Posted by joffre on 10/2/2009, 16:37:24, in reply to "Re: Guardian List: "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read""
68.19.137.158
Here's my offering. As this is a fiction club, we may want to limit our final list to that, but as I said, my list of books everyone should read contains some other things. I don't know what to call it. Books I think everyone should read? Books you must have read or plan to read in order to consider yourself something of an intellectual? It's, perhaps, a quirky list. I've gone with feeling. How can a person not read this? Sometimes I've picked the best known novel over the greatest. I've tried to keep it short, a basic list that 'everyone' could handle. I count it at 38. I'm tempted to make it 39 by adding The New Lifetime Reading Plan, which I consider the best guide to reading.
The Hebrew-Christian Bible and the Koran... I am struggling with the Bible, and whenever I manage to finish it, I'll read the Koran. Perhaps this neglects other religions, but the texts of most other religions seem copious. One might, at least, read the Bhagavad Gita, and I have read that.
Half a dozen general histories of the world's leading nations. I'm keeping my list fairly open. I've only read one history myself, so I'm way behind here too.
The Iliad or the Odyssey
The Divine Comedy
The Canterbury Tales
Don Quixote and War and Peace... How can you go through life without reading the two novels most often called the best ever?
Half a dozen Shakespeare plays, read since college. I count these as one book.
Paradise Lost
Basic documents in American history... for Americans, corresponding documents for people of other countries. I confess I've not read any of these. I strongly dislike politics, but I suppose one ought to know something about the system.
Two Jane Austen novels
Something by Charlotte or Emily Bronte
The Origin of the Species... I have not read it.
Two Dickens novels
Something by Balzac
The Scarl... oh nevermind.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
Something by George Eliot
Madame Bovary
Crime and Punishment
Huckleberry Finn, little as I like it.
Something by Henry James
Something by Thomas Mann
Ulysses, at least try it.
Something by Faulkner
Something by Hemingway or Fitzgerald
Catcher in the Rye
Lolita
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I've not listed any poetry, no bodies of short poems anyway. And my list is sadly lacking in works of philosophy. I probably think most of us are better off reading about philosophy than reading philosophy. I tried once to read Being and Nothingness and quickly realized it was pointless without having read a lot of other things.
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