Self-referential url: http://209.24.112.224/DrPseudocryptonym/What_should_you_read_Who_says_so.html

This list is skewed from a global point of view. (Where's Asia?) But still useful. This is what THEY believe are important. I offer it as a way of studying what THEY think. Whoever THEY are....

other such lists of books I have heard of (haven't read these, no recommendation either way; picked off a newspaper review of Bloom; books re Western canon , Jan 18, 1995, San Francisco Examiner, review of Bloom ) which are not incorporated in the following list:

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 1995, (author of The Book of J, and The American Religion ["post-Christian gnosticism"]) sees real "competition for mindshare" [ cf all the contemporary blather re "memes"] (His list includes Penguin Island and Thaïs, available at this website.) (Please do not confuse Harold Bloom with Allan (Closing of the American Mind), Howard (The Lucifer Principle), Milo, Leopold, or Joe Bob Briggs.)

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1954 (in the list below)

F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, (editor of Scutiny, d. 1978)

The following I grabbed off the WELL and aschteemelified; it had been floating around the net:

WHAT SHOULD YOU READ? WHO SAYS SO? Revision 2 [July 1990]

The list below includes almost 900 recommendations found in a variety of sources identifying "important" books:

Some considerations:

1. The books followed only by c, s, b, or e: Many of these are what I call "teacherly" books-- those seen as suitable for secondary English curricula because of literary merit or perceived wholesomeness. They represent the biases, professional and personal, of generations of English teachers.

2. The books followed by l, g, t, r, or a: These might be most legitimately considered "important," either for literary merit, historical importance, or utility. They include most of the core "classics" of the Western literary canon and important works of the social and natural sciences. The books marked "a" are the only ones chosen by a statistical method--books that scholars actually cited in their work.

3. The books followed by h, w, or f: These are quirkier choices. Strictly speaking, they represent less a consensus and more a group of recommendations by individuals--Harvard professors, various writers (many of them well-known), and two Oxbridge writer-critics. I included these three lists because if people from those groups recommended a bunch of books to me I would at least listen to them. To avoid a 3000-book list, I generally eliminated fiction recommendations from these lists.

4. Obviously, the problems of canonicity and ethnic bias that pertain in scholastic debate today are echoed in this compilation. The major reason for including the "teacherly" works is to offer some alternatives--there are more works by female writers and at least some by non-white writers thereby. By that same token, the orientation is weighted toward American titles in 19th and 20th Century works, and toward Western works generally. Any serious reader will have quarrels with this list. That is as it should be. I have not fudged here. I stress this point to avoid conflict. I did not choose the books included here [except h, w, and f, where I winnowed, but did not add]. To take the smallest example, I don't know why King Lear is not included in the Shakespeare list. In addition, please realize that these lists are timebound. Some of the original compilations were made in the 1950s and 1960s [when people still read, says my anti-television bias]. There are works here that seemed to be important at the time, but which have wavered or sunk in their reputation in the last two or three decades. The list may be flawed, but I challenge you, as a serious reader, to look through here without finding something that sparks your attention and sends you off to the library. Similarly, if a book is on four, five, six, or seven of those lists, you might be hard-pressed to justify it as not being worth reading. Even if you disagree with Thomas Carlyle's statement that "The true University of these days is a collection of books," I hope you can find some value here. I would welcome any helpful comments or reasonable sources to add to the database that underlies this project. Especially welcome would be notice of any case where one work appears here under two titles, as happens when works are published in different languages or in different countries.

Alexander H. McIntire, Jr.
Graduate School of International Studies
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL 33124-3010
e-mail: amcintire@umiami.miami.edu