101 in 1001
REBOOT! A friend and I started this experiment in April 2007. I’ve done a little tweaking and think I’ll give it another go. (NOTE: Some of these I’ve read before and plan to get to again.)
Ancient (up to 5th century A.D.), 15 works
1. Iliad, Homer (Fagles translation)
2. Odyssey, Homer (Lattimore translation)
3. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
4. The Clouds, Aristophanes
5. The Republic, Plato
6. Poetics, Aristotle
7. Confessions, Augustine
8. On the Incarnation, Athanasius
9. Metamorphoses, Ovid
10. The Aeneid, Virgil
Middle Ages (5th to 14th century), 18 works
1. Beowulf
2. The Seafarer
3. The Song of Roland
4. Divine Comedy, Dante (Sayers translation)
5. Gawain and the Green Knight
6. Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich
7. Piers Ploughman, Langland
8. Utopia, More
9. The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
10. A Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer
11. The Practice of the Presence of God, Lawrence
Early Modern (14th to 18th century), 18 works
1. Macbeth, Shakespeare
2. As You Like It, Shakespeare
3. Richard III, Shakespeare
4. Volpone, Ben Jonson
5. Paradise Lost, Milton (with Lewis’s preface)
6. Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan
7. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Law
8. The Faerie Queen, Spenser
9. Select Essays of Michel de Montaigne
10. King Lear, Shakespeare
11. Measure for Measure, Shakespeare
12. The Tempest, Shakespeare
13. Doctor Faustus, Marlowe14. The Prince, Machiavelli
15. Pensees, Pascal
16. Introduction to the Devout Life, de Sales
17. Candide, Voltaire
18. Phaedra, Jean Racine
Reason, Romanticism, Naturalism (18th to 1901), 18 works
1. Emma, Austen
2. Pride and Prejudice, Austen
3. Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge
4. The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal
5. Faust, Goethe
6. Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, Gibbon
7. Candide, Voltaire
8. Tom Jones, Fielding
9. The Social Contract, Rousseau
10. Founding Documents, various -Federalist Papers -Articles of Confederation -The Constitution -The Declaration of Independence
11. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo
12. Tristram Shandy, Sterne
13. Life of Johnson, Boswell
14. Pere Goriot, de Balzac
15. The Red and the Black, Stendhal
16. The Ambassadors, James
17. Frankenstein, Shelley
Modernism (late 19th to early 20th), 18 works
1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Neitzsche
2. The Birth of Tragedy, Neitzsche
3. Pygmalion, Shaw
4. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens
5. Bleak House, Dickens
6. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
7. The Origin of Species, Darwin
8. Essays, Emerson
9. Selected Poems, Yeats
10. A Doll’s House, Ibsen
11. Walden, Thoreau
12. Heart of Darkness, Conrad
13. Civil Disobedience, Thoreau
14. Moby Dick, Melville
15. The Mill on the Floss, Eliot
16. Huckleberry Finn, Twain
17. Jane Eyre, C. Bronte
18. Wuthering Heights, E. Bronte
Post-modernism (early to mid-twentieth), 18 works
1. Dubliners, Joyce
2. Ulysses, Joyce
3. Orthodoxy, Chesterton
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston
4. 1984, Orwell
5. The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn
6. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
7. How Should We Then Live?, Schaeffer
8. The Seven-Storey Mountain, Merton
9. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman
10. The Stranger, Camus
11. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
12. This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald
13. The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
14. The Fountainhead, Rand
15. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
16. All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
17. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin
18. Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys
19. The Wind in the Willows, Grahame
20. A Passage to India, Forster
21. Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner
22. Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez
23. Catch-22, Heller
24. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf
25. Slaughterhouse-5, Vonnegut
26. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee
Hi Jamie – Just wanted to say hello and introduce myself. I’m one of the mothers at DCCA. My son was in kindergarten this year and my baby (4-year-old!) will be there next year. What a great year it’s been. I know Derek and Greg are so happy that you will be headmaster next year.
I noticed you are an avid reader and I love your book list. What a great idea. I just got my own copy of Pilgrim’s Progress (plus a child’s version that I can read to my deep-thinking 6-yr-old). I’ve been an avid reader all my life. My own parents still tell stories of putting me to bed, and checking under the door to see if the light is out, only to find me in the morning, asleep, with an open book and flashlight in hand.
Anyway, I noticed on your list that there were several Catholic mystics (Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton). Can you tell me more about your interest in those authors?
Nice to meet you.
Christine Pack
Hi Christine,
Looking forward to having your boys at school!
How funny that those two authors caught your eye! You’ll have to tell me why.
The short answer is that my friend and I negotiated the list, and since I have read both Brother Lawrence and Thomas Merton with profit, I thought he might benefit from them. Lawrence, for instance, places great emphasis on the presence of God in everyday life, a very biblical concept. Merton’s autobiography details an intellectual person’s inner struggle toward faith in God. It’s a twentieth century reflection of Augustine’s Confessions.
A second answer is that I’m interested in anything that influences Christianity, and it’s hard to argue with the influence of these two authors on postmodern Christianity.
Hey Jamie – Got another Thomas Merton quote for you…
“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, … now I realize what we all are …. If only they [people] could all see themselves as they really are …I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other … At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusions, a point of pure truth … This little point …is the pure glory of God in us. It is in everybody.”
- Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
(1989 edition, 157-158)
What was that book you were telling me about? Something about dying light, perhaps?
My memory is terrible.
So I stumbled upon your 101 books to be read list and am inspired – I usually am clueless as to what books to give a whirl, so I’m going to use your list as reference.
Thanks!! Hope all is going well with the school and so forth… blessings to you all!
Jamie, this is really cool! I wonder if you could use something like DailyLit.com or LibraryThing.com to track it all and allow other people to participate along the way.
how’s the progress on the challenge coming along, my friend?
also- i recently discovered a wonderful little place in old town chicago called the map room. it’s not quite the store of bricks, but it’s a decent stand-in.
savvy?
Candide-interesting, All Quite on the Western Front-great, both How Should we then Live and Orthodoxy-highlighter and study worthy, a Tale of Two Cities-torture (although I love Dickens), And Amuzing Ourselves to Death-educational.
Jamie’s list inspired me to read more classics, including ones not on Jamie’s list, and I’m glad. So far this year I’ve read
‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Bleak House’, ‘Age of Innocence’, and ‘Persuasion’. They’ve all been excellent, esp. ‘Bleak House’. My only concern is that I won’t be able to read anything non-classic without criticizing the comparatively poor writing.
For me, the greatest classic of all is ’1984′. I read it 10 years ago and it still haunts me.