Start with The Hobbit, then all of Lord of the Rings.
If your going to have them read religious books then include something by the Dalli Lama
Books Everybody Should Read
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IbPervert (imported)
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moi621 (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is a collection of morality stories.
As biblical as any stories. I'm partial to the "Story of Ruth" which I
first read at a Public High School. Probably, they are not allowed to
include it in a literature curriculum today <sad>.
Come to think of it, Ruth was the same time as, "The Jungle".
Hasn't anyone read "The Jungle"?
As biblical as any stories. I'm partial to the "Story of Ruth" which I
first read at a Public High School. Probably, they are not allowed to
include it in a literature curriculum today <sad>.
Come to think of it, Ruth was the same time as, "The Jungle".
Hasn't anyone read "The Jungle"?
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FianceeUvBigGuy (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
moi621 (imported) wrote: Mon May 18, 2009 9:25 pm The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is a collection of morality stories.
As biblical as any stories. I'm partial to the "Story of Ruth" which I
first read at a Public High School. Probably, they are not allowed to
include it in a literature curriculum today <sad>.
Come to think of it, Ruth was the same time as, "The Jungle".
Hasn't anyone read "The Jungle"?
If you mean
Yes!
I've also plowed my way, albeit happily, through the Ring Trilogy AND some shorter works by J.R.R. Tolkien.
I'm guessing many among those who have enjoyed the Ring works are unaware of "how and why" they were written. Well, here's the fact:
Tolkien's son was an officer in *His Majesty's Navy during WW2. On a regular basis, Tolkien Sr. would send his son another installment of the books and the son would share each with his shipmates. Great dad, I'd say.
The Harvard Lampoon published a spoof, entitled "Bored Of The Rings" ) back in the 1960s (Find it if you can.) In this "epic" Hobbits became Boggies; Frodo became Frito; Gandalf became GoodGulf; Orcs turned into Narcs; The Balrogs became Ballhogs (wearing Seton Hall basketball jersies), and so on.
To the Lampoon staff's credit, THEIR version took far less time to read.
Oh, BTW, Gollum became Goddam (I think) and Bilbo became...of course, Dildo.
Amazingly, BOTH "Lord..." AND "Bored..." were required reading in one of my Lit courses. Finding copies of "Bored..." in the Nineties was NOT and easy task. The prof owned over 30 copies and one had to put down a huge deposit to borrow one should one not be able to find one's own. If you failed to turn the borrowed copy in you lost the bux. Well, I borrowed TWO and gladly left the money behind in order to own those two copies.
"Lord..." or "Bored..."; BOTH are great.
Yoli
Voted "Most Likely To Hang Out With Eunuchs" in her Senior Year.
*Queen Elizabeth's daddy, King George VI.
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moi621 (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
Yes, that Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Kind of reminds one of Steinbeck stuff but
hits the reader more in the gut as Teddy Roosevelt
complained. Both the fed and more stringently,
the Great State of California passed laws because
of this book.
Now I would have bet moi's Yoli had read it without
asking because that's the kind of 'girl' she is.
The Jungle still goes on today to the benefit of the
American consumer. Not so much in the gut though.
I guess it really does need to be required reading, huh Yoli ?
Kind of reminds one of Steinbeck stuff but
hits the reader more in the gut as Teddy Roosevelt
complained. Both the fed and more stringently,
the Great State of California passed laws because
of this book.
Now I would have bet moi's Yoli had read it without
asking because that's the kind of 'girl' she is.
The Jungle still goes on today to the benefit of the
American consumer. Not so much in the gut though.
I guess it really does need to be required reading, huh Yoli ?
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kizahakan (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
The list of books that we read at junior high and also some that helped me try to make up my mind about the outer world
- Cry the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)
- To Kill a Mocking Bird ( Harper Lee)
- A Passage to India ( Edward Morgan Forster)
- The Modern Middle East ( Ilan Pappé)
- Animal Farm (George Orwell)
- Guns, Germs & Steel (Jareed Diamond)
- Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- Thousand Splendid Suns (Kahles Hosseini)
- Of Mice n Men (Steinbeck)
Greetings to ALL
Hakan
- Cry the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)
- To Kill a Mocking Bird ( Harper Lee)
- A Passage to India ( Edward Morgan Forster)
- The Modern Middle East ( Ilan Pappé)
- Animal Farm (George Orwell)
- Guns, Germs & Steel (Jareed Diamond)
- Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- Thousand Splendid Suns (Kahles Hosseini)
- Of Mice n Men (Steinbeck)
Greetings to ALL
Hakan
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Taylor (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
Let's not forget that recommended reading doesn't have to be the rarified, dry and scholarly work one would expect to be read in the white towers of academia. There is a lot of good literature that is insightful and entertaining. Here are a recommendations off the top of my head:
1984 - George Orwell
Skywater - Melinda Worth Popham
13 Reasons Why - Jay Asher
Narcissus and Goldumund
and
Beneath the Wheel - Hermann Hesse
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah - Richard Bach
Practical Demon Keeping - Christopher Moore
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go - Dale E. Basye
Into the Heart of Borneo - Redmond OHanlon
A Walk In The Woods by Bill Bryson
There should also be a list of recommended movies. Here are some of my recommendations.
