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Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU Path: spies!sgiblab!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!auvm!UMKCVAX1.BITNET!CDELL X-Envelope-to: literary@ucf1vm.bitnet X-VMS-To: @LITERARY X-VMS-Cc: CDELL MIME-version: 1.0 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Message-ID: <01GRUUQWV9Z69S5JN8@VAX1.UMKC.EDU> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1992 22:39:36 -0600 Sender: Discussions about Literature <LITERARY@UCF1VM.BITNET> From: "VALENTINE M. SMITH" <CDELL@UMKCVAX1.BITNET> Subject: An expanded reading list from one who likes to read (LONG! 685 lines!) Comments: To: literary@ucf1vm.bitnet Lines: 687

Dear Readers -

One of my list members asked me for a "seminal list of books" I would or could suggest to people for reading. This list may not be seminal, but does represent books that have influenced me or that I liked. So, this list of 300 (actually 380-382) books are what I would suggest this month, (100 more than when I last sent this list out this summer) as I contend no such lists are the same from any given month to any other given month. They are not in order of preference, they are not ranked in any way, though they do reflect my interests and tastes - lots of history, some fantasy and science fiction, some novels, a sprinkling of many things. The list could have just as easily been five hundred books. VMS

1) Stranger in A Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

2) Citizen of the Galaxy - Robert Heinlein

3) Job, A Comedy of Justice - Robert Heinlein

4) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer

5) Peter the Great - Robert Massie

6) Nicholas and Alexandra - Robert Massie

7) Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

8) the Dune series (6 books, especially _Dune) - Frank Herbert

9) The First Deadly Sin - Lawrence Sanders

10) The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien

a) The Fellowship of the Ring

b) The Two Towers

c) The Return of the King

11) The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien

12) The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

13) God Is An Englishman - R.F. Delderfield

14) the Robot series (7 or 8 books) - Issac Asimov

15) Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

16) Robinson Crusoe- Daniel Defoe

17) Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift

18) The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

19) The Embarassment of Riches - Simon Schama

20) Citizen - Simon Schama

21) a trilogy by W. Bruce Lincoln

a) In War's Dark Shadow

b) Passage Through Armageddon

c) Red Victory

22) The Art of War - Sun Tzu

23) The Discoverers - Daniel Boorstein

24) The Creators - Daniel Boorstein

25) The Story of Civilization series - Will and Ariel Durant (11

books - flawed a bit, but good writing)

26) The Frontiersman - Allan Eckert

27) Einstein, The Life and The Man - Ronald Clark

28) An American Melodrama, The Presidential Campaign of 1968 -

Chester, Hodgeson and Page

29) The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

30) House - Tracy Kidder

31) The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test - Tom Wolfe

32) The Fatal Shore - Robert Hughes

33) The Wise Men - Issacson and Thomas

34) The Glory and the Dream - William Manchester

35) Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

36) Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter

37) The Scarlet Mansion - Allan Eckert

38) Cadillac Desert - Marc Reiner

39) The Uses of Enchantment - Bruno Bettelheim

40) the Travis McGee books (21-22 altogether) - John D. McDonald (the

only series I've REALLY liked)

41) Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins

42) Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins

43) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - Tom Robbins

44) the Mars series (9 books) - Edgar Rice Burroughs

45) Thurber - Burton Bernstein

46) The Thurber Carnival - James Thurber

47) The Outline of History (usually in 2 volumes) - H. G. Wells

48) First and Last Men - Olaf Stapleton

49) Starmaker - Olaf Stapledon

50) THe Army of the Potomac trilogy - Bruce Catton

a) Mr. Lincoln's Army

b) Glory Road

c) A Stillness at Appomatax

51) The Complete Works of O. Henry

52) The Best of Roald Dahl

53) The Mabonogien (the Guest edition is the best I've seen)

54) Le Morte D'Arthur - Thomas Malory

55) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Paul Kennedy

56) The Best and the Brightest - David Halberstam

57) The Powers That Be - David Halberstam

58) The Reckoning - David Halberstam

59) The Imperial Presidency - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

60) THe Cycles of American History - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

