up and Started Believing What We Believe, and 9, The Romantics: The Author as (the Author's) Hero.
Robert Herrick - Poems
(incl. 'Her Legs';
'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time')
Richard Lovelace - Poems
John Suckling - Poems
(incl. 'A Soldier')
Thomas Carew - Poems
John Donne - Poems
(incl. 'The Ecstasy')
George Herbert - Poems
(incl. 'Dulnesse';
The Temple)
Henry Vaughn - Poems
(incl. 'The Morning-Watch')
Abraham Cowley - Poems
Richard Crashaw - Poems
(incl. 'On Our Crucified Lord, Naked and Bloody';
'In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord';
Steps to the Temple)
Andrew Marvell - Poems
(incl. 'To This Coy Mistress')
John Bunyan - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
John Bunyan - Pilgrim's Progress
John Milton - Paradise Lost
John Milton - Paradise Regained; Samson Agonistes
John Milton - Other Poems
(incl. 'On His Blindness')
Samuel Butler - Hudibras*
Sir Robert Burton - The Anatomy of Melancholy*
Izaak Walton - The Compleat Angler*
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys
John Dryden - Poems
John Dryden - Plays
(incl. All for Love)
Wycherley - The Country Wife
Congreve - The Way of the World
Nahum Tate - King Lear
Thomas Otway - Venice Preserved
Aphra Behn - The Rover
Aphra Behn - Oroonoko
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester - Poems
(incl. 'A Satyr on Charles II')
Madeleine de ScudÈry*
HonorÈ d'UrfÈ - L'Astree*
Madame de la Fayette - The Princesse de Cleves
MoliËre - Les Precieuses Ridicules*
MoliËre - The Miser
MoliËre - Tartuffe
MoliËre - The Misanthrope
MoliËre - The Bourgeois Gentleman*
Corneille
(incl. Le Cid; Cinna; Polyeucte)
Racine
(incl. Andromaque;
Phedre;
Athalie)
La Fontaine - Fables
Madame de SÈvignÈ - Letters
Alexander Pope - Essay on Criticism
Alexander Pope - Essay on Man, etc. (incl.
Epistles)
Alexander Pope - The Rape of the Lock
Daniel Defoe - The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe - The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe - Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress
Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year
Samuel Richardson - Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
Samuel Richardson - Clarissa
Samuel Richardson - Sir Charles Grandison
Henry Fielding - An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews*
Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews
Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
Henry Fielding - Jonathan Wild*
Henry Fielding - Amelia*
Samuel Johnson - Dictionary of the English Language*
Samuel Johnson - The Rambler/ The Idler
Samuel Johnson - Poems
(incl. London;
The Vanity of Human Wishes)
Samuel Johnson - The Lives of the English Poets
James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson
Jonathan Swift - A Tale of the Tub
Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Thomas Gray - Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Frances Burney - Diaries
Frances Burney - Evelina
Oliver Goldsmith - The Vicar of Wakefield
Voltaire - Letters on England (Philosophical Letters)
Voltaire - Candide
Denis Diderot - Encyclopedia*
Denis Diderot - Rameau's Nephew
Denis Diderot - Jacques the Fatalist
Choderlos de Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Emile*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Julie, or the New Heloise*
Marquis de Sade - Justine
Marquis de Sade - The 120 Days of Sodom
Robert Burns - Poems
(incl. 'Why Shouldna Poor Folk Mowe?';
'A Red, Red Rose')
William Blake - Songs of Innocence/ Songs of Experience
William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake - The Prophetic Books
William Blake - Milton, etc. (incl.
Poetical Sketches)
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads*
William Wordsworth - Poems
(incl. The Prelude;
Lucy poems;
'Intimations of Immortality')
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria*
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Poems
(incl. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner';
'Kubla Khan')
Robert Southey - Poems*
Lord Byron - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Lord Byron - Don Juan
Lord Byron - Short Poems
(incl. 'She Walks in Beauty')
Percy Bysshe Shelley - Poems
(incl. 'Ode to a Skylark';
'Ode to the West Wind';
'Ozymandias';
Adonais;
'Mont Blanc';
Epipsychidion;
Prometheus Unbound)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
John Keats - Odes [assuming here that the selection is all six of the 1819 odes]
John Keats - 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'*
John Keats - 'Bright Star'*
John Keats - The Story Poems
(incl. 'The Eve of St. Agnes';
'Lamia';
'Isabella')
John Keats - Endymion
John Keats - The Hyperions ['Hyperion'; 'The Fall of Hyperion']
John Keats - Letters
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust
Alexander Pushkin - Stories (incl.
