Life Syllabus
 

I was catching up with one of my old college roommates over the weekend and the subject of a "life syllabus" came up. The idea is that there are a number of books or writings that, put together, would form a course syllabus for "life." I don't mean it as a "how to" manual for success (a la Seven Habits of Highly Successful People or How to Win Friends and Influence People, though, individually, those books might be possible suggesstions. Instead, I guess I'm talking more about more of a loose guide to being a a well rounded, well read, decently educated, I won't sound like I have my head up my ass at cocktail parties, plus I'm genuinely interested in learning more kind of guy.

Again calling on the collective intellect of the FOFC community, I thought it might be interesting to see if we can put together such a syllabus.

We might break it down into topics--history (of course, you can break that down further), philosophy, literature, sciences, etc., but as far as I'm concerned, really anything goes.

For now, I'll hold off on adding the short list I've compiled to this point, but I'm curious for the thoughts and ideas of others.

What a fantastic idea.

Agreed. Count me in.

And as I'm thinking, I'm realizing that anthologies excerpting many texts would have to form the backbone of such a class, as otherwise the time constraints would prevent many different authors from being sampled. But the bibliography you'd pass out would be as thick as a phone book. :)

I suppose it might be best to go ahead with individual titles, and assume that they'd be judiciously chopped into a pleasing collection.

The Norton people are on this pretty well, if you want to go for excerpts.

Another direction to go would be "review" literature -- which probably accomplishes something, but that something might not be a particularly good match with the original intent. One of my first thoughts was for philosophy, you might prescribe Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. It's a wonderful book, but it doesn't contain a single original idea -- all it seeks to do is discuss great thinkers from history, and place their lives and ideas into context. It does that very well, in my judgment, but it's clearly like the K-tel version of a true philosophic history.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption!

In the hopes of getting some responses going, given my academic background (bachelor's in government), my initial inclusions were:

Aristotle, The Politics
Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Locke, Two Treatises on Government

Well, how many classic books do you think you could fit into the schedule? As far as political philosophy goes, I think Hobbes' Leviathan is necessary reading, and I think you'd be wise to include Mill's On Liberty as well.

But hell... I'd be just as likely to want to weave Lord of the Flies in there, too.

True, true. The list could go on forever. I hadn't read your post suggesting the Durant book before I posted my three--so maybe the better tact is to look for anthology types rather than primary sources.

This would, in the end, be the most realistic approach for accomplishing the goals of such a course.

For the question, then, I guess we're the committee of writers/editors who're putting together the texts in that series; by which we should begin in listing the works that would need to be considered. The main problem would then become breadth, as the initial question has an inherent text limitation.

I think anthology types would give you the most bang for your buck in the science, history, and probably philosophy sections. But I can't really see how excerpted, or reviews of, literature get to the heart of what we'd want from this. That seems like the one category where a number of full texts would probably be required. Because if I'm understanding this correctly we want more than a "cultural dictionary" type course, something deeper than learning the vocabulary, that gets to really engaging some of the more valuable ideas and art that man has produced. I'll get to thinking on some stuff, it's tough to strike that right balance between throwing too many into the mix, and keeping things manageable.

Perhaps some combination of the two approaches would be suitable? For the philosophy section, you could include several specific books or selections, and than also include something like Durant as a catch-all for more context.

I'm rethinking my response to Quik a bit. Ideally, you've got a lifetime to fulfill the "course requirements."

I think I'm thinking too much in terms of an actual course instead of a life pursuit.
For the sake of tossing some books into the mix:

Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas
The Confessions, Saint Augustine
Dialogues, Plato
Selected Works, Aristotle
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes
Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
The Federalist Papers
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
Night Elie Wiesel

A start, anyway. No histories, literature, or poetry yet...still considering.

Heh, same wavelength. :)

What about something like the most recent Dictionary of Cultural Literacy?

Or we can look at the famed Columbia core curriculum readings...

hxxp://www.college.columbia.edu/students/academics/core/cc_syllabus.php

hxxp://www.college.columbia.edu/students/academics/core/lh_syllabus.php

Yeah, but that's like flipping to the answers section...there's no fun in that. :)

A Brief History of Time is about as succinct a primer on macro physics as you can get if the idea is to briefly introduce a 'student' to the topic.

True, though the core curriculum has its critics (e.g., very weak on modern sciences)...

I'll try a couple smaller categories.

