Hey, we just brought a new house and I have been given the spare room to start my own library. I have quite a few books but was just wondering what fiction and non-fiction is essential for my library, thanks
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Hey, we just brought a new house and I have been given the spare room to start my own library. I have quite a few books but was just wondering what fiction and non-fiction is essential for my library, thanks
Ulysses
The Bible
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Nietschze/Marx/any philosopher
What you put in your personal library is entirely up to you and depends upon your personal interests.
If you do not have one already, then a good dictionary is an essential, I believe. Then ask yourself what you cannt do without in the way of reference books: I'd be lost without a fairly extensive overview of literature, similar volumes for music, gardening, wildlife, birds, history, cookery, an Atlas, a general information book which can be updated from time to time such as Whitacker's Almanac or Hutchings Factfinder (UK: don't know what the equivalents are in other parts of the world) - I wouldn't buy an encyclopaedia, they go out of date quite quickly and are expensive. Like Kelby, I'd want a Complete Works and a Bible, preferably one with an Apocrypha. I'd also like a good Anthology of English Poetry.
Thereafter, what you put on your shelves will reflect your interests and the development of your collection will reflect your changing interests over the years.
Lucky you, to have a room just for books!
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Two volumes)
'Roget's Thesaurus'
'The History of Western Philosophy' Bertrand Russell
'The Shorter Routeledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy'
'The Road To Reality' Roger Penrose (A complete guide to the laws of the Universe)
'World Politics, 1945 - 2000' (8th Edition) Peter Calvocoressi
'The Norton Anthology of Poetry' Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy.
'The Norton Shakespeare' (Based on the Oxford edition)
'The Norton Anthology of American Literature' (Volumes 1 & 2)
'The Riverside Chaucer'
'The Oxford Companion to English Literature'
'The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism'
'The Times Atlas of the World'
'Pears Cyclopaedia' (Latest edition)
Work outwards from there. All good literature is worth having on your shelf, and it looks like you're going to get some great suggestions on this thread. (I'll give you one...Anna Karenina) :D
Beware of just lifting any old philosopher off the shelf...It can lead to utter confusion and taking things out of context. If you feel you do want to look further into philosophy then Plato is the place to start...after the Russell book above. :)
The books I find indispensable line the top shelf of my bookcase and are:
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
1984
Lolita
On the Road
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Old Man and the Sea
A Moveable Feast
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Dante's Inferno
Ovid's Metamorphoses
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Flowers of Evil
The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot
The Oresteia
The Oedipus Cycle
The Complete Plays of Aristophanes
The Tragedies of Seneca
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Eight Dramas of Calderon
The Works of Jean Racine
Waiting For Godot
The Republic
Montaigne's Essays
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The cornerstone of a good library is always the reader's favorite texts. A personal library should reflect a point of view, but at the same time be varied, both hard and soft, with lightweight champions mixed in with the serious heavyweights.
Yeah, I noticed how you slipped Fear and Loathing in there.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Might want to squeeze in some philosophy there. Plato's <b>Republic</b>, maybe some Voltaire or some transcendentalists. And I'll back the Shakespeare, Gatsby, and Moby Dick in addition to the others mortalterror listed.
thankyou everyone, this is really helpfull, I am currently on amazon buying all your suggestions, please keep them coming :)
Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie
The Wizard of Oz - L Frank Baum
Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
most excellent additions :).Quote:
Originally Posted by BienvenuJDC
EXCELLENT choices, guys!! As kasie says, you really should go on your personal interests - my bookshelves are chock full of random stuff: Toni Morrison's Beloved is sitting by Tolkien's Silmarillion which is crushed next to Night Flight by de Saint-Exupery which clings to Dostoevsky's The Idiot which is right next to Shanna, a fabulous romance novel by Kathleen Woodiwiss (the last book on that shelf is Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged). Michael T's is probably one of my favorites because I'm big on anthologies, but kelby, mortalterror, and blackbird all had awesome selections too.
I'm going to go in a weird direction here (and try not to list anything that has already been listed too). Some of them are children's books, yes.
