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This is a pretty mediocre reading
list.
For one thing, far
too many works by non-Western
authors.
Yeah, I know it sounds cool, modern, and liberated to include them,
but most of them
aren't that great. Omar the Tent-Maker (a.k.a. Omar
Khayyam) was a
third-rate poet until Fitzgerald immortalized him. The
Tale of Genji and most of the other "great"
oriental novels are boring,
and in any case can't be readily understood by
anyone without
a solid background in Asian culture. So
they're really not worth reading.
For another thing, I find it
incredible that the compilers included
no Western works written between 420 (Augustine)
and the early
14c (Dante). What about The Song of Roland,
the poetry of the
troubadours, the fabliaux, and Gottfried von
Strassburg's Tristan?
They all beat the
hell out of the Mahabharata.
Your disgruntled medievalist,
Bill Cole
Cole & Contreras Books
The New Lifetime Reading Plan
by Clifton Fadiman and John S.
Major
(4th ed., 1997)
Preface
"We assume that
nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat
accustomed to reading it; there is nothing we might try to say about it
that would not seem presumptuous."
Part One
1. Anonymous, ca. 2000 BCE. The Epic of
Gilgamesh.
2. Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The
Iliad.
3. Homer, ca. 800 BCE. The
Odyssey.
4. Confucius, 551-479 BCE. The
Analects.
5. Aeschylus, 525-456/5 BCE.
The Oresteia.
6. Sophocles, 496-406
BCE. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone
7. Euripides, 484-406 BCE. Alcestis;
Medea; Hipploytus; Trojan Women; Electra;
Bacchae.
8. Herodotus, ca. 484-425 BCE.
The Histories.
9. Thucydides,
470/460-ca.400 BCE. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
10. Sun-tzu, ca. 450-380 BCE. The Art of
War.
11. Aristophanes, 448-388 BCE.
Lysistrata; The Clouds; The Birds.
12. Plato, 428-348 BCE. Selected Works.
13. Aristotle, 384-322 BCE. Ethics; Politics;
Poetics.
14. Mencius, ca. 400-320 BCE.
The Book of Mencius.
15. Valmiki, ca.
300 BCE. The Book of Ramayana.
16.
Vyasa, ca. 200 BCE. The Mahabharata.
17. Anonymous, ca. 200 BCE. The Bhagavad Gita.
18. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, 145-86 BCE. Records of the
Grand Historian.
19. Lucretius, ca.
100-ca. 50 BCE. Of the Nature of Things.
20. Virgil, 70-19 BCE. The Aeneid.
21. Marcus Aurelius, 121-180. Meditations.
Part Two
22. Saint Augustine, 354-430. The Confessions.
23. Kalidasa, ca. 400. The Cloud Messenger;
Sakuntala.
24. Revealed to Muhammad,
ca. 650. The Koran.
25. Hui-neng,
638-713. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
26. Firdausi, ca. 940-1020. Shah Nameh.
27. Sei Shonagon, ca. 965-1035. The Pillow
Book.
28. Lady Murasaki, ca. 976-1015.
Tale of Genji.
29. Omar Khayyam, 1048-?
The Rubaiyat.
30. Dante Alighieri,
1265-1321. The Divine Comedy.
31. Luo
Kuan-chung, ca. 1330-1400. The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms.
32. Geoffrey Chaucer, 1342-1400.
The Canterbury Tales.
33. Anonymous,
ca. 1500. The Thousand and One Nights.
34. Niccolò Macchiavelli, 1469-1527. The Prince.
35. François Rabelais, 1483-1553. Gargantua and
Pantagruel.
36. Wu Cheng-en, 1500-1582.
Journey to the West.
37. Michel Eyquem
de Montaigne, 1533-1592. Selected Essays.
38.
Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, 1547-1616. Don Quixote.
Part Three
39. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Complete Works.
40. John Donne, 1573-1631. Selected Works.
41. Anonymous, 1618. The Plum in the Golden Vase
(Chin P'ing Mei)
42. Galileo Galilei,
1574-1642. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
43. Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679.
Leviathan.
44. René Descartes,
1596-1650. Discourse on Method.
45.
John Milton, 1608-1674. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the
Morning of Christ's Nativity; Sonnets;
Areopagitica.
46. Molière, 1622-1673.
Selected Plays.
47. Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662.
Thoughts (Pensées).
48. John Bunyan,
1628-1688. Pilgrim's Progress.
49. John
Locke, 1632-1688. Second Treatise of Government.
50. Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694. The Narrow Road to the Deep
North.
51. Daniel Defoe, 1660-1731.
Robinson Crusoe.
52. Jonathan Swift,
1667-1745. Gulliver's Travels.
53.
Voltaire, 1694-1778. Candide and Other Works.
54. David Hume, 1711-1776. An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding.
55. Henry Fielding,
1707-1754. Tom Jones.
56. Ts'ao
Hsüeh-ch'in, 1715-1763. The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called
The Story of the Stone).
57. Jean
Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778. Confessions.
58. Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768. Tristram Shandy.
59. James Boswell, 1740-1795. The Life of Samuel
Johnson.
60. Thomas Jefferson and others.
Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B.
Morris
61. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The
Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter.
Part Four
62.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832. Faust.
63. William Blake, 1757-1827. Selected Works.
64. William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. The Prelude; Selected
Shorter Poems; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800).
65. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834. The
Ancient Mariner; Christabel; Kubla Khan; Biographia
Literaria; Writings on Shakespeare.