Plays:
Hamlet
King Lear
The Orestia

Speeches/ Declarations
Gettysburg address
Churchill's "Never surrender" speech
Declaration of Independence
Las Casas' testimony on Spanish colonization

Ok some literature that has to be in the mix at least...

Don Quixote Cervantes
War and Peace Tolstoy
Most of Shakespeare, there's really no way around it
A Dostoevsky, probably Crime and Punishment as Karamazov misses with a lot of people
Divine Comedy Dante, mentioned already, but has to be there
Some Twain
Some Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo most likely
Some Dickens, definitely
Iliad and Oddysey

I'm missing a bunch of the so-called canon, but I'm moving on to personal favs instead

Adventures of Augie March Bellow
All of Salinger
Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway
A Graham Greene novel or two, I'm partial to Our Man in Havana but it's not his best or most important
As much Faulkner as you can stomach

I'll post more later, I think we've already got a few years worth of reading thrown out there in the first hour...

The Communist Manifesto
The Holy Bible
The Koran

And a strong second to THe Count of MOnte Cristo. Best book ever IMO.

And just so we can pretend we're not completely eur-amero-centric...

Season of Migration to the North Tayeb Salih, a great little book

To Kill a Mockingbird
Lolita
The Tempest

Also, I am a fan of annotated versions, commentaries, and readers' companions when you can get them. There is the school of thought that you should be coming to your own ideas and not what the annotator wants you to think. And that is certainly valid.

But I read the annotated Lolita, and I know that I got waaaaay more out of the book than I would have had I just read it on my own. A lot of the texts that people are putting on this list are very dense. I think that the benefit that you get from having a (virtual) expert at your side to help unpack some of these ideas outweighs the detriment of missing some of your own insights. YMMV.

dola--forgot Milton's Aeropagitica--the best argument against censorship that I have ever read.

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/areopagitica.html

Here are a few ideas that jump to my mind (they may need to be expounded on by our more well-read members:

-Huckleberry Finn
-The Origin of Species[sp?]
-Atlas Shrugged
-some sort of Confucious anthology? I don't think he wrote a book and if he did I think it would have been burned.
-one of the Fredrick Douglass autobiographies
-The Prince
-Charlotte's Web
-The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
-The Federalist Papers
-the Bible
-The Wealth of Nations

I could blather on forever. Maybe digamma should edit his original post occsionally to include concensus picks for the syllabus

Huge second for Lolita. Lolita the second time through is probably my favorite book of all-time.

Odds and Ends

The Fifties - David Halberstam
The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara

Some other literature to toss into the mix:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Dog Years, Gunter Grass
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

Literary considerations, off the top of my head:

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Rievers, William Faulkner
O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Ulysses, James Joyce
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Advise and Consent, Allen Drury
Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Maus, Art Spiegelman


good heavens did I get off track there...

Quik: I had Watership Down as well, but decided two animal books were too many and bumped it for Animal Farm. But I'm torn. :)

I think you made the right call. I just got carried away.

I now want to do the whole thing with nothing but anthromorphic creatures. There are plenty of allegorical bits with any number of creatures. Might need its own thread, though.

I whole-heartedly second The Catcher In The Rye for the literature section. The more books I read, or the more I re-read it, the more I'm convinced it is the best book I've ever read.

Same wavelength again. Start up that thread. :)

Modern plays

Oklahoma
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
Waiting for Godot
Uncle Vanya

edit: can't believe I left out Angels in America

How many credits is this class? 15?

Don't forget your poetry, also:

Longfellow, Poe, Dickinson, Lord Byron, Cummings, Sandberg, Frost, Tennyson, Whitman . . . to name a few.

Tolstoy hasn't been mentioned yet either.

I'm a bit confused. Was this supposed to be a single course, or more of a guideline to life readings? Either way, I never did quite see what's so special about some of these famous novels. It's like they're only pushed because of their past significance, and not for their current value/entertainment.

The Brothers Karamazov? What a snoozer.

Great Expectations. More like, don't have great expectations for this book, because it will absolutely bore you to death.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. wow, this sucked bad compared to the modern genre.

Bram Stocker, Dracula. I can see how this used to be significant because it introduced the idea of vampires to modern culture. But 150 (or however many) years later, we've been hearing about vampires our whole lives, so this book can be rendered obsolete.