Le Petit Prince- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
King Arthur and His Knights- Sir Thomas Malory
The Once and Future King - White
Poetry, poetry, poetry. Get the Norton Anthology.
Beowulf
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There- Carroll
Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Canterbury Tales -Chaucer
Peter Pan - Barrie
Paradise Lost - Milton
The Divine Comedy - Alighieri
Pride and Prejudice - Austen
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer- Twain
The Art of Loving - Fromm
Art of War- Sun Tzu
All The King's Men- Warren
Wuthering Heights - Bronte
Great Expectations - Dickens
Shogun- Clavell
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure - Hardy
I like Virginia Woolf, but I don't own any individual copies of her work, they're mostly in my anthologies.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Glass Menagerie- Tennessee Williams
The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) - Tolkien
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway- Hemingway
The Three Musketeers - Dumas
The Wind in the Willows - Grahame
Fairy Tale Anthologies - be they by Grimm, Anderson, be they of Russian origin, German, etc. - Fairy tales are so important.
Edith Hamilton's Mythology - Bulfinch is cool too.
And if you're feeling reeeally flexible - The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis) and The Last Unicorn (Beagle) and any compilation of nursery rhymes.
Children's stories aren't always just children's stories, and sometimes hold as much wisdom as any weighty read, if one truly reads them. Strange list... but... yeah.
Edit: And the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid. ... Did anyone post that? *Goes to check*
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Also, I second the previous poster's recommendations of
The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.
If you interested in a comprehensive list of "canonical works", there are plenty of lists online, compiled by various scholars. Either that or just search the table of contents in the various Norton Anthologies.Quote:
Originally Posted by k.brignell
thankyou mayneverhaveQuote:
Originally Posted by mayneverhave
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
Lolita - Nabakov
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Independence Day - Richard Ford
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
Underworld - Don DeLillo
The Outsider - Camus
The Great Gatsby - Scott Fitzgerald
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
Sabbath's Theatre - Philip Roth
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Collected Poem - WB Yeats
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
What we talk about when we talk about love - Carver
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Let's get real. The works of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, J.M. Barrie, etc... don't come near to qualifying as essential bits of literature... books that every home library SHOULD have... in spite of how much I may actually like these writers. If you are seeking to construct a library of the central works of Western literature... specifically in the English language... then the canonical works would include books such as:
The Bible (King James Version)
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Orestia- Aeschylus
The Oedipus Plays- Sophocles
The Collected Works of Plato
The Poems of Sapho
The Metamorphoses- Ovid
Collected Poems- Horace
The Divine Comedy- Dante
Collected Poems- Petrarch
Collected Essays- Michel de Montaigne
Plays- Moliere
Don Quixote- Cervantes
The Arabian Nights Entertainments
Canterbury Tales- Chaucer
Paradise Lost- Milton
The Faerie Queene- Spenser
The Collected Poems- John Donne
Tristam Shandy- Lawrence Sterne
Selected Poems by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake
War and Peace- Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov- Dostoevsky
Collected Stories- Checkoff
Madame Bovary- Flaubert
Flowers of Evil- Baudelaire
Leaves of Grass- Walt Whitman
Collected Verse- Emily Dickinson
Faust- Goethe
Confessions- Rousseau
Les Miserables- Victor Hugo
Moby Dick- Melville
Collected Essays- Emerson
The Life of Johnson- Boswell
A Tale of Two Cities- Dickens
Collected Poems- T.S. Eliot
Collected Poems- Wallace Stevens
Collected Stories- Kafka
Illuminations/A Season in Hell- Rimbaud
In Search of Lost Time- Proust
As I Lay Dying- Faulkner
Collected Short Stories- Hemingway
End Game- Beckett
Ulysses- Joyce
Ficciones/Labyrinths- J.L. Borges
etc...
