[Borges]

List posted here for perusal and good natured vitriol.

[ClearCase_guy]

Ulysses at Number 3? Let's examine the thought process:

"I've never read it. I tried, but it sucked real bad. My professor said it was really important. She didn't actually read it either -- she said it sucked real bad too. But, since it's so important, I guess I should vote for it..."

[Mrs. Darla Ruth Schwerin]

100.Gone with the Wind - Mitchell

Well, this picture paints a thousand words...

[gate2wire]

List must be from a teacher or literature major out to impress. Only books on the list are books one was forced to read in school.

My top 5-
Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove
Shogun
and
Lonesome Dove

[mware]

I read 21 of the books on the list.

[mware]

FRESHMAN YEAR

HOMER: Iliad, Odyssey
AESCHYLUS: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
SOPHOCLES: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes
THUCYDIDES: Peloponnesian War
EURIPIDES: Hippolytus, Bacchae
HERODOTUS: Histories
ARISTOPHANES: Clouds
PLATO: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theatetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
ARISTOTLE: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
EUCLID: Elements
LUCRETIUS: On the Nature of Things
PLUTARCH: Lycurgus, Solon
NICOMACHUS: Arithmetic
LAVOISIER: Elements of Chemistry
HARVEY: Motion of the Heart and Blood
Essays by: Archimedes, Fahrenheit, Avogadro, Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Mariotte, Driesch, Gay-Lussac, Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thompson, Mendeleyev, Berthollet, J.L. Proust
top

SOPHOMORE YEAR

THE BIBLE
ARISTOTLE: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
APOLLONIUS: Conics
VIRGIL: Aeneid
PLUTARCH: "Caesar" and "Cato the Younger"
EPICTETUS: Discourses, Manual
TACITUS: Annals
PTOLEMY: Almagest
PLOTINUS: The Enneads
AUGUSTINE: Confessions
ST. ANSELM: Proslogium
AQUINAS: Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles
DANTE: Divine Comedy
CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales
DES PREZ: Mass
MACHIAVELLI: The Prince, Discourses
COPERNICUS: On the Revolutions of the Spheres
LUTHER: The Freedom of a Christian
RABELAIS: Gargantua and Pantagruel
PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
MONTAIGNE: Essays
VIETE: "Introduction to the Analytical Art"
BACON: Novum Organum
SHAKESPEARE: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Sonnets
POEMS BY: Marvell, Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
DESCARTES: Geometry, Discourse on Method
PASCAL: Generation of Conic Sections
BACH: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
HAYDN: Quartets
MOZART: Operas
BEETHOVEN: Sonatas
SCHUBERT: Songs
STRAVINSKY: Symphony of Psalms
top

JUNIOR YEAR

CERVANTES: Don Quixote
GALILEO: Two New Sciences
DESCARTES: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
MILTON: Paradise Lost
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maximes
LA FONTAINE: Fables
PASCAL: Pensees
HUYGENS: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
ELIOT: Middlemarch
SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise
LOCKE: Second Treatise of Government
RACINE: Phaedre
NEWTON: Principia Mathematica
KEPLER: Epitome IV
LEIBNIZ: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay On Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
SWIFT: Gulliver's Travels
HUME: Treatise of Human Nature
ROUSSEAU: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
MOLIERE: The Misanthrope
ADAM SMITH: Wealth of Nations
KANT: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
MOZART: Don Giovanni
JANE AUSTEN: Pride and Prejudice
DEDEKIND: "Essay on the Theory of Numbers"

top

SENIOR YEAR

Declaration of Independence
The Constitution of the United States
Supreme Court opinions
HAMILTON, JAY, AND MADISON: The Federalist Papers
DARWIN: Origin of Species
HEGEL: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
LOBACHEVSKY: Theory of Parallels
TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy in America
LINCOLN: Selected Speeches
KIERKEGAARD: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
MARX: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
DOSTOEVSKI: Brothers Karamazov
TOLSTOY: War and Peace
MELVILLE: Benito Cereno
TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
O'CONNOR: Selected Stories
FREUD: General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
WASHINGTON, BOOKER T.: Selected Writings
DUBOIS: The Souls of Black Folk
HEIDEGGER: What is Philosophy?
HEISENBERG: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
MILLIKAN: The Electron
CONRAD: Heart of Darkness
Essays by: Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Mendel, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Schrodinger, Bohr, Maxwell, de Broigle, Dreisch, Orsted, Ampere, Boveri, Sutton, Morgan, Beadle & Tatum, Sussman, Watson & Crick, Jacob & Monod, Hardy

[Cyclopean Squid]

4. In Search of Lost Time - Proust

Wretched, miserable, execrable, abysmal book. To be fair I only read Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove, but it was by far the dumbest thing I have ever read. Pretentious, plodding, pointless. How many pages can you read about a church steeple? To get through this book, you'll have to conquer 12. In a row. How little can happen in the 1000 pages of the 2 volumes (of 7 total) that I read? How about having tea with Madame Swann, and then going to the beach. That's it. Maybe there's something I'm not getting. Maybe I'll try it again some day. Much of the prose is beautiful, but the plot is so uncompelling that it hardly matters.