Darwin, The Origin of Species. You can waste 4-5 months reading 1400 pages of boring crap, or you can spend half the time and leave with a far better understanding of natural selection and evolution. The problem with Darwin was his ideas were written 140 years ago, and he was really just making a hypothesis based on his observations. It's surprising how accurate he really was, but modern science has a lot more to offer to understanding the concepts than this book can do for you. Learn about transcription/translation, a little Mendelian Genetics and maybe read some Richard Dawkins, and you will have a far better understanding of what's going on here.



Now that I' done being negative, here are some suggestions.

Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo. Wow. How can a book written this long ago still be so entertaining today.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. When you aren't 'forced' to read this book, it's funny how much more you can appreciate it.

Zinn, A People's History of the United States. I learned more about U.S History from this book than I have from anything else in life.

Machiavelli, The Prince. It's crazy how much political significance this book had on the 20th century.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War. I really enjoy 'strategy', so I enjoyed this book.

Puzo, The Godfather. For pure entertainment value. Influenced several generations, and created a whole genre of books, movies, culture etc..

While I basically agree, I would still insist on the traditional classification of "play." Call me old fashioned.

How about Short Stories? May be a quick way to get some of this literary stuff going...

Flannery O'Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying"
Amos Tutuola "Palm Wine Drinkard"
Shirley Jackson "The Lottery"

Hmmmm...

Thoughts?
Chas

This, to me, challenges one of the core concepts of this whole effort. Do you read the "great books" themselves, or do you read something more modern that seeks to put the great ideas into a broader context? I don't think there is a perfectly clear answer to that - but it goes far beyond Darwin.

There's no doubt that Darwin's Origin of Species was a monstrously influential book... maybe (I cant remember the attribution here, but I'm quoting/paraphrasing someone here) "the greatest idea anyone ever had." But is it essential to read the book itself to grasp the magnitude of the idea?

In literature, there's no two ways around it. You have to read the real thing -- add in whatever commentaries and criticisms you like, but if you don't read the classic book, there's no way to really appreciate it, period. But most other areas, there's going to be this debate -- what do you use as your source? Looking at most of the philosophical writings included thus far -- it probably isn't necessary to read most of them, beyond appropriate excerpts perhaps. You could probably do fine, for practical purposes, just readong someone's summary and critique of the main ideas of The Politics, for instance -- without wading into the direct translation itself. Same for most of the science, mathematics (who would want to even try to read the Principia anyway?), and any number of other areas.


It's a pretty tough fork in the road for this exercise. But if you decide that modern summaries are good enough, then there's basically no point in thinking about the great representative works (which has been most of the effort to date), since a summary form would be able to "cover" much, much more material than we'd be putting together as a list.

Quiksand: I've been thinking about this as well. One idea would be to have a 'professor' that could pull excerpts from some of these works. That way you could read the source material, but you wouldn't have to read every page. I think you could get Darwin's ideas without having to slog through the whole book.

My other question is about the purpose of the syllabus. Is this about reading the great works or about reading influential works or about being able to converse at parties? Some of the choices I would recommend would be very different based on the goals.

For example, I don't think there has been a more widely seen platwright in the 20th century than Neil Simon and you should have a knowledge of him if you want to discuss what's coming to Broadway, but I certainly wouldn't recommend him on the basis of great writing.

Short Story: Gustave Flaubert, "A Simple Life"

I really, really liked this story and think that it has a lot to tell us about the human condition as people actually live it.

(One note about Flaubert: Since I don't read French, I had to read him in translation. There are, of course, competing schools of thought about how much you lose when engaging in that necessary (for most people) exercise. I have heard, though, that the problem is particularly present for Flaubert who was obsessive about detail in his writings. The story goes that one of his friends saw him at a dinner party and asked him how his book was going. Flaubert replied that he had been debating for a while whether he needed to put a comma in a certain place, but had just recently come to the conclusion that he should. The next week, the same friend saw him at another dinner party and asked him what he had done in the past week. Flaubert replied, "I decided to remove the comma."

The general point, of course, is that--especially with subtle literature--you will always lose something in translation. That does not mean that you should not read it, IMO. But it does mean that whenever I put down a translated work, especially one that I enjoyed, I always wonder what I was missing.)

Hmmm.... Arthur Miller... I think he would be considered both a great writer and widely seen playwright.

Just a thought... glad you triggered my memory... I loved reading Miller when I was younger.

Couple of late 19th century playwrights that would be considered would have to be Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde...