All this would be but scraping the surface and one could certainly go much deeper into any area... more French, more German, more Italian, etc... This would also ignore the brilliance and depth of non-Western literature (excepting the Arabian Nights) and here one might start with the Indian epics (Mahabharata, Ramayana), the Tao Te Ching, the poems of the great Chinese poets such as Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei... the poetry of the great Japanese poets including Buson, Hitomaro, Akiko, Ladi Issa, etc... and the great Persian Epic, The Shahnameh... as well as the Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, Attar, and Omar Khayyam.
What it really comes down to is the reality that the works that are essential to you in your personal library are those books that you find indispensable. Personally I find such central canonical works as I listed above necessary because they continue to resonate through the whole of literature... beyond the fact that most of them are just damn good reading. But certainly there are any number of other books that I personally find indispensable... although they may not be truly central texts. Among these I'd include The poetry of Rilke, Verlaine, Garcia-Lorca, Holderlin, Montale, Cavalcanti, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Thomas Traherne, Neruda, Robert Herrick, etc... as well as the prose writings of Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities!!), Zola, Voltaire, Hawthorne, Poe, Jane Austen, Thomas hardy, Walter Pater, etc...
Good luck on your shopping spree!:thumbs_up
Guess which books you forgot? Its actually remarkable that you did mention Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and so on when it comes to eastern literature.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
But after the Bible it`s ok to mention the Quran (Koran) and the Lotus Sutra as must have (religious) books.
But your list is very good indeed!
Yes... and I admitted that my list was but a beginning. The Qur'an and the Bhagavad Gita, The Rig-Veda, the Upanishads, Herdotus, the Icelandic Sagas, Aristophanes, Euripides, Lucretius, Catullus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Sei Shonagon, Pessoa... on and on we go.:p
...Leopardi...
4 Confucian classics and a couple translations of 300 T'ang poems are a nice touch too.
Tao Te Ching is also a must have - but really there are about 500 must haves from the West-European+American tradition alone.
JBI... I was waiting for you to throw Leopardi in there (I left him out on purpose:D) but you're slipping, man: "there are about 500 must haves from the West-European+American tradition alone?" What!!?? No mention of a Canadian?:brow:
I beg to disagree. I think that Catch-22 is as good as Don Quixote but since it came later it is judged by a different set of standards. I don't know why you feel so confident that you can dismiss it out of hand, as a strong contender for the best book of the twentieth century while still including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. I see that you grouped The Aeneid along with Paradise Lost, and I think that Catch-22 bears a corresponding relationship with Don Quixote.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Be that as it may, your list is wonderfully inclusive, almost stiflingly so. An all encompassing, dare I say encyclopedic list that leaves hardly anything out. This may be a virtue in a public library, but what gives the personal library it's character is as much what is left out, the pointed omissions, as what is left in. If we do not exclude certain books which are not to our taste then what remains will have no form of it's own. It will feel like a reference stack compiled from anthologies.
A home library should make a statement, should say something about the person who owns it. There should be an inordinate abundance of titles by a favorite author, the startling omission of some sacred cow, and a preponderance of works from a given period or language. You'll note that in my own list I include American and French works but snub the Russians and English novelists. This was a deliberate choice. I included nearly the complete Greek and Roman dramatic canon but there are gaps covering the entire middle ages and the three centuries from Racine to Beckett. The message of Plato's Republic standing almost alone representing philosophical works would be watered down by adding Rousseau, Locke, or Hegel. It also makes a different point than if I'd gone with Aristotle. Sometimes including a single work to stand for a whole epoch is a more potent statement than every title available. That's one way to build a library.
Canada is not part of the so called "Western" tradition. The reason, is firstly, Canada was rejected from it, and secondly, Canada developed a tradition completely away from it, which incorporates many elements completely outside of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I disagree, if I were looking for the Great Book of the twentieth century (something which I dislike doing, as it is really too difficult a question), I wouldn't dwell much on Heller's Catch 22. Quite simply, when compared to Lu Xun (Hsun)'s Call to Arms, it doesn't even scrape the surface. Even Mann's The Magic Mountain doesn't seem compare to Lu Xun. That being said, one must also take into account every genre, not just novels. And when that happens, I would put something like Eliot's Complete Poems as far more valuable to me than any of the so mentioned names.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Either way though, I don't think much of Catch 22, but when considering the essentials, one must have a wider range than 4 countries.
