From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Some Canonical Lists
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 21:29:31 GMT


                                  Saturday, the 15th of August, 1992

Part 3 of 5, Continued.

**********
List 4: _The Lifetime Reading Plan_, by Clifton Fadiman (3rd edition)
      |The Beginning
1. Homer, _The Iliad_
2. Homer, _The Odyssey_
3. Herodotus, _The Histories_
4. Thucydides, _The History of the Peloponnesian War_
5. Plato, Selected Works
6. Aristotle, _Ethics_, _Politics_
7. Aeschylus, _The Oresteia_
8. Sophocles, _Oedipus Rex_, _Oedipus at Colonus_, _Antigone_
9. Euripides, _Alcestis_, _Medea_, _Hipploytus_, Trojan Women_, _Electra_,
   _Bacchae_
10. Lucretius, _Of the Nature of Things_
11. Virgil, _The Aeneid_
12. Marcus Aurelius, _The Meditations_
       |The Middle Ages
13. Saint Augustine, _Confessions_
14. Dante Alighieri, _The Divine Comedy_
15. Geoffrey Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_
       |Plays
16. William Shakespeare, Complete Works
17. Moliere, Selected Plays
18. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, _Faust_
19. Henrik Ibsen, Selected Plays
20. George Bernard Shaw, Selcted Plays and Prefaces
21. Anton Chekhov, _Uncle Vanya_, _Three Sisters_, _The Cherry Orchard_
22. Eugene O'Neill, _Mourning Becomes Electra_, _The Iceman Cometh_,
    _Long Day's Journey into Night_
23. Samuel Beckett, _Waiting for Godot_, _Endgame_, _Krapp's Last Tape_
24. _Contemporary Drama_, edited by E. Bradlee Watson and Benfield Pressey
      |Narratives
25. John Bunyan, _Pilgrim's Progress_
26. Daniel Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_
27. Jonathon Swift, _Gulliver's Travels, _A Modest Proposal_,
     _Meditations upon a Broomstick_, _Resolutions when I Come to be Old_
28. Laurence Sterne, _Tristram Shandy_
29. Henry Fielding, _Tom Jones_
30. Jane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Emma_
31. Emily Bronte, _Wuthering Heights_
32. William Makepeace Thackeray, _Vanity Fair_
33. Charles Dickens, _Pickwick Papers_, _David Copperfield_, _Bleak House_,
    _Great Expectations_, _Hard Times_, _Our Mutual Friend_, _Little Dorrit_
34. George Eliot, _The Mill on the Floss_, _Middlemarch_
35. Lewis Carroll, _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_, _Through the Looking
    Glass_
36. Thomas Hardy, _The Mayor of Casterbridge_
37. Joseph Conrad, _Nostromo_
38. E.M. Forster, _A Passage to India_
39. James Joyce, _Ulysses_
40. Virginia Woolf, _Mrs. Dalloway_, _To the Lighthouse_, _Orlando_,
    _The Waves_
41. D.H. Lawrence, _Sons and Lovers_, _Women in Love_
42. Aldous Huxley, _Brave New World_, _Collected Essays_
43. George Orwell, _Animal Farm_, _Nineteen Eighty-Four_
44. Thomas Mann, _The Magic Mountain_
45. Franz Kafka, _The Trial_, _The Castle_, Selected Short Stories
46. Francois Rabelais, _Gargantua and Pantagruel_
47. Voltaire, _Candide_ and Selected Works
48. Stendhal, _The Red and the Black_
49. Honore de Balzac, _Pere Goriot_, _Eugenie Grandet_
50. Gustave Flaubert, _Madame Bovary_
51. Marcel Proust, _Remembrance of Things Past_
52. Andre Malraux, _Man's Fate_
53. Albert Camus, _The Plague_, _The Stranger_
54. Edgar Allan Poe, Short Stories and Other Works
55. Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Scarlet Letter_, Selcted Tales
56. Herman Melville, _Moby Dick_, _Bartleby the Scrivener_
57. Mark Twain, _Huckleberry Finn_
58. Henry James, _The Ambassadors_
59. William Faulkner, _The Sound and the Fury_, _As I Lay Dying_
60. Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories
61. Saul Bellow, _The Adventures of Augie March_, _Herzog_, _Humboldt's
    Gift_
62. Miguel de Cervantes de Saavedra, _Don Quixote_
63. Jorge Luis Borges, _Labyrinths_, _Dreamtigers_
64. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, _One Hundred Years of Solitude_
65. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, _Dead Souls_
66. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, _Fathers and Sons_
67. Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, _Crime and Punishment_, _The Brothers
    Karamazov_
68. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, _War and Peace_
69. Vladimir Nabokov, _Lolita_, _Pale Fire_, _Speak, Memory_
70. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, _The First Circle_, _Cancer Ward_
      |Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Essays
71. Thomas Hobbes, _Leviathan_
72. John Locke, _Second Treatise of Government_
73. David Hume, _An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_
74. John Stuart Mill, _On Liberty_
75. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, _The Communist Manifesto_
76. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, _Thus Spake Zarathustra_,
    Selected Other Works
77. Sigmund Freud, Selected Works
78. Niccolo Macchiavelli, _The Prince_
79. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Selected Essays
80. Rene Descartes, _Discourse on Method_
81. Blaise Pascal, _Thoughts_
82. Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_
83. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works
84. Henry David Thoreau, _Walden_, _Civil Disobedience_
85. William James, _The Principles of Psychology_, _Pragmatism_
    and Four Essays from _The Meaning of Truth_, _The Varieties of
    Religious Experience_
86. John Dewey, _Human Nature and Conduct_
87. George Santayana, _Skepticism and Animal Faith_, Selected Other Works
      |Poetry
88. John Donne, Selected Works
89. John Milton, _Paradise Lost_, _Lycidas_, _On the Morning of Christ's
    Nativity_, _Sonnets_, _Areopagitica_
90. William Blake, Selected Works
91. William Wordsworth, _The Prelude_, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface
    to the _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800
92. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, _The Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_,
    _Kubla Khan_, _Biographia Literaria_, _Writings on Shakespeare_
93. William Butler Yeats, _Collected Poems_, _Collected Plays_, _The
    Autobiography_
94. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems and Collected Plays
95. Walt Whitman, Selected Poems, _Democratic Vistas_, Preface
    to the first issue of _Leaves of Grass_ (1855), _A Backward Glance
    O'er Travel'd Roads_
96. Robert Frost, _Collected Poems_
97. _Poets of the English Language_, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman
    Holmes Pearson
98. _The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry_, edited by Richard Ellmann
    and Robert O'Clair
      |History, Biography, Autobiography
99. _Basic Documents in American History_, edited by Richard B. Morris
    _The Federalist Papers_, edited by Clinton Rossiter
100. Jean Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_
101. James Boswell, _The Life of Samuel Johnson_
102. Henry Adams, _The Education of Henry Adams_
103. Fernand Braudel, _The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World
     in the Age of Philip II_, _Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th
     Century_
        |Annex
I. William H. McNeill, _The Rise of the West_
   Will and Ariel Durant, _The Story of Civilization_
II. Samuel Eliot Morison, _The Oxford History of the American People_
    Page Smith, _A People's History of the United States_
III. Alfred North Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_
IV. Alfred North Whitehead, _An Introduction to Mathematics_
V. E.H. Gombrich, _The Story of Art_
VI. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, _How to Read a Book_

