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).