I beg to disagree. I think that Catch-22 is as good as Don Quixote but since it came later it is judged by a different set of standards. I don't know why you feel so confident that you can dismiss it out of hand, as a strong contender for the best book of the twentieth century while still including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. I see that you grouped The Aeneid along with Paradise Lost, and I think that Catch-22 bears a corresponding relationship with Don Quixote.
Catch-22 struck me as a good read but surely not near a central text of the 20th century, let alone of all time. It is certainly not a book that has drawn me back again and again and again. For me, such texts would include the writings of J.L Borges, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino... the poems of T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Rilke, and a few others.
Be that as it may, your list is wonderfully inclusive, almost stiflingly so. An all encompassing, dare I say encyclopedic list that leaves hardly anything out. This may be a virtue in a public library, but what gives the personal library it's character is as much what is left out, the pointed omissions, as what is left in. If we do not exclude certain books which are not to our taste then what remains will have no form of it's own. It will feel like a reference stack compiled from anthologies.
Undoubtedly the inclusiveness of my list is owed to the scale of my personal library. Had someone asked the same question when I was just out of high-school my list would probably have been heavy in the works of the Russians, French poets, and a few clearly iconic figures such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, and Dante. As my library now numbers some 3000 books it is necessarily more inclusive. Even so... as any library... it has its biases... if only owing to the fact that I am an English-speaking reader and am dependent upon the accessibility of certain works in English. Personally, I see no problem with reading and owning books that are in strict disagreement. I have argued with both Plato and Rousseau extensively in the margins... yet feel both are essential reads. With time, however, I have come much closer to Montaigne, Emerson, and others.
Looking at my shelves, the English-language writers dominate... and this is undoubtedly owed to the fact that I tend to be more enamored of poetry than the novel and poetry is perhaps the most difficult genre to translate. Thus I have all of the great English Romantics (Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth) as well as the secondary English Romantics (Robert Burns, Arthur Hugh Clough, John Clare, Emily Bronte...) as well as the Americans (Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, Tuckerman, Dickenson, Whitman, etc...). Yet from the same period I have little in French poetry and am limited to Goethe, Holderlin, Novalis, Heine, and Morike among the Germans. Certain indisputably central figures such as Virgil, Homer, Dante, Sappho, Horace, Baudelaire, etc... have been quite ably translated. Others... not so much so. I've found Holderlin in translation by Micheal Hamburger and Rilke by Edward Snow has fared far better than Goethe in many instances... and Goethe has fared far better than Pierre Ronsard, Francisco de Quevedo, Gustavo Adolpho Becquer... and until just recently: Luis Gongora and Victor Hugo.
Certainly I acknowledge the strength of the Russians... but having a clear preference for poetry followed by shorter fiction and non-fiction prose... the Russians certainly lose out. I have studied the history of literature (and the accompanying history of art) enough to recognize that the Baroque-era was a golden age of literature and art in Spain... yet I have scant little to prove this is so... at least in terms of literature: Not a single volume by Becquer, a sole, but recently acquired volume on Gongora, a few poems by most of the other poets in slim anthologies, a few bits of theater by Rojas, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon de la Barca. The most complete works I have beyond Cervantes (at least prior to the 20th century) are the romance Tirant lo Blanc by Martorell and De Galba praised by Cervates and ably translated by David Rosenthal, The Poem of the Cid marvelously translated by W.S. Merwin, and the poems of San Juan de la Cruz translated by Roy Campbell and John F. Nims.
I will also note that having owned and read a book and admitted to its merits is no where near the same as liking or loving it. I cannot help but recognize and admit to Joyce's centrality among Modernist prose... but I'll take Proust, Kafka, Borges... even Joyce's follower, Beckett over him by personal preference.