[GSWarrior]

# 9 Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

I remember being caught up in this book. And then, near the end, Mann switches to the French language for several pages for no apparent reason.

I don't speak French and I was a little annoyed.

[RabidBartender]

Good: Only 1 Hemingway
Bad: No Atlas Shrugged, which I just finished a few weeks back and is easily in my top 5.

[Young Werther]

"The Red and the Black" - Stendahl

"The Sorrows of Young Werther" - Goethe, (Napolean's favorite. supposedly he is always pictured with his hand inside his lapel since he kept this book in his jacket pocket "close to his heart!")

"Th Foundation Series" - Asimov

[kidd]

You have to get down to #14 (Huck Finn) before you find one that's actually enjoyable to read.

[#1CTYankee]

Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury, the first book I was assigned to read in school that I actually read.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I certainly don't agree with the whole list, but it's scary how many of them I have actually read....And how many of them I consider highly overrated.

[MotleyGirl70]

2. War and Peace - Tolstoy

Elaine: (to the phone)Yeah. Oh! What? He is! Oh! this is so fantastic! I'm so excited! Yes I'm excited, OK I'll be in soon! OK, OK, I'm coming, yeah, yeah I'm coming, I'm coming! (Elaine jumps up and dances around) Yuri Testikov, the Russian writer!

Jerry: The guy in the gulag!

Elaine: Yeah! Pendant's publishing his new book, and I'm working on it! Lippman and I are going to the airport to pick him up Thursday in a limousine!

Jerry: You wanna barrow Golden Boy!

Elaine: Oh! Don't you know what this means, it's like working with Tolstoy!

Jerry: Hey ya know what I read the most unbelievable thing about Tolstoy the other day, did you know the original title for "War and Peace" was "War--What Is It Good For?"!

Elaine: Ha ha.

Jerry: No, no.. I'm not kidding Elaine it's true, his mistress didn't like the title and insisted him change it to "War and Peace"!

Elaine: But it's a line from that song!

Jerry: That's were they got it from!

Elaine: Really?

Jerry: I'm not joking!

[RMDupree]

No Lord of the Rings?

Bah!

[bruin66]

10. The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki

Yikes! That's the most crushingly boring novel ever written. Right up there with Beowulf

[monkey]

Tolstoi is the best and most important novelist - War and Peace is unmatched. Dostoevsky is also good but went for low-hanging apples. Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is superb.

Re: this list, Austen and Elliot are trivial, good to see Moby Dick so high (too high) - it is the great american novel, Proust, Joyce and The Great Gatsby are always overrated on these things.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I have read 47 of these. Has anyone else actually read Petersburg?

BTW Thomas Mann wrote Buddenbrooks not Hardy. Got the wrong Thomas there.

[dfwgator]

Pan Tadeusz needs to be on the list. (Wajda made an excellent movie version)

[najida]

I wonder what the top 100 "Books That People Actually Read Because They Wanted to Read Them, and Liked Them So Much, They Excitedly Passed Them on to Their Friends" would be.

Not many on the list is my bet. ;)

[Billthedrill]

Hmph. Naughty Nurses In Bondage doesn't make the cut again. What was this list-maker thinking?

My guess is that factors other than sheer literary quality went into this one. Tale of Genji, for example, may have been the first novel, period, and written in an environment that made literary creativity, especially by a woman, nearly impossible. That said, the book's a yawner.

War And Peace was truly a sweeping, magisterial read, but some of the most important plot arcs (IMHO) weren't resolved until the second or third afterword. That simply isn't great construction, but it was a great read. Huckleberry Finn was the Great American Novel and indispensable to the understanding of the United States, especially the Western United States, and especially its males. "Lit out for the Territories" is an entire cultural dissertation in a single phrase.

I have a couple of unorthodox nominees. One is King's Salem's Lot, a marvel of concision and pacing that he hasn't really equaled since. William Gibson's Neuromancer is one I'd suggest. These are two "first" novels, meaning that their respective authors polished them relentlessly, far more than a professional could normally afford to do and that neither man appears to have done with subsequent novels.

Proust I don't get and I'm afraid I'm too impatient for Pynchon. Joyce I enjoy as an intellectual challenge but if you have to work that hard at grasping allusions it seems to cost in terms of emotional involvement. I adored The Tin Drum but haven't been able to get behind anything else Grass wrote. I didn't see Sense and Sensibility on the list - liked it better than Pride and Prejudice.

But no pr0n. Sheesh.