Most of you are PhDs and respond to inquiries from the non-science type to aspects of your field(s). So how about asking a college in the English Lit or World Lit department?
Robert, you mentioned you are going to improve your literary education, so the works will generally be older because those have had an effect on the development of literature. The works should provide some understanding of the development of the field as well as being entertaining, insightful, etc. To make a musical analogy, I thoroughly enjoy Bach Fugues but if I wish to understand the musical form of the fugue, I also need to listen to Medieval and Renaissance forms that lead up to it (the ricercar, fantasy, etc) Think of the field as having a core trunk and then many branches at the top. It sounds like you are asking about the 'trunk' of the field. So maybe you need 10 books to represent the trunk of the literary tree and then afterward pick 3-5 more works for each branch to cover the last 150 - 200 hundred years. Steph T On 10/9/2010 3:44 AM, Saul Caganoff wrote:
All great suggestions and timely since my library book is due back tomorrow. I'll add a couple of other suggestions: The English Patient (Ondaatje) Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Persig) (not sure if this counts as fiction) A Glass Darkly (Philip K Dick) On the Road (Kerouac) Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera) Heart of Darkness (Conrad) and for the Illiad I strongly recommend the audio book with Derek Jacobi reading the Fagles translation (abridged). +1 for all Herman Hesse titles mentioned. Regards, Saul On Saturday, October 9, 2010, Alison Jones<alison.jo...@redfish.com> wrote:After 10 years of lurking something I can finally comment on. In no particlular order: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie Sometime a Great Notion by Ken Kesey Beloved by Toni Morrison Middlemarch by George Eliot Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Death in Venice by Thomas Mann There are so many more! Alison (Yeah, I know it is 11. And you are so right Robert (Holmes), I should really say Pevear and Volokhonsky's Karenina ☺) On Oct 8, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote: Ok, so I've decided my literary education is somewhat lacking and would like to know this group's recommendations for the "10 Best Literary Works" I should read. They have to be works of fiction and available in English and not just say of 2009 but of all time. Google searches tend to list the best of a year or be listed by one particular publisher. This is a good group to poll since you all (most) have at least some kind of scientific/technical bent. So I know the suggestions will be good ones for me! Once I have a list of all suggestions maybe I'll ask you all to vote on them. My list currently starts with Frank's recommendation today: "Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West" by Cormac McCarthy Thanks! Robert C. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