The Captain's Daughter;
'The Queen of Spades' [originally published in Biblioteka dlya Chteniya Mar. 1834])
Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin
Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time*
Turgenev - Fathers and Sons*
Goncharov - Oblomov*
Alfred Tennyson - Early Poems
(incl. 'The Lotos-Eaters')
Alfred Tennyson - In Memoriam
Alfred Tennyson - 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'*
Alfred Tennyson - Maud: A Monodrama
Alfred Tennyson - The Idylls of the King
Elizabeth Barrett Browning* - Poems
(incl. 'Sonnet 43')
Robert Browning - 'My Last Duchess'
Robert Browning - 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'
Robert Browning - The Ring and the Book
Robert Browning - 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin'
Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers*
Alexandre Dumas - Twenty Years After*
Alexandre Dumas - The Vicomte of Bragelonne*
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo*
Alexandre Dumas Jr. - The Lady of the Camellias*
Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables*
Edmond Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac*
Prosper MÈrimiÈe - Carmen*
Sir Walter Scott - The Bridge of Lamermoor*
Sir Walter Scott - Rob Roy*
Sir Walter Scott - Ivanhoe*
20 May
Glenn Greenwald again effectively summarizing an unfortunate turn of events:
Obama D O J Formally Accuses Journalist in Leak Case of Committing Crimes
The report from the Washington Post mentioned in that column:
A Rare Peek Into a Justice Department Leak Probe
And some background on other controversial moves mentioned in the Greenwald column:
Subpoena Issued to Writer in C I A-Iran Leak Case
U S Pressing Its Crackdown Against Leaks
21 May
21 May
Charles Van Doren's The Joy of Reading [1985], published a few years after his retirement from Encyclopaedia Britannica, gave the author a chance to make his own list of books, after having worked with Mortimer Adler on the final, 1972 version of the latter's book, How to Read a Book. Whereas the Adler book discusses reading generally, with a list tagged on at the end, Van Doren's is similar to Newman's, Dirda's, Seymour-Smith's, Fadiman's, and Ward's in being a book-as-list, giving a short account of each author or work in turn. Undoubtedly, Van Doren's self-imposed intellectual constraints and personal history hamper the listmaking process. Notice the inclusion of his father, Mark Van Doren, the Britannica, and a few U S government documents and speechesóThe Gettysburg Address, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence: silly choices in such a project unless one were to include similar works from other nations (the Magna Carta, etc., as Downs does). He also admits to being a Shakespeare denier. And includes Adler's Syntopicon from the Great Books of the Western World set; that, at least, is an appropriate self-referential move given how important the Great Books set has been to the entire phenomenon of "great books" lists. Despite these drawbacks, the book is an easy enjoyable read.
As with other list-as-book works, works not formally listed but recommended in the text just as highly are included, noted with an asterisk.
Henry Adams - The United States in 1800
Henry Adams - Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams
Mortimer J Adler - Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World
Aeschylus - The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Eumenides
Aesop - Fables
Anonymous - The Song of Roland
Archimedes - Scientific Writings
(incl. Book 1 of On Floating Bodies;
The Method;
Measurement of a Circle;
The Sand Reckoner)
Aristophanes - The Acharnians
Aristophanes - The Peace
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Aristophanes - The Clouds
Aristophanes - The Birds
Aristophanes - The Frogs
Aristotle - The Poetics
Aristotle - The Nicomachean Ethics
Augustine - Confessions
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen - Emma
Francis Bacon - Novum Organon
Francis Bacon - Advancement of Learning
Francis Bacon - Essays
Honore de Balzac - Old Goriot
Charles Baudelaire - Flowers of Evil
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Joseph Bedier - The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
Claude Bernard - Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
William Blake - Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience
William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*
William Blake - Milton*
William Blake - Jerusalem*
Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy
James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson L L D
James Boswell - Diaries*
Fernand Braudel - The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Fernand Braudel - Structures of Everyday Life*
Margaret Wise Brown - Goodnight Moon
Robert Browning - Selected Poems
(incl. Sordello;
'Meeting at Night';
'Andre del Sarto';
'Porphyria's Lover';
'My Last Duchess';
The Ring and the Book;
'Home-Thoughts, From Abroad';
'Home-Thoughts, From the Sea';
'A Woman's Last Word';
'The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church';
'A Toccata of Galuppi's';
'The Last Ride Together';
'Prospice';
'Rabbi Ben Ezra')
Robert Burns - Selected Poems
(incl. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect;
'Green Grow the Rushes O';
'A Red, Red Rose';
'Highland Mary';
'Mary Morrison';
'John Anderson, My Jo';
'The Banks o' Doon';
'Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever';
'To a Mouse, on Turning Up Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785';
'To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church';
'Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous';
'Charlie, He's My Darling';
'A Man's a Man for A' That';
'The Cotter's Saturday Night';
'Tam o'Shanter';
'Oh, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast')
Lord Byron - Don Juan
Lord Byron - Selected Poems
(incl. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage;
'So We'll Go No More A-Roving')
Albert Camus - The Stranger
Albert Camus - The Plague
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde
Arthur C Clarke - Profiles of the Future
Arthur C Clarke - Childhood's End
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Selected Poems
(incl. Lyrical Ballads;