66. Jane Austen, 1775-1817. Pride and Prejudice;
Emma.
67. Stendhal, 1783-1842. The
Red and the Black.
68. Honoré de Balzac,
1799-1850. Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet.
69. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882. Selected Works.
70. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864. The Scarlet
Letter; Selected Tales.
71. Alexis de
Tocqueville, 1805-1859. Democracy in America.
72. John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873. On Liberty; The
Subjection of Women.
73. Charles Darwin,
1809-1882. The Voyage of the Beagle; The Origin of
Species.
74. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol,
1809-1852. Dead Souls.
75. Edgar Allan
Poe, 1809-1849. Short Stories and Other Works.
76. William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-1863. Vanity
Fair.
77. Charles Dickens, 1812-1870.
Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Great
Expectations; Hard Times; Our Mutual Friend; Little
Dorrit.
78. Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882.
The Warden; The Last Chronicle of Barset; The Eustace
Diamonds; The Way We Live Now; Autobiography.
79. The Brontë Sisters
79A. Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1855. Jane Eyre
79B. Emily Brontë, 1818-1848. Wuthering
Heights.
80. Henry David Thoreau,
1817-1862. Walden; Civil Disobedience.
81. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, 1818-1883. Fathers and
Sons.
82. Karl Marx, 1818-1883, and
Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895. The Communist Manifesto.
83. Herman Melville, 1819-1891. Moby Dick;
Bartleby the Scrivener.
84. George
Eliot, 1819-1880. The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch.
85. Walt Whitman, 1819-1892. Selected Poems;
Democratic Vistas; Preface to the first issue of Leaves of
Grass (1855); A Backward Glance O'er Travelled Roads.
86. Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880. Madame
Bovary.
87. Feodor Mikhailovich
Dostoevsky, 1821-1881. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers
Karamazov.
88. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy,
1828-1910. War and Peace.
89. Henrik
Ibsen, 1828-1906. Selected Plays.
90. Emily
Dickinson, 1830-1886. Collected Poems.
91.
Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland;
Through the Looking-Glass.
92. Mark
Twain, 1835-1910. Huckleberry Finn.
93.
Henry Adams, 1838-1918. The Education of Henry Adams.
94. Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. The Mayor of
Casterbridge.
95. William James,
1842-1910. The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism; Four
Essays from The Meaning of Truth; The Varieties of Religious
Experience.
96. Henry James, 1843-1916.
The Ambassadors.
97. Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, 1844-1900. Thus Spake Zarathustra; The Genealogy of
Morals; Beyond Good and Evil; and other works.
Part Five
98. Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939. Selected Works, including
The Interpretation of Dreams
;
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; and Civilization and
Its Discontents.
99. George Bernard Shaw,
1856-1950. Selcted Plays and Prefaces.
100.
Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924. Nostromo.
101. Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904. Uncle Vanya; Three
Sisters; The Cherry Orchard; Selected Short Stories.
102. Edith Wharton, 1862-1937. The Custom of the
Country; The Age of Innocence; The House of
Mirth.
103. William Butler Yeats,
1865-1939. Collected Poems; Collected Plays; The
Autobiography.
104. Natsume Soseki,
18676-1916. Kokoro.
105. Marcel Proust,
1871-1922. Remembrance of Things Past.
106. Robert Frost, 1874-1963. Collected Poems.
107. Thomas Mann, 1875-1955. The Magic
Mountain.
108. E. M. Forster, 1879-1970.
A Passage to India.
109. Lu Hsün,
1881-1936. Collected Short Stories.
110. James
Joyce, 1882-1941. Ulysses.
111.
Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941. Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse;
Orlando; The Waves.
112. Franz
Kafka, 1883-1924. The Trial; The Castle; Selected Short
Stories.
113. D. H. Lawrence, 1885-1930.
Sons and Lovers; Women in Love.
114. Tanizaki Junichiro, 1886-1965. The Makioka
Sisters.
115. Eugene O'Neill, 1888-1953.
Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's
Journey into Night.
116. T. S. Eliot,
1888-1965. Collected Poems; Collected Plays.
117. Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963. Brave New World.
118. William Faulkner, 1897-1962. The Sound and
the Fury; As I Lay Dying.
119.
Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1962. Short Stories.
120. Kawabata Yasunari, 1899-1972. Beauty and
Sadness.
121. Jorge Luis Borges,
1899-1986. LabyrinthsDreamtigers.
122.
Vladimir Nabokov, 1899-1977. Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak,
Memory.
123. George Orwell, 1903-1950.
Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four; Burmese
Days.
124. R. K. Narayan, 1906- . The
English Teacher; The Vendor of Sweets.
125. Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989. Waiting for Godot;
Endgame; Krapp's Last Tape.
126.
W. H. Auden, 1907-1973. Collected Poems.
127.
Albert Camus, 1913-1960. The Plague; The Stranger.
128. Saul Bellow, 1915- . The Adventures of Augie
March; Herzog; Humboldt's Gift.
129. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918- . The First
Circle; Cancer Ward.
130. Thomas
Kuhn, 1922-1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
131. Mishima Yukio, 1925-1970. Confessions of a
Mask; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
132. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1928- . One Hundred Years of
Solitude.
133. Chinua Achebe, 1930- .
Things Fall Apart.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Fadiman, Clifton and John S. Major.
The New Lifetime Reading Plan. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins,
1997. © 1997 by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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