I want you to look at the following list. It's long. It's so very long that I wonder if I will ever be able to complete it... given that my goal was to create a list of the books that I should probably read before I go back to school next year (for a doctorate in English). I thought maybe I'd come up with twenty to thirty books. That would be more than manageable in a year, right? And then I thought, why not cull my personal library so that I don't even have to buy any books, and I'd have the freedom to take notes in the margins - because we do not write in library books, do we children? But do you see the list below? There are 131 books on that list. One hundred and thirty-one books. With the exception of five (bolded), I own them all. Some of the books are living in my old room in St. Louis. Some of them have been read before (they are asterisked). If I subtract those, I'm still left with 108 books. I'd need to read a book every three days. Someone would have to financially support me in order to make this possible. Is this a public plea for said support? Perhaps... but also a plea for some wisdom. If you had to choose from this list, what would you read?
A (14)
13 at Dinner - Agatha Christie
1984 - George Orwell
The ABC Murders - Dorothy L. Sayers
Across Five Aprils - Irene Hunt^
All Creatures Great and Small - Charles Harriott
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
Anthem - Ayn Rand
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
The Abolition of Man - C.S. Lewis*
Absence of Mind - Marilynne Robinson
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll^
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
B (8)
Being Human - Ranald MacAuley and Jerram Barrs
Ben Hur - Wallace^
Beowulf*
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
The Boy King
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley*
Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
Busman's Honeymoon - Dorothy L. Sayer
C (11)
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer^
The Catcher in the Rye
Charles Williams (anything)
Christ and Culture - Niehbur
To Change the World
The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom
Clouds of Witness - Dorothy L. Sayers
Collected Short Stories - Flannery O'Connor*
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx^
Created in God's Image - Antony Hoekema
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
D (4)
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens^
Death Comes to the Archbishop - Willa Cather^
The Death of Adam - Marilynne Robinson
Desire of the Everlasting Hills
E (4)
Emma - Jane Austen
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene^
The End of Faith - Sam Harris
An Experiment in Criticism - C.S. Lewis*
F (4)
The Fabric of Faithfulness - Steven Garber*
A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
Five Red Herrings - Dorothy L. Sayers
Forrest Gump - Groom
G (6)
Gaudy Night - Dorothy L. Sayers*
The Giver - Lois Lowry^
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald^
Guilt and Grace - Tournier^
H (7)
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Have His Carcase - Dorothy L. Sayers*
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne^
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
How to Read a Book
Huckleberry Finn - Tom Sawyer
I (3)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino^
Irrigating Deserts
K (4)
Kidnapped - Stevenson^
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
King Lear - Shakespeare^
Kite Runner - Hosseini^
L (5)
Lady Chatterly's Lover - Lawrence^
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper^
Lectures in Calvinism - Abraham Kuyper
Lolita - Nabokov*
Lord Peter - Dorothy L. Sayers*
M (10)
MacBeth - Shakespeare
The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton*
The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers^
The Message in a Bottle - Walker Percy
Metamorphoses - Kafka^
The Mind of the Maker - Dorothy L. Sayers*
Moneyball - Michael Lewis
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy L. Sayers
N (2)
Native Son - Wright^
The Nine Tailors - Dorothy L. Sayers
O (7)
O Pioneers! - Willa Cather^
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens^
On Stories - C.S. Lewis*
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Orthodoxy - G.K. Chesterton
Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis*
P (7)
The Pearl - Steinbeck^
Perelandra - C.S. Lewis*
Pilgrim at Tinker at Creek - Annie Dillard
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene^
The Price of Privilege
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain
R (7)
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane^
Resurrection - Tolstoy^
The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien*
Right Ho, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse^
The Rhetoric of Fiction
A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
A Room With a View - Forster^
S (6)
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Separate Peace - Knowles^
Signposts in a Strange Land - Walker Percy
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Strong Poison - Dorothy L. Sayers*
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
T (9)
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens^
Telling the Truth - Beuchner
That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis*
Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis*
Theology in America
Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Tolkien and Lewis
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Smith^
The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien*
U (4)
unChristian
Uncle Tom's Cabin - H.B. Stowe^
Unhooked - Laura Sessions
Unnatural Death - Dorothy L. Sayers
V (1)
The Violent Bear it Away - Flannery O'Connor
W (8)
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Weight of Glory - C.S. Lewis*
What the Best College Professors Do
Whose Body? - Dorothy L. Sayers*
Will in the Word
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle*
No comments:
Post a Comment