Thursday, December 4, 2014

SUGGESTED BOOKS FOR 2015


CATEGORIES IN WHICH THE BOOKS ARE DIVIDED
Re-reading books we have read before
A selection from the Bible.
A selection from the Greeks
A selection from Shakespeare
A work of poetry
A non-Western selection
A selection by a female author
A recent (1915-1965) selection
A shorter work
A longer work
Unclassified (I was too lazy to place them in a category)
Some books are listed in multiple categories.


RE-READ BOOKS WE HAVE READ BEFORE

Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Candide (1759) by Voltaire 

Middlemarch by George Eliot 

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Hardy

Bleak House by Dickens 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe


A SELECTION FROM THE BIBLE

Book of Ruth

Acts of the Apostles

Gospel of Luke

Esther


A SELECTION FROM THE GREEKS (OR ANCIENT ROMANS)

The Nature of Things by Lucretius

Electra by Sophocles 

Sappho’s poems 

Gorgias by Plato

Epictetus, Discourses; 

Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica


A SELECTION FROM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear by Shakespeare 
(Heart of America Shakespeare Festival 2015)


A WORK OF POETRY

A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman 

The Wasteland by T.S.Eliot 

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer

Ariel by Sylvia Plath


A NON-WESTERN SELECTION

The Plum in the Golden Vase by Jin Ping Mei 
(also known as THE GOLDEN LOTUS; 2 volumes) (1610)

Bhagavad Gita

The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin 

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, 


A SELECTION BY A FEMALE AUTHORS

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Dalloway

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Blazing World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle

Sappho’s poems

Sonnets from the Portuguese by E.B. Browning, 

Ariel by Sylvia Plath,

(There are several books under the “Previously read books” category that are by women authors.) 


A RECENT (1915-1965) SELECTION

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheltering_Sky


I, Claudius by Robert Graves

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(novel)

Chronicles of a Death Foretold (1981) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

The Last Puritan by George Santayana

The Life of Reason by George Santayana

The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus

Palace of Desire (1953; volume 2 in The Cairo Trilogy) by Naguib Mahfouz 

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
East of Eden by Steinbeck   

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Hardy 

Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess,  

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Being and Nothingness by Sartre

Being and Time by Heidegger

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

Snopes Trilogy by Faulkner

Cairo Trilogy by Mahfouz

USA Trilogy by Dos Passos’

Diary, Volume One (1953-56) by Polish émigré, Witold Gombrowicz 


A SHORTER WORK

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

A Short Story or 2 from a collection, say
Holding Pattern by Jeffrey Renard Allen

Areopagiticus by John Milton 

The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

Tractatus by Wittgenstein

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.


A LONGER WORK


Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust 

Our Mutual Friend by Dickens 

Bleak House by Dickens 

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth 

The Cairo Trilogy by Long Mahfouz

The Snopes Trilogy by Faulkner

The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos


UNCLASSIFIED (I was too lazy to place them in a category)

Njáls saga (Icelandic)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Njáls_saga

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream) by Francesco Colonna, c. 1599, 1999 translation by Jocelyn Godwin  

The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774) by Goethe 
(written when Goethe was in his 20’s;  said by some to be the first “best seller”)

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky

Critique of Pure Reason by Kant


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