Don Quixote struck me about the same way; but instead of low-rating it, I was reminded of how some people still fail to understand the exquisite beauty of Catch-22 and what a tragedy that can be. I consoled myself that at least I liked one of them and if I'd lost one treasure I'd found another.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I've noticed this funny trade off more than once in my readings where I'll have nothing but disdain for one artist and completely love another similar one who does all the things I think I dislike in his alternate. I can't stand Dickens for his plot contrivances and phony bologna characters, but I'm awe struck by the same things in Hugo.
If you do not think that Catch-22 is one of the best books of the twentieth century, allow me to offer the possibility that you undervalue comedy in your aesthetic appraisal. You routinely recommend Joyce and Borges but rarely mention Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence, Petronius, Rabelais, Farquhar, Wycherley, Etherege, Goldsmith, Swift, Gay, Congreve, Goldoni, Gozzi, Lesage, Wilmot, Marivaux, Fielding, Peacock, Wilde, Twain, or Wodehouse. Comedy has a hard time getting itself taken seriously, in the world as well as on these boards.
First off, Wow! I wish I had enough money to do that!Quote:
Originally Posted by k.brignell
Second, I think the best library is the one that you create on your own piece-by-piece. Tastes vary greatly and you may not like what others suggest. MortalTerror is right, here.
For example, my library would contain no Jane Austen, but that's just me
One more thing!
It's great to look at your old books and remember where you were when you first bought it. I actually keep the receipt in the book when I buy it. It makes a good bookmark, but more importantly, it timestamps the book. It's funny to look at a book you bought and say, "Wow, I bought this when I was doing X. I was so stupid back then!" Or something else like that.
Unless your goal is to just create a great library now, not necesarily to read, but to cover the important ground. If so, then proceed!
...allow me to offer the possibility that you undervalue comedy in your aesthetic appraisal. You routinely recommend Joyce and Borges but rarely mention Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence, Petronius, Rabelais, Farquhar, Wycherley, Etherege, Goldsmith, Swift, Gay, Congreve, Goldoni, Gozzi, Lesage, Wilmot, Marivaux, Fielding, Peacock, Wilde, Twain, or Wodehouse. Comedy has a hard time getting itself taken seriously, in the world as well as on these boards.
I don't know that this is entirely valid. I have mentioned Wilde more than once and certainly would include Swift among the "must reads" (Haven't we already discussed A Modest Proposal?). To this I would add Sterne, Boccaccio, Marivaux, Moliere, surely Cervantes and Twain... but also Bulgakov, Landolfi, Gogol, etc... Of course my own sense of humor leans toward something darker and twisted so I would also add Kafka, Faulkner, O'Connor, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthleme, etc...
No home library should be without comics: Maus, Watchmen, Persepolis, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Understanding Comics, A Contract With God, Starman Omibus. . . just to name a few.
Yours is an impressive list (and a motivating one) St Lukes but as you recognise, a work does not have to be canonical to be essential. Judge time may not be kind to some of the books i've mentioned but they nevertheless loom large in my library and in my reading. So it's in with Heller and out with Cervantes .:) I think MortalTerror has the right idea in general here.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
whyever not?? Saint-Exupery's and Barrie's works have resounded in the hearts of children though the ages...would you actually say that disqualifies them from being considered classics? quintessential literature, even, especially to develop imaginations and to prepare them for the heavier reading you listed? Speaking as an eighteen-year-old, I can already understand how those books I read earlier in my reading experiences have strengthened my mental foundation for these works.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Furthermore, writing to both children AND adults (as Saint-Exupery undeniably does) is NOT an easy thing to do; at least, admire their artistry.
I find Barrie indispensible. And Dorothy L. Sayers. J.R.R. Tolkien. I mention these in particular because they're not held in very high "classical" esteem among some.Quote:
What it really comes down to is the reality that the works that are essential to you in your personal library are those books that you find indispensable. Personally I find such central canonical works as I listed above necessary because they continue to resonate through the whole of literature... beyond the fact that most of them are just damn good reading. But certainly there are any number of other books that I personally find indispensable... although they may not be truly central texts.
