<p>What would you suggest they read? (Looking for classics, today’s best sellers, your favorites, etc.)</p>
<p>I’d try to find a mix of intelligent leisure, and classical. To me, the one author that can fall in the rare category of both classical and enjoyable is Orwell. Animal Farm and 1984 are two books I both enjoyed and got a ton out of. Usually I enjoy legal fiction (Grisham), sci-fi (Song of Fire and Ice, LotR, Harry Potter, Dark Tower), and general thrillers (Baldacci, Custer, Koontz, etc)</p>
<p>I’m currently reading “Freakonomics” which is both changing the way I think and providing plenty of laughs.</p>
<p>Suppose you can read an average of two books a week over your reading lifetime. I think that would be on the high side for the general population, but this is CC - a bookish bunch - and I’m also approximating the reading demands on high school and college students. That’s maybe 8000 books - not many considering all the important writers, concepts, and ideas out there. Kinda makes me feel guilty about all the murder mysteries in my bookcases. </p>
<p>Something that puts me in touch with many viewpoints and cultures I wouldn’t ordinarily seek out is The New Yorker. I feel well-read when I’m reading it. :)</p>
<p>Wow, it would take a long time to make this list. I’ll start with some “classic” American authors: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Roth, Vonnegut, Capote…</p>
<p>Just a start.</p>
<p>ooh dead white guys my favorite ;)</p>
<p>( love Vonnegut though)</p>
<p>I would suggest the Odyssey- I like Fagles translation
Didion for incisive commentary
ditto Sontag & Liebowitz</p>
<p>hm</p>
<p>My bookgroup reads books we often wouldn’t read on our own-
I have read or tried to several by Jane Austen, Uncle Toms Cabin-, Guns Germs and Steel for discussion.</p>
<p>We are currently reading Songs of a Gorilla Nation ( my choice), by a woman with Aspergers , and have also read Train Go me Sorry( about students at a New York City school for the deaf)</p>
<p>Classics are important- as other works often have been influenced by or refer to them, but I also like more modern books that may expand my world a bit more</p>
<p>I would really recommend a book group to help motivate you to expand your reading selections- its helped me anyway</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/asp/main.aspx?page=1302&parent=1003#f[/url]”>http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/asp/main.aspx?page=1302&parent=1003#f</a></p>
<p>St. Johns College (two campuses- Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM) is a unique liberal arts college whose curriculum is comprised solely of a four year ‘Great Books’ program, involving the reading and discussion of some of the seminal intellectual works of western civilization. </p>
<p>Here is their reading lists for all four years of college. Although I have no doubt that people will hotly contest some of the selections, it is a good starting point. Also, note that it does not only include ‘literature’ in the strict sense, but also philosophy, theology, politics, science, and music. It is an attempt to give their students a ‘liberal’ education in the truest sense of the word.</p>
<p>For magazine reading, The Economist or The New Yorker couldn’t hurt either.</p>
<p>Shakespeare, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Wilde, Austen, Dickens, Hemingway, Whitman, Nabokov, Orwell, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dumas</p>
<p>Apologies to those who have already posted some of the works I’ll mention:
Iliad, Odyssey. Aeneid, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Donne’s poems,
Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, Candide, Romantic poems: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Blake, Austen novel, Brontes, Trollope novel, Dixkens novel, Emerson’s essays, Walden, Emily Dickinson poems, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, Hucklebury Finn, Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Balzac novel, Stendhal novel, Flaubert novel, Swan’s Way, Woolf, Joyce, Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Oscar Wilde, The Stranger, Kafka, Borges. Poems of Rilke, Rimbaud, Russian poetry, War and Peace, Doestoyevsky novel, Chekov. Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Mailer, Updike, Roth, Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin. Yeats, Eliot, Lolita, A Hundred Years of Solitude.</p>
<p>Plato, Kant, Hegel + Modern philosopher of choice.</p>
<p>Freud, Jung, Skinner + Feminist psychologist of choice.</p>
<p>Newton, Darwin, Hawking + Environmentalist of choice.</p>
<p>Mead, Levi-Straus, Marx, 'Engels, Saussure + Modern sociologist/anthropologist.</p>
<p>Heroditus, Gibbon, + historians of choice, including historians of American history.</p>
<p>Woolstonecraft, Friedan + contemporary feminist of choice.</p>
<p>I think the usual suspects have been listed here. I’ll add that the year I traveled across the US I read the Norton Anthology of American Literature cover to cover and have never regretted it. Not even some of the really boring authors! I like to read a mix of books, including a smattering of bestsellers especially the ones it seems EVERYONE is reading.</p>
<p>I never read as much non-fiction as I think I should, but really enjoyed Freakonomics, Collapse, most of The Panda’s Thumb and other essay collections by Gould, Lives of the Cell and Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures.</p>
<p>My humanities class this year, titled Human Being and Citizen at the University of Chicago, read: The Apology, Euthyphro, The Iliad, Genesis, Nicomachean Ethics, Confessions (St. Augustine), Inferno, Troilus and Cressida, a series of American Documents (Constitution, Dec. of Ind., fed papers #10 and #51, Mayflower Compact, Gettysburg Address, Letter from a Birmingham Jail–I think I got that name right, some poetry, some other documents), Hadji Murad, and a couple other texts that I’m forgetting.</p>
<p>I could list a whole lot of books of my own choosing, the books in my social sciences class which are just as valuable, and other texts from other humanities classes, but I’m feeling pretty tired. Mythmom gave a nice list. My list would have a number of overlaps, I believe.</p>
<p>I’ll just quickly add that I enjoyed Equus, and I think that reading it was worth-while. No one has mentioned it yet.</p>
<p>I’m so pleased corranged added Dante! How could I forget?</p>
<p>corranged, I didn’t really include drama. Your Equus is a good idea plus: Oresteia, Oedipus Cycle, Euripedes, Aristophones, Moliere, Racine, de Vega, Shaw, O’Casey, Ibsen, Chekov mentioned, O’Neill, Williams, Miller, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee.</p>
<p>From Africa my two favorites are: Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka (Nobel laureate 1983), So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba, Noma winner 1980. (Though I guess Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe would be the more “classic” choice. Achebe’s critical works, like his not-to-be-missed piece on Conrad, are also widely studied.)</p>
<p>To the US writers on the list, I would add Maya Angelou, particularly her autobiographical works.</p>
<p>Oh, and this thread has gone far too long without anyone mentioning Atlas Shrugged.</p>
<p>n’oubliez pas Montaigne.</p>
<p>Rather than Great Books of Civilization, how about Books That Are Fun and Meaningful? Or something like that…</p>
<p>Childhood’s End Arthur Clarke
Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers Robert Heinlein
The History of the English Speaking Peoples Winston Churchill
Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse Jered Diamond
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carre
The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler
The Hunt for Red October Tom Clancy
The Firm John Grisham
Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas and Hell’s Angels Hunter Thompson
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Right StuffTom Wolfe
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey
From Bauhaus to Our House Tom Wolfe</p>
<p>Fine with me WashDad. But in interest of completeness (yes you can say
obsessive, and thanks conyat for excellent additions) I feel I must add the Satanic Verses and Tale of Gengi.)</p>
<p>My additions to the list are a bit esoteric. Hopefully books for a well read person would include books on and by one of our founding father. Thus, my suggestion:</p>
<p>Dumas Malone’s six-volume authoritative biography of Thomas Jefferson, and the complete writing of Thomas Jefferson by himself.</p>
<p>For fiction, I would add Marcel Proust and Joyce.</p>
<p>Kate Chopin - The Awakening
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath</p>