Regards,
Chas

Okay, in some part inspired by this thread, I have enrolled in a class for the next few months, which ought to do at least a little of the stuff we discussed here.

Executive Seminar: Freedom, Virtue, and Society

First class is in late September, we will be discussing Huckleberry Finn. I got my shipment of books last night - but seeing th Politics and Leviathan on the list made me want to engage in a little forum necromancy with this thread.

Oh yeah. Glad you bumped this.

Two books came up recently that reminded me of this thread because people in the conversation were so clueless about them. The Maltese Falcon and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

The Wizard Rules books by Terry Goodkind ...

http://www.terrygoodkind.com/wfr.php

IMHO the rules are very good as guides for life (of the books the first four or so were great, the subsequent ones you kind of read because you've read the first few and enjoyed them - but like the Star Wars films ;) ).

Winner.

I can't believe it took this long for Hemingway to pop up.

I'll add "The Last Lion - Vol. I and II" by William Manchester.

Nice.

I got caught up with work and didn't get to concentrate on the list as much as I would have liked.

I've been on an audio book kick for my commute lately--and I've been trending toward American history most recently.

"Great Books of the Western World" Ten Year Reading Plan

http://www.io.com/~beckerdo/books/gb195210.html

I'm going to start on that. Thanks.

Missed this the first time around, but if you want some Eastern philosophy/religion to compliment the classical stuff you'd probably want the following. Its been a while, but I'd say this is also the order you'd want to read them.

The Analects by Confucious (Confucianism)
Mencius (Confucianism)
Hsun Tzu (Neo Confucianism)
Chuang Tzu (Taoism)
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (Taoism)

Of those Chuang Tzu and Hsun Tzu are easily my favorites and what I'd reccomend the most. They're also presented in a format that is probably more accessible to reading in a non-instructor led setting. Whatever you do, stay away from all that I Ching and Chinese alchemy crap.

Allow me to add a few things.

The idea, as I understand it, is to be able to speak with intelligence and authority. Even if Romeo and Juliet is one of the Bard's weaker plays, it is still so well known that one must have read it in order to be considered (as my Enlgih teacher would have put it) literate people.

There are some others as well.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be. Ozymandias. Xanadu. And so forth.


The problem with choosing material that is commonly known is that some of it is rather bad. I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights, the Beloved Country, Song of Solomon, The Bell Jar or Cry, the Beloved Country. I also didn't care much for Steinbeck other than Of Mice and Men.

In philosophy, there are some particular revolutionary works written recently. In political philosophy, Rawl's A Theory of Justice is right up there with the best of them. Rousseau's Social Contract I don't remember being mentioned either (Was The Art of War or The Prince mentioned either? I don't remember). Social and Political Philosophy is one of my academic specialities (remember, PoliSci professor here) so I'll try and steer clear of Montesquieu or Mussolini :)


-Anxiety

Plato's "The Republic" is so important, it's on the list twice. :)

Came to this thread from Quik's new thread on Freedom, Virtue and Society.

I fall into the category of those that prefer an anthology to reading the individual texts if only because one can cover so much more ground that way. Providing it's produced by a competent commentator then I believe you can gain much from this.

The book that I have spent most time reading - in fact it's falling apart after years of use and still sits on my bedside table - is Russell's History of Western Philosophy. I can't recommend this enough. Reading it is like painting the Forth Bridge - when you reach the end you return to the beginning and read again. Every page is packed with ideas and you can easily spen a full evening over a single page, even paragraph.

There was also a series of books published by Fontana but I think they stopped around 1990. they wwere called the Fontana Modern Masters and may well now be out of print. Each book, around 120 pages, were dedicated to one subject including Freud, Wittgenstein, Marcuse, Einstein, Joyce, McLuhan, Orwell, Popper, Barthes, Heidegger, Proust, Steinberg, Beckett, Chomsky, Levi-Strauss, Jung ........... many others.

When it comes to individual books/novels I have a more European approach. Here are a few:

Thus Sprach Zarastrustra and Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzche (in fact almost any book of Nietzche's)
The Trial - Franz Kafka
War and Peace - Tolstoi
The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
The Upanishads
Don Quixote - Cervantes
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T.E. Lawrence
The Roads to Freedom trilogy by Sartre

I thought of this thread when I saw a link to this site from refdesk:

Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction

Interesting array, though I confess the fiction is disarminly unfamiliar to me. Don't know if perhaps the selections are being driven by what material is available in the proper format and without copyright concerns. *shurg*


In any event... I enjoyed this thread anyway, so even if this is simply a bump, so be it.