Why not throw in a couple of Japanese manga, too? There are decent ones out there like "Angel Sanctuary" or "Full Metal Alchemist". :)Quote:
Originally Posted by The Comedian
Or how about The Redwall series by Brian Jacques if you happen to live with kids?
Not sure if these are mentioned, but here's a few anyway:
The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Diary Of Anne Frank
The Day Of The Triffids - John Wyndham
Call Of The Wild - Jack London
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin
Crime & Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Watchmen - Alan Moore
Dune - Frank Herbert
Sorry if the above are a little eclectic but I think the books above offer a mixture of longevity and interest, which means you (and others) are always guaranteed a good read. There's a few classics and some more contemporary fair; something for the oldies and the youngsters and some flights of imagination and some brain fodder too. :D
most essential books
Letters to a christian nation-sam hitchins (atheist book but should be read by anyone)
The god dellusion-richard dawkins (same as above)
The picture of dorian grey and other short storie-oscar wilde
The third policeman-Flann O'brien
And anything else that you like
Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker (covers evolution by natural selection- how it works etc. No one has the right to call themselves a thoughtful Christian until they have carefully read this. If your faith survives it then it will survive anything)
Stephen Hawking: A Brief History Of Time (opened the minds of a whole generation to black holes, space-time and event horizons)
Bertrand Russell: History Of Western Philosophy (not only covers the flow of western thought from the Greeks to Bergson but sets it in its historical context)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World and George Orwell: 1984- books to be lived with, meditated upon and discussed.
Shakespeare's plays, or at least Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest
E H Gombrich: The Story Of Art
Those ones you really, really, really like or would consider reading again and again!Quote:
Originally Posted by k.brignell
I started to collect books just after joining LitNet, when I was compelled by interest (and something more) to obtain two books which were receiving scrutiny on the boards at the time. Another relatively thorough forum discussion of a Robert Frost poem had me getting a small used edition of his collected works so that, not only could I read that specific poem when I had the urge, but I could also see whether anything else he penned was as rich.Quote:
Originally Posted by k.brignell
Since then I've purchased or collected more than 3,000 books. Searching for specific books and idly browsing used book stores has been a large part of my life for years now. I live in a relatively small town which is blessed with 3 used books stores and 4 thrift stores. The former tend to overprice books (and I don't hold this against them), whereas the latter typically sell paperbacks for $.50 and hardbacks for $1. Out of even this small environment I've found ample variety. What I am deprived of locally can be obtained via the Internet and travel.
The 1200 or so books which comprise my 8 floor to ceiling bookcases would be able participants in a decent liberal education, to my mind. I have bookcases devoted to American history and literature, Shakespeare and poetry, Science and autodidaction, Philosophy and anthologies, etc.
I did not begin my activities with any particular objective, unless it were to discover what was most pleasurable and profitable in the world of letters and ideas. Which act, I think, is a moving personal experience.
I should add that my views on what constitutes "great" literature largely coincide with those of stlukesguild (inasmuch as I've seen). I imagine that some would identify my views as "elitist." I think this description, in its best sense, is a just one.
Sounds like a great journey.Quote:
Originally Posted by ShoutGrace
Richard Dawkins: The Ancestor's Tale is an absolute must. Some people think 'The Blind Watchmaker' is the best introduction to evolution by natural selection and his best book, but I have a feeling this will be seen as his greatest work. It is the most complete and up to date account of, well, how we got here that I am aware of.
A nice variety of golden books. Even if you don't have children, it's nice to have a couple sitting on the lower shelf for little guests. Many of the stories are just so sweet, and I'll admit I'm a sucker for uniform books sitting on the shelf. I read them all the time. :redface:
For other books,
Anna Karenina
The Phantom of the Opera
Grapes of Wrath
Where the Red Fern Grows
No Promises in the Wind
The Princess Bride
I concur.Quote:
Originally Posted by sixsmith
Stlukesguild's list got it ('bout time somebody mentioned Moliere)
But the previous holding up of Heller to Cervantes tho...*edits endless versions of satirical, cliched remarks, because they fail to convey*