TIMELY WISDOM

Friday, October 9, 2015

Books To Read

SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2015

It would take more than one summer to read this many books but here it is:
Summer Reading List

When I was an undergrad, I had the wonderful chance to work with a brilliant scholar, Dr. Tom Samet. 
He died way too young, but his summer reading list offered up to all of us was recently uncovered. 

Samet was a Fulbright Scholar who invited his whole class to his house to watch 
Breaker Morant an influential film that gave us this: 

"The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations." 

Dr. Samet's reading list for budding scholars:

Naturally, the list reflects all of my personal biases, quirks, and preoccupations. Though there are exceptions to each of the following principles, I've in general been guided by these considerations: 
a. length: the list includes a number of very long books, on the assumption that if one doesn't read these during the summer, one doesn't read them at all; 
b. period: most of the volumes included are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is where I'm most at home; 
c. familiarity: with few exceptions these are well known and celebrated books--classics, if you like; but I've tried to avoid those that you are most likely to encounter in the classroom.

  • Richard Altick, The Scholar Adventurers: as the title suggests, an account of major literary discoveries, including frauds, secret codes, and other mysteries; Victorian People and Ideas: an exceptionally useful and readable introduction to the life of nineteenth-century England
  • W. H. Auden, Selected Poems
  • Jane Austen, Mansfield Park: novel
  • James Baldwin, Another Country: novel
  • James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain: short fiction
  • John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor: novel
  • Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: an enormously important study of the "disjunction" between economic structure and cultural values
  • Saul Bellow, Herzog: novel
  • Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers: major essays on Tolstoy, Herzen and others by one of the great British thinkers of the twentieth century
  • Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: important essays by a central figure in American intellectual life during the first decades of the twentieth century
  • Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: one of the few memoirs of World War I by a woman
  • Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: probably the best book on Freud ever written, and an indispensable introduction to psychoanalysis
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: a major work by the central figure in English conservative thought
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote: novel--arguably the first one
  • Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: novel--his most ambitious and possibly his greatest
  • Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: the most important account of the writers of the "lost generation"--Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cummings, etc.
  • Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Little Dorrit: novels
  • Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: a cultural history of the sixties
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: novel
  • George Eliot, Middlemarch: novel
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, Selected Letters
  • Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
  • Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End: a series of four novels, and arguably the finest work of fiction to emerge from the first world war
  • E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy: essays
  • Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: historical study by one of the most important and influential of recent French thinkers
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Totem and Taboo, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex
  • Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory: an award-winning study of the impact of the First World War upon the modern imagination
  • Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man's Land: major studies of women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: important reflections on childhood in America at mid-century
  • Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a major Victorian autobiography, recording the conflict of faith with the secular pressures of the latter half of the nineteenth centuries
  • Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That: memoir of World War I by a major modern writer
  • Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls: novel
  • Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind: the best available account of the climate of thought and sentiment in Victorian England
  • Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima: novels
  • James Joyce, Selected Letters
  • Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father: as the title suggests, a letter from a great writer to his businessman father
  • Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion: novel
  • Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon: novel
  • Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American life in the seventies by one of our major cultural historians
  • D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow: novel; Studies in Classic American Literature: critical essays; Phoenix: essays
  • Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night: novel; Of a Fire on the Moon; journalism
  • Thomas Mann, Death in Venice: short novel
  • Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary: essays
  • Herman Melville, Moby Dick: novel
  • V. S. Naipaul, Guerillas, A Bend in the River: novels
  • George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism, Letters (4 vols.)
  • Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, V: novels
  • Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: novel
  • David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: a classic study of American character at midcentury
  • Katherine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: a history of misogyny in literature
  • Philip Roth, Letting Go, The Ghost Writer: novels
  • Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: an important study of English women novelists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  • Patricia Meyer Sparks, The Female Imagination: a study of women's writing by a major American scholar
  • Stendahl, The Red and the Black: novel
  • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: novel
  • Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve, Fathers and Sons: novels
  • Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men: major novel by a major American writer, based in part on the life of Huey Long
  • Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall: novel
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: a profoundly important account of the emergence of capitalism from the change in religious sensibility brought about by the Reformation
  • Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, The Country and the City: major studies by one of Britain's greatest cultural historians
  • Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: historical studies in European socialism-- indispensable reading; Patriotic Gore: historical and biographical studies in the literature of the American Civil War
  • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own: an appeal for sexual equality; Three Guineas: an appeal for sexual equality; A Writer's Diary
  • Richard Wright, Native Son: novel; Black Boy: autobiography
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