I have a few to add:
"The Cross of Gold" speech by William Jennings Bryan
Euclid's Elements(being a mathematician makes this first and formost to me :) )
Richard Wright Native Son
All the Names Jose Saramago (modern work by a recent Nobel winner)
Ode to a Grecian urn- John Keats
Ivanhoe- Walter Scott (I think)
Wuthering Heights Charlotte Bronte
A Doll House Henrik Ibsen
Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams
The Rhinoceros Eugene Ionesco (Theatre of the Absurd)
Ulysses James Joyce (no read it but feel like Ishould)
From the Earth to the Moon Jules Verne
Flatland Edwin Abbott-Abbott

I"m still on my biography kick, having just started Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. Probably wouldn't make it on the syllabus, but oh well.

Some of these will be repeats, but I'll put in my own list, arranged by thematic structure and possible points for discussion.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Discussion points:
-The role of women, more specifically what power they have in a given society
-Female beauty and the male aesthetic. Atwood doesn't really tie in here so much, I don't believe, but it's worth looking into.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
1984 - George Orwell
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Giver - Lois Lowry

Discussion Points
-Utopian societies inverted into dystopias. How does each author present a utopia and then distort it to a dystopia?
-Relevance of the dystopias to the modern-day world

Arthurian Romances - Chretien des Troyes
Parzival - Wolfram von Eschenbach
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot

Discussion Points
-How has the image of the romantic hero changed through the centuries?
-Is the romantic hero/questing knight archetype still possible in contemporary society? Why/Why not?

Nectar in a Sieve - Kamala Markandaya
Mister Johnson - Joyce Carey
Burning Grass - Cyprian Ekwensi
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin*

Discussion Points
-What effects have the colonizer had on the colonized? The colonized on the colonizer?
-How does a country or an individual bridge the gap between their pre-colonial past and their colonized history in shaping their new nation?
*-Not literature, but a reference text for understanding and engaging in the post-colonial debate.

Nyquil's kicking in, so I'm headed to bed. I'll try and work more on this tomorrow because this has been fun :)

My college is offering for this fall an opportunity for alumni to take a "distance learning" course on Justice. The idea is to present the actual lectures from the undergraduate course online (24 total lectures) and then follow them up with 4 in person discussions led by various speakers. There would also be an online discussion forum for the course.

The course is a moral reasoning course and studies various philosophies and theories of justice, beginning with utilitarianism and venturing through Aristotle, Kant and Rawls. I actually took the course as a freshman (in the fall of 1994).

I'm strongly considering participating in the program (admittedly, partially because it will count for continuing legal education credit in the hard to get (but required in California) ethics category). I think it will be an interesting exercise to compare my thoughts now versus back then (I'm fairly sure I have my class notes somewhere). I'll update if I move forward.

I've been reading Don Quixote, and I've been very surprised by how funny it is.

I've also been re-reading Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, and would like to recommend it for consideration: Its not a classic (I think it was written in 1998), but it presents a pretty good summary of the various problems presented by consciousness - problems which have been known about at least since Plotinus.

Wow no mention of "Beyond Good and Evil", Friedirich Nietzsche.

Not that I consider it the most influential thing I've ever read, but it definitely makes you think and it is good.

I'm a big fan of Schopenhauer's philosophical works, which supposedly Nietschze was heavily influenced by him.

Don Quixote is possibly my favorite book ever. It does taper off toward the end, though.

Didn't catch this thread the first time around. I guess I'll throw some 20th century science books into the mix:

Antonio Damasio - Descartes' Error
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (also The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, etc.)
Theodosius Dobzhansky - Genetics and the Origin of Species
Albert Einstein - Relativity
R.A. Fisher - The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Allen Newell and Herbert Simon - Human Problem Solving
James Watson - The Double Helix
E.O. Wilson - Sociobiology (also On Human Nature, The Ants, The Diversity of Life, etc.)

I started Don Quixote a while back, but haven't finished it. It's funny in parts, but so far I'm not seeing it as a genuine classic. I do, however, suspect the translation to be at fault here, so I'm going to look for a better version later on.

I finally finishes the 1254 page unabridged Count of Monte Cristo (translated by Robin Buss) and I all have to say is... Wow. I resolved to make this summer an Alexandre Dumas summer after running across an unabridged version of The Three Musketeers in a second-hand bookstore in La Crosse.