Christabel; Kubla Khan [as in Fadiman's list, the inclusion of both of these poems has been counted as an entry for Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision in a Dream; The Pains of Sleep, the book published 1816, as the third poem, 'The Pains of Sleep' is relatively brief; in other words, similar to a few selections in Durant's list, a choice of most or nearly all of a book can count as an entry for the whole book])
William Congreve - The Way of the World
Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
Charles Galton Darwin - The Next Million Years
Robertson Davies - Deptford Trilogy
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders*
Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year*
Daniel Defoe - The History and Remarkable Life of Col. Jack*
Daniel Defoe - Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress*
RenÈ Descartes - Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens - Hard Times
Charles Dickens - The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens - Bleak House
Charles Dickens - Little Dorritt*
Emily Dickinson - Selected Poems (incl. Poems by Emily Dickinson;
'Success Is Counted Sweetest';
'The Heart Asks Pleasure First';
'The Soul Selects Her Own Society';
'Because I Could Not Stop for Death';
'After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes')
Isak Dinesen - Seven Gothic Tales
John Donne - Selected Poems
(incl. 'Death Be Not Proud';
'At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners, Blow';
Anniversaries;
'Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star)';
'Love's Deity';
'The Funeral';
'The Good Morrow';
'The Blossom';
'The Undertaking';
'The Canonization';
'Love's Alchemy';
'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning';
'Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward';
'Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness';
'A Hymn to God the Father';
Holy Sonnets nos. 1, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 18;
'Death's Duel';
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [this serves as the chapter title, and does not seem to refer to the eponymous anthology; instead, Van Doren refers to the four novels and the short stories noted below]
Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet*
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Sign of Four*
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles*
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Valley of Fear*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Red-Headed League'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Five Orange Pips'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Crooked Man'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Final Problem'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Adventure of the Empty House'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot'*
Arthur Conan Doyle - 'His Last Bow'*
George Eliot - Silas Marner[
George Eliot - Middlemarch
T S Eliot - Selected Poems
(incl. 'The Waste Land';
Ash Wednesday;
Four Quartets;
'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock';
'The Hollow Men';
'Rhapsody on a Windy Night';
'Morning at the Window';
'Sweeney Among the Nightingales';
Journey of the Magi;
Marina;
'Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears';
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats;
The Sacred Wood [1920];
Selected Essays, 1917-1932)
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Epictetus - Discourses
Euclid - The Elements
Euripides - Alcestis
Euripides - Medea
Euripides - Hippolytus
Euripides - Ion
Euripides - The Trojan Woman
Euripides - The Bacchantes
Euripides - Iphigenia Among the Taurians
Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
John Fowles - The Magus
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman*
John Fowles - Daniel Martin*
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud - An Outline of Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents
Robert Frost - Selected Poems
(incl. 'The Gift Outright';
'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening';
'The Death of the Hired Man';
'The Road Not Taken';
'Two Tramps in Mud Time';
'The Witch of Coˆs';
'The Death of the Hired Man';
'Home Burial';
'The Black Cottage';
'In the Home Stretch';
'Fire and Ice';
'Once by the Pacific';
'Birches';
'Mending Wall';
'Revelation';
'The Oven Bird';
'The Runaway';
'To Earthward';
'The Silken Tent')
Galileo Galilei - Two New Sciences
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Edward Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
William Gilbert - On the Lodestone
…tienne Gilson - The Arts of the Beautiful
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay - The Federalist Papers
Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy - Selected Poems
(incl. 'Hap')
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - The Philosophy of History
Robert A Heinlen - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert A Heinlen - Farnham's Freehold*
Robert A Heinlen - The Door Into Summer*
Ernest Hemingway - The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway [Van Doren gives this title for the 1938 anthology, actually entitled The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories; that collection contains the In Our Time, Men Without Women, and Winner Take Nothing, in addition to The Fifth Column (a play) and five other stories; the title Van Doren gives for the 1938 book is actually the title of the 1953 Scribner reissue, without The Fifth Column; either way, given the ambiguity of Van Doren's overall selection here, combined with the four works he discusses in detail, as noted below, this entry remains in the "indeterminate selection" category]
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea*
Ernest Hemingway - 'Big Two-Hearted River'*
Ernest Hemingway - 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place'*
Ernest Hemingway - 'Old Man at the Bridge'*
George Herbert - Selected Poems
(incl. The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations;
'The Collar';
'Love';
'The Pulley';
'The Flower';
'Denial';
'Man';
'Prayer';
'The Temper';
'Employment';
'Sighs and Groans';
'Whitsunday';
'The Star';
'The Rose';
'The Sacrifice';
'Virtue')
[All of these poems are included in The Temple; they are not being listed as separate entries.]
Herodotus - The History
Robert Herrick - Selected Poems
(incl. Hesperides; His Noble Numbers;
[besides noting Hesperides and His Noble Numbers, Van Doren refers to the following poems included in those books; they are not being listed separately, only noted here:
from Hesperides:
'To Meddowes';
'The Argument of His Book';
'Upon Master Ben. Johnson. An Epigram';
'To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses';
'To Daffadils';
'Upon Julia's Clothes';
'Delight in Disorder';
'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time';
'The Mad Maids Song';
from His Noble Numbers:
'Another Grace for a Child';
'A Thanksgiving to God, for His House';
'His Litanie, to the Holy Spirit';
'To Death']
Eugen Herrigel - Zen in the Art of Archery
Hippocrates - Medical Treatises
Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James - The Golden Bowl
William James - The Principles of Psychology
Thomas Jefferson - The Declaration of Independence
James Joyce - Dubliners
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce - Ulysses
Franz Kafka - The Trial
Franz Kafka - The Castle
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis*
Franz Kafka - In the Penal Colony*
Immanuel Kant - Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason*
Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Practical Reason*
Immanuel Kant - The Science of Right*
Immanuel Kant - Perpetual Peace*
Johannes Kepler - The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Books
Rudyard Kipling - 'The Cat That Walked by Himself'
Jean de la Fontaine - Fables
C S Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet
C S Lewis - Perelandra
C S Lewis - That Hideous Strength
Abraham Lincoln - The Gettysburg Address
John Locke - The Second Essay on Civil Government
John Locke - A Letter Concerning Toleration
John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
George Berkeley - The Principles of Human Knowledge
David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
James Madison - The Constitution of the United States of America
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
Thomas Mann - Tonio Krˆger
Thomas Mann - Mario and the Magician
Thomas Mann - The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man*
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Andrew Marvell - Selected Poems
(incl. 'An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland';
''To His Coy Mistress';
'The Garden')
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Foretopman*
John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
John Stuart Mill - Considerations on Representative Government
Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
John Milton - Paradise Lost
John Milton - Selected Poems
(incl. 'L'Allegro';
'Il Penseroso';
'Lycidas')
John Milton - Areopagitica
Moliere - The School for Wives
Moliere - The Misanthrope
Moliere - The Doctor in Spite of Himself
Moliere - Tartuffe
Michel de Montaigne - Essays
Montesquieu - The Spirit of Laws
Isaac Newton - Principia
Isaac Newton - Opticks
Christiaan Huygens - Treatise on Light
Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey Into Night
George Orwell - Animal Farm
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
Oxford English Dictionary
Blaise Pascal - PensÈes
Plato - The Republic
Plato - The Symposium
Plato - The Trial and Death of Socrates (Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo)
Plato - Meno*
Plato - Protagoras*
Plato - Thaeatetus*
Plato - Sophist*
Plato - Statesman*
Plutarch - The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Beatrix Potter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Ptolemy - The Almagest
Francois Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
Antoine de Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince
J D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
J D Salinger - Nine Stories*
William Shakespeare - Hamlet
William Shakespeare - Henry IV, Part I
William Shakespeare - Henry IV, Part II
William Shakespeare - As You Like It
William Shakespeare - Cymbeline
William Shakespeare - Othello*
William Shakespeare - King Lear*
William Shakespeare - Sonnets*
William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing*
William Shakespeare - Pericles*
William Shakespeare - The Winter's Tale*
William Shakespeare - The Tempest*
Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion
Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles - Ajax
Sophocles - Philoctetes
Benedict de Spinoza - Ethics
Stendhal - The Red and the Black
Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal
J M Synge - The Playboy of the Western World
Tacitus - Annals
Tacitus - Histories
Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Illych
Leo Tolstoy - Twenty-Three Tales
Ivan Turgenev - First Love
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Van Doren - Selected Poems
(incl. 'For the Time Being';
'The Animals';
'Former Barn Lot';
'Woman Few of Words';
'My Great Friends';
'Parents' Recompense';
'So Fair a World It Was';
'O World';
100 Poems;
That Shining Place;
Good Morning: Last Poems;
'A Winter Diary';
'Family Prime')
['For the Time Being' and 'So Fair a World It Was' are from That Shining Place; the rest of the poems specifically noted in the text, except 'A Winter Diary', are included in the 100 Poems collection, so they are not being treated as separate entries.]
Virgil - The Aeneid
Voltaire - Candide
E B White - Charlotte's Web
E B White - Stuart Little*
T H White - The Once and Future King
Alfred North Whitehead - Introduction to Mathematics
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
William Wordsworth - Selected Poems
(incl. Lyrical Ballads--noted above under Coleridge)
'Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey';
'Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood';
'Ode to Duty';
The Prelude;
'The Simplon Pass';
'Influence of Natural Objects';
'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways';
'I Traveled Among Unknown Men';
'A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal';
'My Heart Leaps Up';
'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge: September 3, 1802';
'It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free';
'London 1802';
'The Solitary Reaper';
'The World Is Too Much With Us';
'To Sleep';
'Personal Talk')
Austin Tappan Wright - Islandia
William Butler Yeats - Selected Poems
(incl. Last Poems [this could refer to Last Poems and Two Plays, 1939; or Last Poems and Plays, 1940, a larger book including all but five songs from Last Poems and Two Plays, all of New Poems, 1938, and three poems from On the Boiler, 1939; I am only counting this as an entry for Last Poems and Two Plays, since that work would be included either way];
'Easter 1916';
'Among School Children';
Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems;
'Sailing to Byzantium';
'Under Ben Bulben';
'The Ballad of Father Gilligan';
'To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing';
'The Cat and the Moon';
'The Second Coming';
'Leda and the Swan';
'For Anne Gregory';
'The Cold Heaven';
'The Wild Swans at Coole';
'The Tower';
'Down by the Salley Gardens';
'When You Are Old';
'September 1913';
'A Prayer for My Daughter')
22 May
22 May
Mortimer Adler's revised second edition of How to Read a Book [1972], co-written with Van Doren, came after the first version of his famous series, The Great Books of the Western World [1952]; so, of course, the list at the end of this book overlaps to some extent with those Great Books, as well as the Gateway to the Great Books [1963] ten-volume series of shorter pieces and excerpts. Neither the first version of The Great Books nor the Gateway will be used for this project; instead, the final, 1990 version of The Great Books is--especially as it includes many authors or works that had only been in the Gateway. One could ask, though, why How to Read a Book isn't excluded. Indeed, there is also a good deal of overlap between the 1972 How to Read a Book and the 1990 Great Books series. However, the former's list is longer (after all, the Great Books books actually provided texts, not just lists, so had to be more discerning to save space) and deserves its status as relatively-distinct project, especially as the original How to Read a Book was published in 1940 while the Gateway series was constructed specifically to accompany (that is, not overlap with) the original Great Books.
