Fifteen Books that will stick with you
In line with all the lists I’ve been posting of late, and falling in step with D.G Myers and Patrick Kurp, I’ll play the literary parlour game. Rules as follows: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. With these slight revisions proposed by Mr. Myers: instead of the future tense (books that will always stick with you), use the past perfect. Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.
Here goes:
Shakespeare’s Plays and Sonnets
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Plato’s Republic
Montaigne’s Essays
Youth by J.M. Coetzee
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Stendhal’s L’amour
The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan (my review here)
The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell
The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch
The Image by Daniel Boorstin (review here)
Amusing ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
A squabble in my mind left three titles bleeding on the editing suite floor: Le Rouge et le Noir, What Good are the Arts? and Madame Bovary. Make that four: London Fields…I’m struck by how many titles were read in teenagerdom and my twenties. And how roughly half the list etched emotional lessons…half intellectual/practical life lessons. The media culture emphasis is no great surprise given that almost twenty years of my life were spent in the field.
All – be it through timing, content or circumstance – have affected the way in which I greet and understand this scurvy and disasterous world of ours and those ill fated enough to inhabit it.
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June 19th, 2009 at 3:03 PM
Nigel,
When you read someone else’s list of fifteen books in fifteen minutes, don’t you think, “Damn, his is better than mineâ€?
–DGM
June 19th, 2009 at 3:58 PM
DGM: Well the first thing I thought when I read yours was: who the hell are these people…
Janet Lewis,
J. V. Cunningham
Emmanuel Levinas,
Michael Wyschogrod,
Gilbert Ryle
Denis de Rougemont
The next thing I thought, when I read RT’s was ‘damn how could I be so stupid as to have left off The Western Canon, and even more unbelievably: Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan…’
I watched J.M. Coetzee in a rare interview the other night in which he explained that he hated to do interviews because he was never pleased with the answers he gave…not enough time to think…
I’ll ditto that sentiment on this one.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:02 PM
Godot and Blake’s works are damned fine picks too.