Enjoyed T3M immensely, but Monte Cristo was so brilliant, so damned satisfying, that it instantly vaulted into one of my top 3 favourite books of all time.

I started The Black Tulip last night, incidentally.

dola,

for anyone looking into Dumas, I *strongly* recommend Robin Buss's translations in the Penguin unabridged editions. Buss does an excellent job of translation.

I read this in high school and thought it was great....and then later in life, I learned that what I read was really an abridged version of it. Damn you high school library! Anyway, I've been meaning to read this, the real version of it.

And while we are on the topic of translated books, anyone have a recommendation on what translated copy of Arabian Nights I should get? I always get nervious about buying books that have been translated. Is just getting the Penguin Classics version of a book a good general rule to go by?

I just copy and pasted all of the titles and authors mentioned in this thread (and put them into categories). I'm wondering if there's any interest in starting this discussion back up, namely to fill some voids (just two titles I have under economics, Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital, even though some political books surely spill over into economics) and to weed out a bunch of titles where there is overfill (lots and lots of novels on the list - it's about half of the list).

Also, there seems to be a few different trains of thought going on here. Some think the list shopuld include the classics, to read the old books, even though they are outated (Origin of Species for one), and those who want a list of anthology/summery books on all of the topics (namely for topics like science and philosophy)

Perhaps the best solution would be to break it up into parts. One part could be a (short-ish) list of original writings and a second list of anthology/summeries that cover a wide range of ideas/authors/topics/etc.

For instance:

Philosophy - Anthologies/Summeries
Story of Philosophy - Will Durent
History of Western Philosophy - B. Russell

....

Philosophy - Original Writings
Selected Works - Aristotle
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzshe

In essence, creating a few different syllabi for the two or three different ways people could approach this idea of a "life syllabus" (and perhaps one that combines the 2? One of some summeries with a few 'essential' original writings)

And here's the list I made. A few titles may be in the wrong category, and I may have a repeat or two considering there are some "No mention of (Title)?!?!?OMFG!!!" when there were already a few mentions of it. :)

Literature - Novel
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Illiad - Homer
Oddysey - Homer
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
For Whom The Bell Tolls - Hemingway
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Grapse of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Dog Years - Gunter Grass
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Rievers - William Faulkner
O Pioneers - Willa Cather
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
Ulysses - James Joyce
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Fahters and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Advise and Consent - Allen Drury
Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Hainlein
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Maus - Art Spiegelman
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
Sword of Truth series - Terry Goodkind
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard - Thomas Gray
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Outsider - Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus
The Upanishads - Eknath Easwaran
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse
The Seven Pillars of Wisdon - T. E. Lawrence
Native Son - Richard A Wright
All The Names - Jose Saramago
Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne
Flatland - Edwin Abbot
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Giver - Lois Lowry
Arthurian Romances - Chretien des Troyes
Parzival - Wolfram von Eschenbach
Nectar in a Sieve - Kamala Markandaya
Mister Johnson - Joyce Carey
Burning Grass - Cyprian Ekwensi
Romance of the 3 Kingdoms - Luo Guanzhong
1001 Arabian Nights (have not read this yet, would this be better off being described as a collection of short stories?)
The Foundation Trilogy - Issac Asimov
The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Shogun - James Clavell
Dune - Frank Herbert
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card


- Short Story/Novellas
A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
Palm Wine Drinkard - Amos Tutuola
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
A Simple Life - Gustave Flaubert

- Poetry
Shakespeare
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edgard Allen Poe
Emely Dickinson
Lord Byron
e.e.cummings
Sandberg
Robert Frost
Alfred Tennyson
Walt Whitman
"When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" - John Keats
"Ozymandias" - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Xanadu" - Samuel Taylor Colleridge
"Ode to a Grecian urn" - John Keats
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot

- Plays/Theater/etc.
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
King Lear - William Shakespeare
The Tempest - William Shakespeare
The Orestia - Aeschylus
Oklahoma
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov
Angels in America - Tony Kushner
Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
The Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
The Chalk Circle
The Clay Cart
A Midsummer's Night Dream - Shakespeare
Oedipus - Sophocles
Le Tartuffe
The Government Inspector - Nikolai Gogol

Biography/Autobiography/Memoirs
Night - Elie Wiesel
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass
The Last Lion - William Manchester