Lawrence of Arabia
Key Largo
Casablanca
Blade Runner (theatrical cut NOT the crappy directors cut)
The Cuckoo
Better than Chocolate
The Secret of Roan Inish
Harold & Maude
The Manchurian Candidate (original b&w movie)
Jeremiah Johnson
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Das Boot
Kind Hearts and Coronets
T.
1984 - George Orwell
Skywater - Melinda Worth Popham
13 Reasons Why - Jay Asher
Narcissus and Goldumund
and
Beneath the Wheel - Hermann Hesse
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah - Richard Bach
Practical Demon Keeping - Christopher Moore
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go - Dale E. Basye
Into the Heart of Borneo - Redmond OHanlon
A Walk In The Woods by Bill Bryson
There should also be a list of recommended movies. Here are some of my recommendations.
Lawrence of Arabia
Key Largo
Casablanca
Blade Runner (theatrical cut NOT the crappy directors cut)
The Cuckoo
Better than Chocolate
The Secret of Roan Inish
Harold & Maude
The Manchurian Candidate (original b&w movie)
Jeremiah Johnson
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Das Boot
Kind Hearts and Coronets
T.
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ramses (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
It's hardly "academic", but I enjoyed Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" and "The Witching Hour" quite a bit. It was a great mix of history, religion, geography and fantasy. In her book, "The Devil Memnoch", one of the Vampire Chronicles, The main character Lestat was courted by the Devil for assistance and took a tour through time, heaven and hell. It was a very interesting story and posed some very interesting religious questions.
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calmeilles (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
A selection of fiction I'd be happy to have hanging about the house in the hope that a youngster might pick one or more of them up. I'd not worry about them being age-suitable. Mostly when someone can read a book with enjoyment they're ready for it (and if they're not enjoying it they won't continue.
I've tried (not always successfully) to keep to one per author and tended to the more well know than the critically acclaimed "best" in the hope of being more accessible.
Umm, an oddity of the sort has put them in first name of author. Doh!
Anyhows, my thought is that these are - if you'll allow for slipping in a few personal favourites - a part of our common cultural heritage; the sort of stuff that isn't ever "learned" as such but absorbed and by absorbing you can grok what the other guy's going on about. :-\
Matthew
Manon Lescaut, Abbe Prevost
England, Their England , AG Macdonell
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (Gil Blas), Alain-René Lesage
The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
Red Shift, Alan Garner
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe
Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovtich, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Samarkand, Amin Maalouf
Empress Orchid, Anchee Min
The Immoralist, Andre Gide
La Condition Humaine, Andre Malraux
Andrea Camilleri, The Shape of Water
Death and the Penguin, Andrey Kurkov
Wise Children, Angela Carter
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Angus Wilson
The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave,Aphra Behn
Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Possession, AS Byatt
A Fatal inversion, Barbara Vine
A Kestrel for a Knave, Barry Hines
Sharpe's Eagle, Bernard Cornwell
The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
Dracula, Bram Stoker
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
No Bed for Bacon, Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon
My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
Faded Sun, CJ Cherryh
Dissolution, CJ Sansom
Whisky Galore, Compton Mackenzie
The African Queen, CS Forester
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing
Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Le Sayers
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Queen Lucia, EF Benson
Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell
At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart
Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard
A Passage to India, EM Forster
Therese Raquin, Emile Zola
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Love Story, Eric Segal
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
Dune, Frank L Herbert
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Diary of a Nobody, George Grossmith
Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Tintin in Tibet, Georges Remi Herge
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
The Garden of the Finzi-Cortinis, Giorgio Bassani
The Little World of Don Camillo, Giovanni Guareschi
The Leopard, Giuseppi di Lampedusa
The Third Man, Graham Greene
The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant
She: A History of Adventure, H Rider Haggard
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Le Grand Meaulnes, Henri Alain-Fournier
Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding
Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, Henry Howarth Bashford
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Moby-Dick or, The Whale, Herman Melville
The Time Machine, HG Wells
La Comedie Humaine, Honore de Balzac
The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole
Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Consider Phlebas, Iain M Banks
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Hanging Gardens, Ian Rankin
Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
Deliverance, James Dickey
LA Confidential, James Ellroy
Lost Horizon, James Hilton
From Here to Eternity, James Jones
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Les Enfants Terrible, Jean Cocteau
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome
Empire of the Sun, JG Ballard
Waiting for the Barbarians, JM Coeztee
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
The Magus, John Fowles
The Man of Property, John Galsworthy
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,John le Carre
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike
Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Boy A, Jonathan Trigell
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth
Uncle Silas, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,Laurence Sterne
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Wine Dark Sea, Leonardo Sciascia
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The L Shaped Room, Lynne Reid Banks
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
ASH: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
The Far Pavillions, Mary Margaret Kaye
