I’m kind of a sucker for those “100 greatest books” lists. Although I agree philosophically with those who rightly raise intersectional issues and argue “canons” are problematic, nevertheless I have attempted, over the last fifty years, to read rather comprehensively in certain subject areas. “Great” lists help.
I’ve been fairly thorough. Partially this has been a happy accident of majoring in English literature in college and then teaching English for a few years as a missionary; partially it has happened then by a certain fastidiousness reading my way through “the classics.”
The other day I happened upon a new method for a top 100 list. This suggestion (which I think I discovered on Reddit) was to “fill in the gaps.” So, create a reading list for yourself filling in the gaps you see in your own personal “canon.”
So I got to work on this list. So far I have 50. Some of these are indeed attempts to read great books for “great books” lists. In some other instances they’re just works I’ve meant to read for a while and so inserted. I’ve also added works not only from literature but a certain amount of philosophy, theology, science, poetry, and “speculative fiction,” mostly because those are the great works lists I most frequently read from.
Note that there are a lot of books considered “classics” that are not on my list because I’ve already read them. I do read quite a bit.
I’ve left the other fifty slots empty for now because I would like suggestions from all of you. If you’re willing, you’ll help me develop half my list. I think this is a good spiritual practice, because it means a lot of what I read will come by way of suggestion from friends, colleagues, family, mentors, and blog readers.
I may not put everything suggested on the list (mostly because I may have already read some of what gets suggested). But I can’t wait to read your suggestions!
—
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
The Diary of a Nobody, Grossmith brothers
Odes, John Keats
The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy, John le Carre
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, Italo Calvino
The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendahl
Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Chariton
The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Another Country, James Baldwin
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
The Bounds of Sense, Peter Strawson
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
Solaris, Stanslaw Lem
Hyperion, Dan Simmons
Fullmetal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Selected Writings of Hildegaard von Bingen
Voyages Around My Room, Xavier de Maistre
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral
Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum
Waiting for God, Simone Weil
The Book of Lamentations, Rosario Castellanos
Closely Watched Trains, Bohumil Hrabal
Christ Stopped At Eboli, Carlo Levi
Jesus and the Word, Rudolph Bultmann
Against Heresies (condensed), Irenaeus
On First Principles, Origen
The Hexameron, Basil
Five Theological Orations, Gregory of Nazianzus
Metamorphoses, Ovid
The Bhagavad Gita
La Nausee, Jean-Paul Sartre
Timaeus, Plato
Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein
The Patternist Series, Octavia Butler
The Xenogenesis Series, Octavia Butler
The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi
Razing the Bastions, Hans urs von Balthasar
Meditations, Descartes
The Man Who Counted, Malba Tahan
The Elements, Euclid
In trying to think of books that you might not have read before or recently, hopefully I've listed at least one that interests you:
Holistically Green Homes by Orlo Stitt (Foreward by me, published by University of Arkansas Press) is one that might interest Sam more, as might anything by Amory Lovins or Rocky Mountain Inst.
Lost & Found: Poems Found All Around self-published by local poet Greg Zeck.
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader is a classic of the "Corporations done us wrong" genre.
Anything by Norman Wirzba, especially From Nature to Creation.
Biomimicry by Janine Benyus.
Anything by Michael Mann, especially The New Climate War; & The Tantrum That Saved The World [a children's book].
Capitalism at the Crossroads by Stuart Hart.
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad.
Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, & L. Hunter Lovins.
Any volume of The Gospel In Solentiname by Ernesto Cardenal.
I read about 50 books a year. Here are my favorites from past few years: This Tender Land and Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger, Caste: The Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkinson, The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kalish and This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel.