{"id":189,"date":"2004-05-20T09:33:51","date_gmt":"2004-05-20T09:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/?p=189"},"modified":"2004-05-20T09:33:51","modified_gmt":"2004-05-20T09:33:51","slug":"great_books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/?p=189","title":{"rendered":"Great books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another book meme is circulating through the blogosphere. To participate, you post a copy of this list of 101 Great Books<\/a> to your blog, and indicate which of them you have personally read. Okay, I’ll play. In the following list, the works that I have read are listed in bold<\/strong>.
\n
\nAchebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart<\/cite>
\nAgee, James – A Death in the Family<\/cite>
\nAusten, Jane – Pride and Prejudice<\/cite>
\nBaldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain<\/cite>
\nBeckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot<\/cite>
\nBellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March<\/cite>
\nBeowulf<\/cite><\/strong>
\nBronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre<\/cite>
\nBronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights<\/cite>
\nCamus, Albert – The Stranger<\/cite>
\nCather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop<\/cite>
\nChaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales<\/cite><\/strong>
\nChekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard<\/cite>
\nChopin, Kate – The Awakening<\/cite>
\nConrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness<\/cite><\/strong>
\nCooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans<\/cite>
\nCrane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage<\/cite>
\nDante – Inferno<\/cite><\/strong>
\nCervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote<\/cite>
\nDefoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe<\/cite><\/strong>
\nDickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities<\/cite>
\nDostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment<\/cite>
\nDouglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass<\/cite>
\nDreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy<\/cite>
\nDumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers<\/cite>
\nEliot, George – The Mill on the Floss<\/cite>
\nEllison, Ralph – Invisible Man<\/cite>
\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays<\/cite>
\nFaulkner, William – As I Lay Dying<\/cite>
\nFaulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury<\/cite>
\nFielding, Henry – Tom Jones<\/cite>
\nFitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby<\/cite>
\nFlaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary<\/cite>
\nFord, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier<\/cite>
\nGoethe, Johann Wolfgang – Faust<\/cite><\/strong>
\nGolding, William – Lord of the Flies<\/cite>
\nHardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles<\/cite>
\nHawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter<\/cite><\/strong>
\nHeller, Joseph – Catch-22<\/cite><\/strong>
\nHemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms<\/cite>
\nHomer – The Iliad<\/cite><\/strong>
\nHomer – The Odyssey<\/cite><\/strong>
\nHugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame<\/cite>
\nHurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/cite>
\nHuxley, Aldous – Brave New World<\/cite><\/strong>
\nIbsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House<\/cite>
\nJames, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady<\/cite>
\nJames, Henry – The Turn of the Screw <\/cite>
\nJoyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/cite>
\nKafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis<\/cite><\/strong>
\nKingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior<\/cite>
\nLee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird<\/cite>
\nLewis, Sinclair – Babbitt<\/cite>
\nLondon, Jack – The Call of the Wild<\/cite><\/strong>
\nMann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain<\/cite>
\nMarquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/cite>
\nMelville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener<\/cite>
\nMelville, Herman – Moby-Dick<\/cite>
\nMiller, Arthur – The Crucible<\/cite>
\nMorrison, Toni – Beloved<\/cite>
\nO’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find<\/cite>
\nO’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night<\/cite>
\nOrwell, George – Animal Farm<\/cite><\/strong>
\nPasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago<\/cite>
\nPlath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar<\/cite>
\nPoe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales<\/cite><\/strong>
\nProust, Marcel – Swann’s Way<\/cite>
\nPynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49<\/cite>
\nRemarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front<\/cite>
\nRostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac<\/cite>
\nRoth, Henry – Call It Sleep<\/cite>
\nSalinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye<\/cite>
\nShakespeare, William – Hamlet<\/cite>
\nShakespeare, William – Macbeth<\/cite>
\nShakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/cite><\/strong>
\nShakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet<\/cite>
\nShaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion<\/cite>
\nShelley, Mary – Frankenstein<\/cite>
\nSilko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony<\/cite>
\nSolzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/cite>
\nSophocles – Antigone<\/cite><\/strong>
\nSophocles – Oedipus Rex<\/cite><\/strong>
\nSteinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath<\/cite>
\nStevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island<\/cite><\/strong>
\nStowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin<\/cite>
\nSwift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels<\/cite><\/strong>
\nThackeray, William – Vanity Fair<\/cite>
\nThoreau, Henry David – Walden<\/cite>
\nTolstoy, Leo – War and Peace<\/cite>
\nTurgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons<\/cite>
\nTwain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/cite><\/strong>
\nVoltaire – Candide<\/cite>
\nVonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five<\/cite><\/strong>
\nWalker, Alice – The Color Purple<\/cite>
\nWharton, Edith – The House of Mirth<\/cite>
\nWelty, Eudora – Collected Stories<\/cite>
\nWhitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass<\/cite><\/strong>
\nWilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/cite>
\nWilliams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie<\/cite>
\nWoolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse<\/cite>
\nWright, Richard – Native Son<\/cite>
\n<\/small>
\nNot a very impressive showing, and it would be even less so if I indicated which works I read only because I was required to in school. But with a few exceptions (such as Hamlet<\/cite>, Macbeth<\/cite>, and Don Quixote<\/cite>), I’m not terribly embarrassed by the number of these books I haven’t read. This looks to me like a list compiled by professors of English and comparative literature, and it reflects what books they<\/em> consider important. But it’s not clear to me why it’s imperative for non-professors to read The Mill on the Floss<\/cite> or Vanity Fair<\/cite>.