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake
Mother London, Michael Moorcock
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
And Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfield
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The Virginian, Owen Wister
The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
In the Country of Last Things, Paul Auster
A Taste for Death, PD James
True History of the Ned Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Peter Hoeg
Thank You Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Tom's Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos
Lost Souls, Poppy Z Brite
If Not Now, When?, Primo Levi
The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
When the Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Lorna Doone, RD Blackmore
Asterix the Gaul, Rene Goscinny
How Green was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein
I Claudius, Robert Graves
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
Invitation to the Waltz, Rosamond Lehmann
The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
Judgment in Stone, Ruth Rendell
The Unbearable Bassington, Saki
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Erewhon, Samuel Butler
Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R Delaney
Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Cheri, Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette
The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Puckoon, Spike Milligan
A Kind of Loving, Stan Barstow
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson
Some Experiences of an Irish RM, Somerville and Ross
One Tongue Singing, Susan Mann
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
The Discworld Series, Terry Pratchett
The Sword in the Stone, TH White
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Tom Brown's Schooldays, Thomas Hughes
Schindler's Ark, Thomas Keneally
Camp Concentration, Thomas M Disch
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett
Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Lolita,or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male, Vladimir Nabokov
Candide, Voltaire
A House for Mr Biswas, VS Naipaul
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
An Ice-Cream War, William Boyd
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
News from Nowhere, William Morris
I've tried (not always successfully) to keep to one per author and tended to the more well know than the critically acclaimed "best" in the hope of being more accessible.
Umm, an oddity of the sort has put them in first name of author. Doh!
Anyhows, my thought is that these are - if you'll allow for slipping in a few personal favourites - a part of our common cultural heritage; the sort of stuff that isn't ever "learned" as such but absorbed and by absorbing you can grok what the other guy's going on about. :-\
Matthew
Manon Lescaut, Abbe Prevost
England, Their England , AG Macdonell
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (Gil Blas), Alain-René Lesage
The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
Red Shift, Alan Garner
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe
Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovtich, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Samarkand, Amin Maalouf
Empress Orchid, Anchee Min
The Immoralist, Andre Gide
La Condition Humaine, Andre Malraux
Andrea Camilleri, The Shape of Water
Death and the Penguin, Andrey Kurkov
Wise Children, Angela Carter
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Angus Wilson
The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave,Aphra Behn
Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Possession, AS Byatt
A Fatal inversion, Barbara Vine
A Kestrel for a Knave, Barry Hines
Sharpe's Eagle, Bernard Cornwell
The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
Dracula, Bram Stoker
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
No Bed for Bacon, Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon
My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
Faded Sun, CJ Cherryh
Dissolution, CJ Sansom
Whisky Galore, Compton Mackenzie
The African Queen, CS Forester
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing
Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Le Sayers
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Queen Lucia, EF Benson
Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell
At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart
Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard
A Passage to India, EM Forster
Therese Raquin, Emile Zola
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Love Story, Eric Segal
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
Dune, Frank L Herbert
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Diary of a Nobody, George Grossmith
Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Tintin in Tibet, Georges Remi Herge
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
The Garden of the Finzi-Cortinis, Giorgio Bassani
The Little World of Don Camillo, Giovanni Guareschi
The Leopard, Giuseppi di Lampedusa
The Third Man, Graham Greene
The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant
She: A History of Adventure, H Rider Haggard
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Le Grand Meaulnes, Henri Alain-Fournier
Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding
Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, Henry Howarth Bashford
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Moby-Dick or, The Whale, Herman Melville
The Time Machine, HG Wells
La Comedie Humaine, Honore de Balzac
The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole
Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Consider Phlebas, Iain M Banks
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Hanging Gardens, Ian Rankin
Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
Deliverance, James Dickey
LA Confidential, James Ellroy
Lost Horizon, James Hilton
From Here to Eternity, James Jones
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Les Enfants Terrible, Jean Cocteau
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome
Empire of the Sun, JG Ballard
Waiting for the Barbarians, JM Coeztee
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
The Magus, John Fowles
The Man of Property, John Galsworthy
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,John le Carre
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike
Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Boy A, Jonathan Trigell
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth
Uncle Silas, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,Laurence Sterne
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Wine Dark Sea, Leonardo Sciascia
