Books we should have read
What books do you think absolutely must be read, preferably before graduating from High School, or at least college… or before death?
Maybe I can eventually turn this into a POLL.
I will start with some books as they occur to me.
Some authors obviously could have more than one book. After all, what are you going to say about Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? I sometimes just pick a representative book. You can argue for a different one, of course. I sometimes list more than one work of an an author, especially if they are not really books.
Here goes…
The Bible
William Shakespeare – Just Read Everything
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Plato, The Republic
Homer, The Odyssey & Iliad
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
USA – Founding Documents
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
St. Augustine, Confessions
George Orwell, 1984
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Thucydides, The Peloponesian War
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle
Herodotus, History
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Virgil, Aeneid
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
The Cloud of Unknowing
Euripides, Medea; Trojan Women, Bacchae
Sophocles: Oedipus trilogy
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
St. Benedict, Rule
Pope John Paul II, Salvifici doloris; Veritatis splendor, Centessimus Annus, Evangelium vitae
G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia
William Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope I & II
Descartes, Discourse on Method
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
St. Therese, Story of a Soul
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
James Joyce, Ulysses
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
T.S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Geoge Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest
Aristotle, Categories; Nicomachean Ethics
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
You may have your own suggestions.
I am not talking about books you like. I really like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, but I don't think they are at the level of books which everyone should have read.
I mean books you should read… essential books you should know.
UPDATES:
Giuseppe Maria Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
A. Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi
Beowulf
W. Whitman, Leaves of Grass
V. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Marx, Das Capital and the Communist Manifesto
Freud, On the Interpretation of Dreams.
Darwin, On the Evolution of Specie
John Donne
John Keats
E.M. Remarque, All's Quiet On the Western Front
E. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
No comments:
Post a Comment