Philosophy
Story of Philosphy - Will Durent
Dialogues - Plato
Selected Works - Aristotle
Meditations on First Philosphy - Rene Descartes
History of Western Philosophy - B. Russell
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Roads of Freedom series - Sartre
The writings of Arthur Schopenhauer

Science
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
A Brief History in Time - Stephen Hawking
Elements - Euclid
The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil
Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Genetics and the Origin of Species - Theodosius Dobzhansky
Relativity - Albert Einstein
The Genetic Theory of Natural Selection - R.A. Fisher
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
Human Problem Solving - Allen Newell and Herbet Simon
The Double Helix - James Watson
Sociobiology - E. O. Wilson

History
Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans - Plutarch
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
The Fifties - David Halberstam
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts - Bill Ashcroft

Speeches/Documents
Gettysburg Address - Lincoln
Churchill's "Never Surrender" speech
Declaration of Independance
The U.S. Constitution
Las Casas' testimony on Spanish colonization
Aeropagitica - John Milton
"The Cross of Gold" - William Jennings Bryan

Politics/Government
The Politics - Aristotle
The Republic - Plato
Two Treatises of Government - Locke
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
Leviathon - Thomas Hobbes
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, John Madison, John Jay
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
The Social Contract - Jean-Jaques Rousseau

Economics
Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
Das Kapital - Karl Marx
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Maynard Keynes

Religion/Theology
Summa Theologica - St. Thomas Aquinas
The Confessions - St. Augustine
The Holy Bible
The Koran
The Analects - Confucius
Mencius - (Confucianism) - Anonymous
The writings of Hsun Tzu (Neo-Confucianism)
The writings of Chuang Tzu (Toaism)
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tsu (Toaism)
Bhagavad-Gita

Art/Music Theory and Appreciation

Great job with the list. I imagine I'll be using it fairly frequently this summer.

Just a couple slight corrections: It's Lolita, not Lalita :) and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a poem, not a novel. Admittedly my fault when I constructed the possible units not to indicate it.

A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams

^--- Plays, which are currently in the Novels category

Great job compiling the list in general though :)

Theology/Religion is already an overloaded category, but there's nothing from the vast tradition of India, which is of course where Buddhism was born. Perhaps add the Bhagavad-Gita, which is not overwhelmingly long. I am told that the most accurate translation is the one put together by the Hare Krishnas (believe it or not).

Probably the most influential modern economist is Keynes, but I can't really point us at a single work.

The Upshanaids (sp) are in the novels category, st. cronin. I forget whether that's directly theological or more folkloric though.

Take or leave these suggestions. Given that this exercise is supposed to cover all of human written drama, Williams is overly represented. I'd ditch one and put Mother Courage by Brecht in it's place. I'd also add The Chalk Circle as traditional Chinese and maybe The Clay Cart as Sanskrit. Obviously this list is going to be Western heavy, but you need some representation from Asia in theatre.

I'd also argue that you need Oedipus on the list. It's a tremendous play on it's own, but it's also referred to so often in other works that it would seem to be essential.

There's also not a single comedy on the list. That isn't surprising as comedy has always been the ugly step child among critics, but I'd maybe replace one of the Shakespeare tragedies with Midsummer as well as add a Moliere, probably Tartuffe, and The Government Inspector by Gogol.

This is a fun project and let me know if I can help any more with the theatre section.

We're real light in the Middle East and Asia in terms of novels, too. I'd go with Romance of the 3 Kingdoms and 1001 Arabian Nights as the most obvious jumping off points.

I'll take a look when I get a chance to see what else I can dig up that'd be more contemporary.

Dola,

for short stories, I'd suggest Rabindranath Tagore's "Hungry Stones"

Do you think Lorca's worth including at all?

Added the recent suggestions and added some of my own novel suggestions.

The Foundation Trilogy - Issac Asimov
The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Shogun - James Clavell
Dune - Frank Herbert
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

Anyone want to start making arguments for removing titles from the list?

If we really want to trim this down to what digamma's original intent was (to become well educated and not sound like morons at a dinner party), we're probably going to need to make deep cuts to this thing (and start adding more anthology/summery type books)

If, however, we want to move in the direction that it seems to be moving (Having a life-long reading list), then we probably don't need to make many cuts.

I love Lorca and wouldn't be opposed to adding him, but I don't think he's worthy of a spot on such a short list. Honestly I'm not sure Williams is either, but if you take the view that this is a US based reader it makes some sense.