Homer (9th century B C?)
Iliad
Odyssey
The Old Testament
Aeschylus (c. 525-456 B C)
Tragedies
Sophocles (c. 495-406 B C)
Tragedies
Herodotus (c. 484-425 B C)
History (of the Persian Wars)
Euripides (c. 485-406 B C)
Tragedies (incl.
Medea;
Hippolytus;
The Bacchae)
Thucydides (c. 460-400 B C)
History of the Peloponnesian War
Hippocrates (c. 460-377? B C)
Medical writings
Aristophanes (c. 448-380 B C)
Comedies (incl.
The Clouds;
The Birds;
The Frogs)
Plato (c. 427-347 B C)
Dialogues (incl.
The Republic;
Symposium;
Phaedo;
Meno;
Apology;
Phaedrus;
Protagoras;
Gorgias;
Sophist;
Theaetus)
Aristotle (384-322 B C)
Works (incl.
Organon;
Physics;
Metaphysics;
On the Soul;
The Nichomachean Ethics;
Politics;
Rhetoric;
Poetics)
Epicurus (c. 341-270 B C)
Letter to Herodotus
Letter to Menoecus
Euclid (fl.c. 300 B C)
Elements (of Geometry)
Archimedes (c. 287-212 B C)
Works (incl.
On the Equilibrium of Planes;
On Floating Bodies;
The Sand-Reckoner)
Apollonius of Pergia (fl.c. 240 B C)
On Conic Sections
Cicero (106-43 B C)
Works (incl.
Orations;
On Friendship;
On Old Age)
Lucretius (c. 95-55 B C)
On the Nature of Things
Virgil (70-19 B C)
Works
Horace (65-8 B C)
Works (incl.
Odes and Epodes;
The Art of Poetry)
Livy (59 B C-A D 17)
History of Rome
Ovid (43 B C-A D 17)
Works (incl.
Metamorphoses)
Plutarch (c. 45-120)
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Moralia
Tacitus (c. 55-117)
Histories
Annals
Agricola
Germania
Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.c. 100 A D)
Introduction to Arithmetic
Epictetus (c. 60-120)
Discourses
Encheiridion (Handbook)
Ptolemy (c. 100-178; fl. 127-151)
Almagest
Lucian (c. 120-c. 190)
Works (incl.
The Way to Write History;
The True History;
The Sale of Creeds)
Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations
Galen (c. 130-200)
On the Natural Faculties
The New Testament
Plotinus (205-270)
The Enneads
St. Augustine (354-430)
Works (incl.
On the Teacher;
Confessions;
The City of God;
Christian Doctrine)
The Song of Roland (12th century?)
The Nibelungenlied (13th century)
(The Vˆlsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend.)
The Saga of Burnt Njal
St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)
Summa Theologica
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Works (incl.
The New Life;
On Monarch;
The Divine Comedy)
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400)
Works (incl.
Troilus and Criseyde;
Canterbury Tales)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Notebooks
NiccolÚ Machiavelli (1469-1527)
The Prince
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469-1536)
The Praise of Folly
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Sir Thomas More (c. 1478-1535)
Utopia
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Three Treatises
Table-Talk
Francois Rabelais (c. 1495-1553)
Gargantua and Pantagruel [1532-34]
John Calvin (1509-1564)
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Michel de Montaigne (1553-1592)
Essays
William Gilbert (1540-1603)
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Don Quixote
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599)
Prothalamion
The FaÎrie Queene
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Essays
Advancement of Learning
Novum Organum
New Atlantis
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Works
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
The Starry Messenger
Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
Concerning the Harmonies of the World
William Harvey (1578-1657)
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
On the Circulation of the Blood
On the Generation of Animals
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Leviathan
RenÈ Descartes (1596-1650)
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Discourse on Method
Geometry
Meditations on First Philosophy
John Milton (1608-1674)
Works (incl.
the minor poems;
Areopagitica;
Paradise Lost;
Samson Agonistes)
Moliere (1622-1673)
Comedies (incl.
The Miser;
The School for Wives;
The Misanthrope;
The Doctor in Spite of Himself;
Tartuffe)
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The Provincial Letters
PensÈes
Scientific Treatises
Christian Huygens (1629-1695)
Treatise on Light
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
Ethics
John Locke (1632-1704)
Letter Concerning Toleration
'Of Civil Government' (second treatise in Two Treatises on Government)
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Thoughts Concerning Education
Jean Baptiste Racine (1639-1699)
Tragedies (incl.