\nThis leads to the part of this meme that quite a few bloggers are having fun with: critiquing the list, and suggesting what books they<\/em> think should have been included. There’s some lively discussion<\/a> of this in the comments at Damian Penny’s blog. In particular, I agree with Tony, who points out that this list completely ignores nonfiction works, and that any list of Great Books that excludes Euclid’s Elements<\/cite> and Newton’s Principia Mathematica<\/cite> cannot be taken seriously. Well, okay, it’s not reasonable to expect that everyone will actually read<\/em> those books, but they should understand (a) what those books are about and (b) why they are important<\/em>. In other words, we should all at least have a Cliff’s Notes familiarity with these books.
\nOn that basis, and with the stipulation that I’m only attempting to address Western culture, I would also expect to see the following books on any sensible list:
\n
\nThe King James Bible<\/cite>
\nPlato – Republic<\/cite> and Dialogues<\/cite>
\nHerodotus – Histories<\/cite>
\nThucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War<\/cite>
\nSun Tzu – The Complete Art of War<\/cite>
\nMacchiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince<\/cite>
\nThe Declaration of Independence<\/cite>
\nThe Federalist Papers<\/cite>
\nThe Constitution of the United States of America<\/cite>
\nSmith, Adam – The Wealth of Nations<\/cite>
\nDarwin, Charles – The Origin of Species<\/cite>
\nMarx, Karl – The Communist Manifesto<\/cite>
\nGibbon, Edward – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire<\/cite>
\nBulfinch, Thomas – Mythology<\/cite>
\n<\/small>
\nThat’s just a quick list off the top of my head, with only minimal Web-surfing to make sure I’m listing the titles and names correctly. I’m tempted to do some more research and expand this list, but I’m trying to keep my blogging habit under control, remember? So instead, I’ll ask you. What other works do you think are important enough to be include in this list? Post a comment, or write about it in your own blog.
\nBefore I let go of this, I have one other complaint. Even if we limit the scope of a Great Books list to fiction, I cannot accept a list that contains none of the following titles:
\n
\nVerne, Jules – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea<\/cite>
\nWells, H.G. – The Time Machine<\/cite>, The Invisible Man<\/cite>, or War of the Worlds<\/cite> (at least one!)
\nHeinlein, Robert – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress<\/cite>, Starship Troopers<\/cite>, or Stranger in a Strange Land<\/cite>
\nAsimov, Isaac – The Foundation Trilogy<\/cite>, The Caves of Steel<\/cite>, or I, Robot<\/cite>
\nTolkien, J.R.R. – The Hobbit<\/cite> and The Lord of the Rings<\/cite> (yes, both!)
\nClarke, Arthur C. – 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/cite> or Childhood’s End<\/cite>
\n<\/small>
\nScience fiction and fantasy are mainstream literature now. It’s time for the ivory-tower academics to take notice of this fact. If they continue to tell us with a straight face that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth<\/cite> is more important than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings<\/cite>, that will just demonstrate how out of touch and irrelevant the professors are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another book meme is circulating through the blogosphere. To participate, you post a copy of this list of 101 Great Books to your blog, and indicate which of them you have personally read. Okay, I’ll play. In the following list, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patberry.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}