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The L Shaped Room, Lynne Reid Banks
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
ASH: A Secret History, Mary Gentle
The Far Pavillions, Mary Margaret Kaye
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake
Mother London, Michael Moorcock
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
And Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfield
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The Virginian, Owen Wister
The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
In the Country of Last Things, Paul Auster
A Taste for Death, PD James
True History of the Ned Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Peter Hoeg
Thank You Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Tom's Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos
Lost Souls, Poppy Z Brite
If Not Now, When?, Primo Levi
The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
When the Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Lorna Doone, RD Blackmore
Asterix the Gaul, Rene Goscinny
How Green was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein
I Claudius, Robert Graves
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
Invitation to the Waltz, Rosamond Lehmann
The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
Judgment in Stone, Ruth Rendell
The Unbearable Bassington, Saki
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Erewhon, Samuel Butler
Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R Delaney
Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Cheri, Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette
The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Puckoon, Spike Milligan
A Kind of Loving, Stan Barstow
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson
Some Experiences of an Irish RM, Somerville and Ross
One Tongue Singing, Susan Mann
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
The Discworld Series, Terry Pratchett
The Sword in the Stone, TH White
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Tom Brown's Schooldays, Thomas Hughes
Schindler's Ark, Thomas Keneally
Camp Concentration, Thomas M Disch
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett
Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Lolita,or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male, Vladimir Nabokov
Candide, Voltaire
A House for Mr Biswas, VS Naipaul
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
An Ice-Cream War, William Boyd
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
News from Nowhere, William Morris
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bobover3 (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
Dear Matthew, thanks for taking a few seconds to whip this little list together!
Scanning the list, I find I've not heard of about a third, revealing the lamentable state of my education. Are these all so essential to our culture?
Some of these make better movies than current reads. Today, who'd want to read The Magnificent Ambersons, Casino Royale, Valley of the Dolls, or Day of the Triffids? In fact, many of these items have had a greater life as movies than as books.
Still, thanks for your brilliant list. I expect many happy hours exploring its books.
Scanning the list, I find I've not heard of about a third, revealing the lamentable state of my education. Are these all so essential to our culture?
Some of these make better movies than current reads. Today, who'd want to read The Magnificent Ambersons, Casino Royale, Valley of the Dolls, or Day of the Triffids? In fact, many of these items have had a greater life as movies than as books.
Still, thanks for your brilliant list. I expect many happy hours exploring its books.
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gareth19 (imported)
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Re: Books Everybody Should Read
FianceeUvBigGuy (imported) wrote: Mon May 18, 2009 11:12 pm Well, here's the fact:
Tolkien's son was an officer in *His Majesty's Navy during WW2.
Christopher Tolkien was not a navy officer, he was in the RAF, and his father, who was gassed in WWI, certainly knew that the mortality rate of RAF fliers was not great. There is a poignancy of a father spinning tales to a son whom he knew might not return from his next mission.
In his RAF enlistment papers Christopher identifed his father's profession as "Wizard."
While Tolkien did indeed send Christopher regular installments of LOTR, the work was conceived much earlier and serves as part of Tolkien's mediations on Catholicism [Gandalf is the Church, and Saruman is the Protestant Reformation]
Many people find Lewis's Christian allegory in the Narnia books laid on a bit heavy, but most children I know seem quite immune and enjoy a good story.
I wouldn't recommend The Golden Bough as general reading in any of its permutations, though the original 2 volume version of 1890 is perhaps best. The superadumbration of fascinating but distracting detail means that most readers fail to grasp the actual argument that is being advanced. Forester's comment that "what began as a sprig of mistletoe, turned into a banyan tree and then into an entire forest" was apt; Frazer himself seems to have had a sense of humor; in the third edition of 1915, he footnoted an earlier reference to a previous chapter on the Dying God and Spirits of the Corn "now expanded to four volumes." Jane Ellen Harrison, the clearest of the Cambridge ritualists, makes pretty much the same case in a much more readable form Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
This brings me to contemplate a few works whose messages (for some at least) apparently transcend their inadequate formal properties; they have what Lewis in his Experiment in Criticism has called "a mythic" property. I'm thinking of all those people who apparently read and believed or at least enjoyed nonsense from awful works like Velikovsky's Worlds in Chaos, Forte's Lo, Marx's Das Kapital, or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged without ever even faintly becoming aware of the tedious illogic and plain bad writing of such works. Frazer, of course, writes much better English than these guys or say Dan Brown, but he doesn't think much more clearly, at least not in the Golden Bough. He is at his best editing Apollodorus for the Loeb series.
I had lunch this afternoon with a friend who is a practicing Christian and had just seen and LOVED Devils and Angels or whatever the prequel to the DaVinci Code is, and it was clear that he had no understanding of how fundamentally anti-Christian all this tedious Gnostic drivel is, then again, there are people who read Gone with the Wind and think that it is a romantic story about true love in an idyllic South and never see any of the anti-southern bias. It boggles the mind.