Andromach;
Phaedra)
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Optics
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716)
Discourse on Metaphysics
New Essays Concerning Human Understanding
Monadology
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
A Tale of a Tub
Journal to Stella
Gulliver's Travels
A Modest Proposal
William Congreve (1670-1729)
The Way of the World
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Principles of Human Knowledge
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Essay on Criticism
Rape of the Lock
An Essay on Man
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Persian Letters
Spirit of Laws
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Letters on the English
Candide
Philosophical Dictionary
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
Joseph Andrews
Tom Jones
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The Vanity of Human Wishes
Dictionary
Rasselas
The Lives of the Poets (esp. the essays on Milton and Pope)
David Hume (1711-1776)
Treatise on Human Nature
Essays Moral and Political
An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
On the Origin of Inequality
'On Political Economy'
Emile
The Social Contract
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Tristram Shandy
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
The Theory of the Moral Sentiments
Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Critique of Pure Reason
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
Critique of Practical Reason
The Science of Right
Critique of Judgment
Perpetual Peace
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Autobiography
James Boswell (1740-1795)
Journal (esp.
London Journal)
Life of Samuel Johnson Ll.D.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)
Elements of Chemistry
John Jay (1745-1829), James Madison (1751-1836), and Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804)
Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Theory of Fictions
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Faust
Poetry and Truth
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
Analytical Theory of Heat
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Phenomenology of Spirit
Philosophy of Right
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Poems (incl.
Lyrical Ballads;
Lucy poems;
sonnets;
The Prelude)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Poems (incl.
'Kubla Khan';
'Rime of the Ancient Mariner')
Biographia Literaria
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
On War
Stendhal (1783-1842)
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
On Love
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Don Juan
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Studies in Pessimism
Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Chemical History of a Candle
Experimental Researches in Electricity
Charles Lyell (1797-1875)
Principles of Geology
Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
The Positive Philosophy
HonorÈ de Balzac (1799-1850)
PËre Goriot
EugÈnie Grandet
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Representative Men
Essays
Journal
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The Scarlet Letter
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Democracy in America
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
A System of Logic
On Liberty
Representative Government
Utilitarianism
The Subjection of Women
Autobiography
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
The Origin of Species
The Descent of Man
Autobiography
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Works (incl.
Pickwick Papers;
David Copperfield;
Hard Times)
Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
'Civil Disobedience'
Walden
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Capital (together with the Communist Manifesto)
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Adam Bede
Middlemarch
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Moby Dick
Billy Budd
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Crime and Punishment
The Idiot
The Brothers Karamazov
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Madame Bovary
Three Stories
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Plays
(incl. Hedda Gabler;
A Doll's House;
The Wild Duck)
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
What Is Art?
Twenty-Three Tales
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Mysterious Stranger
William James (1842-1910)
The Principles of Psychology
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Pragmatism
Essays in Radical Empiricism
Henry James (1843-1916)
The American
The Ambassadors
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil
The Genealogy of Morals
The Will to Power
Jules Henri Poincare (1854-1912)
Science and Hypothesis
Science and Method
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
The Interpretation of Dreams
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Civilization and Its Discontents
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Plays (and Prefaces) (incl.
Man and Superman;
Major Barbara;
Caesar and Cleopatra;
Pygmalion;
Saint Joan)
Max Planck (1858-1947)
Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
Where Is Science Going?
Scientific Autobiography
Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
Time and Free Will
Matter and Memory
Creative Evolution
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
John Dewey (1859-1952)
How We Think
Democracy and Education
Experience and Nature
Logic, the Theory of Inquiry
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
An Introduction to Mathematics
Science and the Modern World
The Aims of Education and Other Essays
Adventures of Ideas
George Santayana (1863-1952)
The Life of Reason
Skepticism and Animal Faith
Persons and Places
Nikolai Lenin (1870-1924)
The State and Revolution
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Remembrance of Things Past
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The Problems of Philosophy
The Analysis of Mind
An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
The Magic Mountain
Joseph and His Brothers
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The Meaning of Relativity
On the Method of Theoretical Physics
The Evolution of Physics (with L Infeld)
James Joyce (1882-1941)
'The Dead' in Dubliners
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Jacques Maritain (1882- )
Art and Scholasticism
The Degrees of Knowledge
The Rights of Man and Natural Law
True Humanism
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
The Trial
The Castle
Arnold Toynbee (1889- )
A Study of History
Civilization on Trial
Jean Paul Sartre (1905- )
Nausea
No Exit
Being and Nothingness
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918- )
The First Circle
Cancer Ward
23 May
