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
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
currently reading: A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
“I’m with you in Rockland/where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter...”
-allen ginsburg-
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(UK: don't know what the equivalents are in other parts of the world) - I wouldn't buy an encyclopaedia, they go out of date quite quickly and are expensive.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)
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.
Last edited by Michael T; 04-29-2009 at 06:50 AM.
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.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
Yeah, I noticed how you slipped Fear and Loathing in there.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
currently reading: A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
“I’m with you in Rockland/where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter...”
-allen ginsburg-
Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie
The Wizard of Oz - L Frank Baum
Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Les Miserables,
Volume 1, Fifth Book, Chapter 3
Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
most excellent additions
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
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*
Last edited by a_little_wisp; 04-28-2009 at 09:27 PM.
Then she would run until morning to ease the ache; swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself.
-- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
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.thankyou everyone, this is really helpfull, I am currently on amazon buying all your suggestions, please keep them coming
thankyou mayneverhave
currently reading: A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
“I’m with you in Rockland/where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter...”
-allen ginsburg-
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
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