---

This is taken from the table of contents of Fadiman's book. The book
consists of a little bit of discussion about each one of his selections,
indicating what there might be to like about it.

Fadiman seems to be a scion of Mortimer Adler, and I think you can see
that in the overlap of this list with Adler's. But, I find Fadiman's
list much less daunting. There's a lot more emphasis on novels,
plays, and poetry here. There's a de-emphasis on the most heavy-duty
philosophy and science.

Fadiman is also much more willing to include 20th-Century works, and
as a result you see some more ``multicultural'' works appear.

I'd be much more inclined to advocate Fadiman's list as a core high-school
reading list (in my fantasy school program :-)) than either of Adler's
lists.

On this one, I've read all of 1., 2., 3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9.,
10., 11., 12., 14., 15., 18., 19., 22., 23., 35., 39., 43., 44.,
48., 53., 63., 64., and 78., for 27 out of 103.

**********

List 5: _Classics Revisited_ and _More Classics Revisited_ by
        Kenneth Rexroth
    From _Classics Revisited_
1. _The Epic of Gilgamesh_
2. Homer, _The Iliad_
3. Homer, _The Odyssey_
4. _Beowulf_
5. _Njal's Saga_
6. _Job_
7. _The Mahabharata_
8. _The Kalevala_
9. Sappho, Poems
10. Aeschylus, _The Oresteia_
11. Sophocles, _The Theban Plays_
12. Euripides
13. Herodotus, _History_
14. Thucydides, _The Peloponnesian War_
15. Plato, _The Trial and Death of Socrates_
16. Plato, _The Republic_
17. _The Greek Anthology_
18. Lucretius, _On the Nature of Things_
19. Livy, _Early Rome_
20. Julius Caesar, _The War in Gaul_
21. Petronius, _The Satyricon_
22. Tacitus, _Histories_
23. Plutarch, _Parallel Lives_
24. Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_
25. Apuleius, _The Golden Ass_
26. _Medieval Latin Lyrics_
27. Tu Fu, Poems
28. _Classic Japanese Poetry_
29. Lady Murasaki, _The Tale of Genji_
30. Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_
31. Rabelais, _The Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel_
32. Marco Polo, _The Travels of Marco Polo_
33. Thomas More, _Utopia_
34. Machiavelli, _The Prince_
35. Malory, _Le Morte d'Arthur_
36. Montaigne, _Essays_
37. Cervantes, _Don Quixote_
38. Shakespeare, _Macbeth_
39. Shakespeare, _The Tempest_
40. Webster, _The Duchess of Malfi_
41. Ben Jonson, _Volpone_
42. Izaak Walton, _The Compleat Angler_
43. John Bunyan, _Pilgrim's Progress_
44. Tsao Hsueh Chin, _The Dream of the Red Chamber_
45. Giacomo Casanova, _History of My Life_
46. Henry Fielding _Tom Jones_
47. Laurence Sterne, _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent._
48. Restif de la Bretonne, _Monsieur Nicolas_
49. Edward Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_
50. Stendhal, _The Red and the Black_
51. Baudelaire, Poems
52. Karl Marx, _The Communist Manifesto_
53. Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass_
54. Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_
55. Gustave Flaubert, _A Sentimental Education_
56. Tolstoy, _War and Peace_
57. Rimbaud, Poems
58. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, _Journal_
59. Mark Twain, _Huckleberry Finn_
60. Chekhov, Plays
     From _More Classics Revisited_:
61. _The Song of Songs_
62. Lao Tzu, _Tao Te Ching_
63. Euripides, _Hippolytus_
64. Aristotle, _Poetics_
65. Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius
66. _The Bhagavad-Gita_
67. Ssu-Ma Chien, _Records of the Grand Historian of China_
68. Catullus
69. Virgil, _The Aeneid_
70. The Early Irish Epic
71. Sei Shonagon, _The Pillow Book_
72. Abelard and Heloise
73. _Heike Monogatari_
74. St. Thomas Aquinas
75. The English and Scottish Popular Ballad
76. Racine, _Phedre_
77. Daniel Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_
78. Daniel Defoe, _Moll Flanders_
79. Jonathon Swift, _Gulliver's Travels_
80. Edward Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_
81. Choderlos de Laclos, _Dangerous Acquaintances_
82. Gilbert White, _A Natural History and Antiquity of Selbourne_
83. Robert Burns
84. William Blake
85. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
86.  Honore de Balzac
87. _The Journal of John Woolman_
88. Charles Dickens, _The Pickwick Papers_
89. Francis Parkman, _France and England in North America_
90. Harriet Beecher Stowe, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
91. Frederick Douglass
92. Ivan Turgenev, _Fathers and Sons_
93. Arthur Conan Doyle, ``Sherlock Holmes''
94. Alexander Berkman
95. Leo Tolstoy, _The Kingdom of God is within You_ 
96. H.G. Wells
97. William Butler Yeats, Plays
98. Ford Madox Ford, _Parade's End_
99. Franz Kafka, _The Trial_
100. Herbert Read, _The Green Child_
101. William Carlos Williams, Poems

---

I think these two books are lovely. For each entry on the list,
Rexroth wrote a one or two or three page appreciation. Apparently,
he was planning to collect them all in some way, but this list is
not so much an attempt to exclude I think so much as ``Here are some
books that I'd recommend.''

This is much more multicultural than anything we've seen so far, but
some of that is disappointing, since Rexroth knew Greek, Japanese,
and Chinese, and in a lot of the entries he decries the lack of a good English
translation.

I've read 1., 2., 3., 4., 6., 9., 10., 11., 12. (includes 63.), 13., 14.,
15., 16., 17., 18., 24., 27., 30., 32., 33., 34., 35., 38., 39.,
50., 51., 57., 61., 64., 65., 68., 69., 76., 88., 89., and 100., or
36 out of 100 of these.

**********

(continued to Part 4)
      
                 Mike Morris
              (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:14935 alt.folklore.urban:21844 rec.arts.sf.misc:2644 rec.humor:26637