3 posts tagged “books”
Found here, but who knows from whence it came?
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Below is a list of the 106 books most likely to languish, unread, on the bookshelves of people who only want to seem cultured and well-read. If you want to play along:
green for the titles you've read on your own,
teal for the ones you had to read for school,
purple for the ones you started but didn't finish,
red for the ones you hated,
blue for those you'd recommend
orange for those you'd like to/plan to read
Let the List begin
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Ulysses
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
Moby Dick
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Illiad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - Excerpts
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
You have $100 to spend online in the next hour. How are you going to spend it?
I'd buy about half of my textbooks for the coming semester.
Some of my favorite books that I read this last year in the order completed, with comments as they come to me.
It may not be the most readable edition of this most ancient piece of literature, but the scholarly notes are very helpful and ignorable when you don't care to read them. Highly recommended for anyone who's never read ancient classic literature.
For the inner professor in all of us.
Von Balthasar is maddeningly brilliant (a rarity among Catholic theologians), but he had a notoriously difficult time making himself understandable. This isn't light reading, but it's still a great examination of how the Christian ought to respond the anxieties of life.
Has the classical sense of man been abolished? Lewis thought so, and makes a pretty good case. Necessary reading for those interested in today's cultural crises.
Regrettably, this was the first time I've read this incredible epic. Thankfully, I finally read it.
Surprisingly good children's stories from Oscar Wilde.
This essay's a bit tweedy, but post-war philosopher Pieper makes his case for the necessity of leisure time, and has a few critiques of German industrialism.
Makes more sense than the movie. I read the novel in preparation for a Metaphilm essay connecting the film with Thomism that never materialized. Oh well.
Ok, I haven't finished this one, but it's still good.
Excellent book, though it's probably too much for the casual reader. This one's intended for students and prospective intellectuals.
This biography by Joseph Pearce specifically examines Lewis's tumultuous relationship with the Catholic Church, specifically why he never converted.
Another tome by von Balthasar. I only wish I could remember half of the things he talked about.
A great epic poem with a great translation.
I shouldn't have waited so long to read this.
Nice meditation on the need for leisure (shades of Pieper?) in a science fiction setting.
A nice translation by Dorothy Sayers of an epic poem from medieval times. Sadly, only half of the poem is actually about Roland.
Far too tragic for children, in my opinion, but I loved it.
Mauriac is an under-appreciated novelist.
Full of helpful and realistic advice.
This probably wouldn't be interesting to non-liturgical Christians, but Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) has done a good job with this overview of liturgical history and how it should be applied today.
Not Dickens's most famous novel, but it was a wonderfully scathing and humorous rebuke to the industrialized methods of education and morality in vogue in England at the time.
No, you didn't see this. Keep moving.
Plans for 2007: More fiction and more classical works. Maybe I'll even finish Thucydides.