The next ten "great books" lists/ canons/ reading plans transcribed so far at this site with their handy tags between asterisks:
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren - How to Read a Book - 1972 *Read*
Charles Van Doren - The Joy of Reading - 1985 *Doren*
Frank N Magill - Masterpieces of World Literature - 1989 *Magill*
Clifton Fadiman and John S Major - The New Lifetime Reading Plan - 1997 *Fadiman*
The Great Books Foundation - The Great Books: A Reading List - 1998 *Foundation*
Martin Seymour-Smith - The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought From Ancient Times to Today - 1998 *Seymour*
Utne Reader - The Loose Canon: 150 Great Works to Set Your Imagination on Fire - 1998 *Utne*
W John Campbell - The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics - 2000 *Campbell*
John Mark Reynolds - The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books of Western Civilization - 2011 *Reynolds*
Sandra Newman - The Western Lit Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, From Homer to Faulkner - 2012 *Newman*
The first nine (the top books from these lists can be found at the 8 May post):
Arthur Waldhorn, Olga S Weber, and Arthuer Zeiger, eds. - Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd ed. - 1990 *Good*
The Learning Channel - Great Books - 1993-2002 *Learning*
Robert Kanigel - Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury, A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books - 1998 *Kanigel*
The Norwegian Book Club - World Library - 2002 *Norway*
The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Picks - J Peder Zane - 2007 *Zane*
The Guardian - Books You Can't Live Without: The Top 100 - 2007 *Guardian*
The Globe and Mail - 50 Greatest Books of All Time - 2008 *GlobeMail*
The Daily Telegraph/ The Sunday Telegraph - 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library - 2008 *Telegraph*
The Harvard Book Store - Top 100 Books - 2010 *Harvard*
24 May
The deluxe edition of Pulp's This Is Hardcore lacks one of the B-side tracks of the album's first single, 'Help the Aged', including a shorter version of 'Tomorrow Never Lies', the Rough Mix, instead of the original, plus 'Laughing Boy'. It includes 'Ladies' Man' and 'The Professional', the two original tracks from the 'This Is Hardcore' singles, but only one of four alternate versions of the A side. Only 'Like a Friend' from the 'A Little Soul' singles is included; while a different version of 'Cocaine Socialism' ('The Proper Version', the meaning of which Jarvis Cocker tries and fails to explain in the liner notes) is included, none of the four alternate versions of the A side (the A-side track itself was a version shorter than the album track) make the cut. From the fourth, final single, 'Party Hard', 'We Are the Boyz' is included, but not the two alternate versions of 'Party Hard' or--the worst offense of all--the 'Complete and Utter Breakdown Version' of 'The Fear', arguably a better track than the album original. Given that the album benefits less from the remastering, this deluxe edition is a waste. Granted, the second disc does feature five demos and a session out-take, thus adding six songs to the Pulp oeuvre. But recall that there was already another double-disc version of this album, featuring a Glastonbury performance; if they'd reissued that disc plus the abandoned B-side tracks noted above, they could've had a four-disc set. Or, rather, now that the Pulp deluxe editions are getting old, maybe it's time for a Blu-Ray disc that could fit all that material and more.
25 May
The "great books" lists don't include many periodical pieces (that is, beyond serialized novels of the Nineteenth Century)--especially given our listmakers' tendency to include "selected poems" or "selected essays" without, in some cases, specifying which works they're discussing. Years from now, one can imagine more journalism making these lists, especially classics of New Journalism, but also those that have been made into films, and thus become a greater part of modern popular culture. This Slate-Longform collaboration published today offers a few potential examples:
Before They Were Movies: The Longform Guide to Magazine Articles That Became (Mostly) Great Films
26 May
Henry David Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' is one of the rare individual essays included on several of the "great books" lists. Its contemporary relevance is shown in this insightful cover article for a recent issue of the Nation: Thoreau's Radical Moment--and Ours (annoyingly retitled for its web version). However, the author argues that another essay, originally a speech, is superior to 'Civil Disobedience'.
27 May
Returning to the subject matter of the 14 May post... The Miracles [1958-1965] and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles [1965-1972] (Robinson's exist prompted a return to the plain Miracles moniker), from the time of its landmark debut L P, Hi... We're the Miracles, in 1961, tended to include only a few tracks that had been released as singles, usually typical first singles from an album released in advance of said album. Not surprisingly, the album often listed as their best from this era, Going to a Go-Go [1965], had six tracks out of 12 previously released on singles, one of which came out a little more than a month before the album. Special Occasion [1968] included four (out of 11 tracks) that had been released as singles, while Time Out for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles had four previously-released tracks out of its 12 total. Only one album, One Dozen Roses [1971], unequivocally counts as a compilation: 7 of its 12 tracks had been released, two of them more than two years prior to the album's release, plus 'The Tears of a Clown', which was released on an album in 1967 (three years prior to its release, and surprise success, as a single).
28 May
The method I've developed of splitting an artist's lists of albums into smaller lists, thus offering a clearer representation of the artist's work, takes the following form:
Major albums
Concert albums
Minor albums
Compilations
Major albums consist almost entirely of previously-unreleased material, not recorded in a concert. "Live album," as a descriptive term, simply does not work; plenty of albums, especially in Jazz music, are essentially recorded live in the studio; audiophile "direct-to-disc" recordings assure the consumer of such recording conditions. A studio album might even be recorded live in front of audience, e.g. Tom Waits' Nighthawks of the Diner, which Wikipedia for one claims is a live album. Performance is a word even vaguer than live; certain philosophers would have us say that, every time we press play or lower a stylus, we're performing the music. Either way, "concert album" works better to indicate what most of us think of as live albums: recordings made at a concert--simple, right?
Minor albums are the kind of albums often erroneously referred to as compilations: say, a collection of B B C recordings, or studio out-takes. They are certainly not major releases backed by significant promotional effort. One could argue that they're compilations in that they compile recordings made over the course of several years, often for varying reasons. However, I'd argue that overall compilation, as a term in the music trade, has referred to collections of previously-released material.
29 May
While most regular Web readers have perused the texts available at the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, plenty other relatively-obscure, even somewhat private, sites also offer complete works of literature transcribed, or even translated, by the creators of the site. Obviously, scans of books are preferable, eliminating the possibility of transcription error or perhaps unnecessary additional translations. Nonetheless, these sites, when they are the work of serious scholars, are excellent resources. I'm going to try to find more of these soon enough, but for now: I've recently came across a page of electronic texts by a English professor at Rutgers-Newark. And a massive list of literature anthologies, often with tables of content included, from a professor at George Mason University: Multicultural and World Literature Anthologies.
Poetry in Translation is a larger resource, featuring original translations by A S Kline.
Bibliomania is not quite as rigorous in its documentation, but it offers more.
30 May
An example of an artist's albums divided among major, concert, minor, and compilation: the "Progressive" Rock band Yes. Their discography presents plenty of challenges. Keys to Ascension and Keys to Ascension 2 both feature a mix of concert and studio recordings, a common-enough phenomenon, but with no easy solution in this categorization scheme. Since more of the tracks on both albums are "live" (with studio overdubs) than studio, I place them into the concert-album category. Another solution would have them put in the minor-albums category.
Those albums also bring us to the oft-confusing realm of video releases; commercially-successful artists tend to have numerous, in some cases semi-legitimate, video products (as seen with the Neil Young post of 18 April). Ideally, they are part of a larger project (that is, the tracks overlap in the case of live recordings or promotional clips) as with the Keys to Ascension video; Yessongs, released two years after the album of the same name; House of Yes; Live at Montreux 2003; and Union Live. However, some of these releases completely overlap; in other words, the C D release is more or less the audio portion of the video. Of course, often in such cases the C D is edited slightly, to make for a better listening experience (for example, Unplugged releases available in both formats). Nonetheless, the separate audio disc seems redundant.
For now, I've omitted the official documentary, Yesspeak, and its companion Director's Cut disc that features additional live footage, although the latter would count as a concert album. As an official release, should Yesspeak just go into the major-albums category? Or does it suggest the need to keep video releases separate? That way, other documentaries, especially semi-legit releases, could find a place.
Also, not all compilations have been listed.
major albums:
Yes
1969
Time and a Word
1970
The Yes Album
1971
Fragile
1971
Close to the Edge
1972
Tales From Topographic Oceans
1973
Relayer
1974
Going for the One
1977
Tormato
1978
Drama
1980
90125
1983
Big Generator
1987
[Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe] Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe
1989
Union
1991
Talk
1994
Open Your Eyes
1997
The Ladder
1999
Magnification
2001
Fly From Here
2011
minor albums:
[Steve Howe/ Bill Brufrod/ Jon Anderson/ The London Philharmonic Orchestra/ The English Chamber Orchestra/ The London Community Gospel Choir] Symphonic Music of Yes
1993
Remixes
1993
Something's Coming: The B B C Recordings 1969-1970
1997
concert albums:
Yessongs
1973
Yessongs [video]
1975
Yesshows
1980
9012Live
1985
9012Live: The Solos
1985
Yes: Live - 1975 at Q P R
1993
Live in Philadelphia
1995
Keys to Ascension
1996
Keys to Ascension [video]
1996
Keys to Ascension 2
1997
House of Yes: Live From the House of Blues
2000
House of Yes: Live From the House of Blues [video]
2000
Symphonic Live [video]
2002
Symphonic Live
2003
Yes Acoustic: Guaranteed No Hiss
2004
Songs From Tsongas
2005
The Word Is Live
2005
Live at Montreux 2003
2007
Union Live
2011
Union Live [video; released in Japan, 1991]
2011
Union Live [bonus disc]
2011
In the Present: Live From Lyon
2011
compilations:
Yesterdays
1975
Classic Yes
1981
Yesyears
1991
Yesyears [video]
1991
Greatest Video Hits
1991
Keystudio
2001
In a Word: Yes (1969 - )
2002
The Ultimate Yes: 35th Anniversary Collection
2003
31 May
More online sources of free full texts:
Bartleby
Classic Reader
Corpus Sciptorum Latinorum
Internet Classics Archive
LacusCurtis: Into the Roman World
Literature Network
Online Medieval and Classical Library
Perseus Digital Library
Project Libellus
(in Latin only): Latin Library
Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature provides links to full-text scans and secondary literature about the writers.
and, at Infomotions, the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
Infomotions features a Great Books Survey specifically concerning the Adler/ Hutchins Greats Books of the Western World set (and more specific still, the original 1952 version of that set, not the larger 1990 second edition).