Composite illustration of a literary mug in front of of a work by a famous artist — OI forget the name, it was something like “Lascaux Cave.” Mug shot from here: http://tinyurl.com/bookmug-20130412.
I followed a link this week to an internet site that presented what looks to me like a pretty good list of books for an educated person to have read, ranging from ancient to classic to contemporary. What do you think of this list — both its components and it in its entirety? How much have you read? Don’t click that link until you’ve commented on the list.
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Reason By Thomas Paine
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The American Heritage Dictionary
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson & Peter Parnell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
The Bible by Various
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K Rowling
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Little House On the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Looking for Alaska by John Green
The Lorax by Dr Seuss
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
Song of Songs (author unknown perhaps King Solomon)
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
The Whole Lesbian Sex Book by Felicia Newman
Tell willie that I already checked, and the last title is not available in Braille, yet.
We need to let the publishers know that there is a demand.
dema,
you forget, i have people for things like reading books
This week’s OCRegister.com Dearthwatch:
The Register has begun to slip, while most local blogs are increasing their global ranking. (The “delta” number represents a site’s change in rank since April 2, 2013 with #1 being best; the more negative the number, the better.) Given that the better (closer to 1) the rank is, the greater change in readership generally required to move a site up or down ranks, the Voice of OC’s improving by almost 25,000 ranks is more impressive than our similar improvement.
I did not care for B Franklin’s auto-bio – brilliant man, but difficult to read.
That link might have been very interesting, if it gives background on the attempts to censor the works named, but I refuse to read something with such a plainly poor choice of background. Do they really expect anyone to read the text?
It’s a Weekend Open Thread, Mudge; I was willing to settle for only “mildly interesting.”
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984
*Ever since we saw “Reds” with Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton…..we have realized how truly wonderful….politics… are and how they work. Jim Brulte just mentioned in passing this week-end that Republicans are 28% of the voters in California. Dysfunctional politics? This has been going on for as long as their have been people on earth. Just think of Cain and Able….and their different marketing and political positioning. No one ever mentions what Adam and Eve were talking about …..behind their backs. The Snake knew…..but then….he wasn’t talking much. May have been where “family secrets” and “power politics” became all the rage! Ooops…did we say rage? We meant “upset enough to do something about it and failing miserably”. Yeah, we are definitely going to watch “Reds” again…..just to see how stuff works. That other movie
with Richard Gere is pretty good too – “Power”. If you haven’t seen it……don’t bother to ever run for office and even vote for someone running for office.
Diane Keaton was babysitter to my younger siblings – Santa Ana gal was she.
Curious reaction, if it’s a response to my Dearthwatch.
*No Dr. D.,
Good info for sure….we appreciated all of it.
Leaves of Grass was one the favorites work of Pablo Neruda. The poet Jim Cohn, another admirer of Walt Whitman writes:
“In the 90’s, I encountered Whitman again. In Valparaiso, I visited Pablo Neruda’s home high on steep hillside narrow impossible streets overlooking the city and the sea. I was struck that a poet’s home could offer such solace to people from around the world. It had a magnetism all its own. Neruda was a Leaves of Grass collector. He had all the editions. Walking into his study, I was taken aback by the large photograph of Whitman in pinstripes and began to weep. Standing there, gazing on the rock star-sized image of Whitman dressed to the nines across from Neruda’s writing desk, I felt the great heart of the eloquent postcolonial Chilean ghost calling upon the strident ghost of American colossal nationalism and universal liberation. In “We Live in a Whitmanesque Age (A Speech to P.E.N.),” published in the April 14, 1972 New York Times, Pablo Neruda declared:
For my part, I, who am now nearing seventy, discovered Walt Whitman when I was just fifteen, and I hold him to be my greatest creditor. I stand before you feeling that I bear with me always this great and wonderful debt which has helped me to exist.”
On a side note, Neruda’s body was exhumed last week, after claims that he died as a result of poisoning in 1973. This was after Thatcher’s friend, Pinochet, took power in Chile.
And on a side side note, the unintentionally hilarious Senator Rand Paul, shortly before schooling an African-American university on African-American history, tried to win over the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and show how Latino-friendly he is by reciting a Neruda love poem.
BRING BACK AQUA-BUDDHA!