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

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"?

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

moi621 (imported) wrote: Mon May 18, 2009 5:17 pm "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair...

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.

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 ?

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

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 O’Hanlon

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 director’s 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.

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.

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

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.

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.