61) Naked Lunch - William Burroughs

62) Junkie - William Burroughs

63) The Nine Nations of North America - Joel Garreau

64) Cyteen - C. J. Cherryh

65) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

66) I, Claudius and Claudius the God - Robert Graves

67) the Narnia books (7 books) - C.S. Lewis

68) Damien - Herman Hesse

69) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

70) Crime and Punishment - Fedor Dostoevsky

71) Gilgamesh the King - Robert Silverburg

72) Tom O' Bedlam - Robert Silverburg

73) Earth - David Brin

74) The Complete Sherlock Holmes - A. Conan Doyle

75) Kim - Rudyard Kipling

76) A Fine and Private Place - Peter Beagle

77) The Folk of the Air - Peter Beagle

78) The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek

79) The Merlin Trilogy - Mary Stewart

a) The Crystal Cave

b) The Hollow Hills

c) The Last Enchantment

80) Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel Cervantes

81) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

82) The Manchurian Candidate - Richard Condon

83) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

84) Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare

85) A Midsummer's Night's Dream - William Shakespeare

86) Hamlet - William Shakespeare

87) The Tempest - William Shakespeare

88) King Lear - William Shakespeare

89) MacBeth - William Shakespeare

90) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

91) The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

92) For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemningway

93) Islands of the Sea - Ernest Hemingway (posthumous)

94) White Lotus - John Hersey

95) The Wall - John Hersey

96) Mila 18 - Leon Uris

97) Exodus - Leon Uris

98) Trinity - Leon Uris

99) Mitla Pass - Leon Uris

100) Shogun - James Clavell

101) King Rat - James Clavell

102) The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsythe

103) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

104) Fables and Fairy Tales - Leo Tolstoy

105) The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

106) Perestrokia - Mikhail Gorbachev

107) The August Coup, The Truth and the Lessons - Mikhail Gorbachev

108) The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

109) Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov

110) V. - Thomas Pynchon

111) Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

112) The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

113) A Canticle for Liebowitz - William Miller

114) Little Big Man - Thomas Berger

115) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown

116) Chaos, Making a New Science - James Gleick

117) A Nonconformist History of Our Times (5 volumes that I know of) -

I.F. Stone

a) The War Years, 1939-1945

b) The Truman Era, 1945-52

c) The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951

d) The Haunted Fifties, 1953-1963

e) In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967

118) Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

119) In Search of History, A Personal Adventure - Theodore White

120) The Making of the President, 1960 - Theodore White

121) The Once and Future King - T. H. White

122) Inside the Third Reich - Albert Speer

123) Trillion Year Spree, The History of Science Fiction - Brian

Aldiss

124) The Foundation Trilogy - Issac Asimov

125) Stieglitz, A Memoir/Biography - Sue D. Lowe

126) The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York -

Robert Caro

127) Ansel Adams, An Autobiography

128) Cosmos - Carl Sagan

129) Origins - Richard Leakey

130) America In Search of Itself, The Making of the President,

1956-80 - Theodore White

131) Lucy, The Beginnings of Humankind - Johanson & Edey

132) Coming of Age in the Milky Way - Tomothy Ferris

133) American Caesar - William Manchester

134) Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan

135) The Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan

136) Practicing History - Barbara Tuchman

137) The March of Folly, from Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Tuchman

138) The Weaker Vessel - Antonia Fraser

139) The Holocaust - Martin Gilbert

140) The Holocaust - Nora Levin

141) The Monte Cristo Cover-Up - Simmel

142) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

143) Animal Farm - George Orwell

144) 1984 - George Orwell

145) The New Russians - Hedrick Smith

146) The Russians - Hedrick Smith

147) Let History Judge (the 1989 edition) - Roy Medvedev

148) All Stalin's Men - Roy Medvedev

149) A Question of Madness - Roy and Zhores Medmedev

150) The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitzen (3 volumes)

151) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

152) Rebuilding Russia - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

153) The First Circle - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

154) August, 1914 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

155) Now Playing at Canterbury - Vance Bourjaily

156) Giles Goat Boy - John Barth

157) The Sotweed Factor - John Barth

158) Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurty

159) Moby Dick - Herman Melville

160) The Cold and the Dark, The World After Nuclear War - Ehrlich,

Sagan, Kennedy and Roberts

161) The Essential Ellison - Harlan Ellison

162) Night of the Cooters - Howard Waldrop

163) Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

164) Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse

165) Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

166) Ulysses - James Joyce

167) The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare

168) The Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (7 volumes as I

recall, I do not own this set, regretfully)

169) Tom Jones - Henry Fielding

170) The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe

171) The Fires of Spring - James Michener

172) Hawaii - James Michener

173) Across the Wide Missouri - Bernard DeVoto

174) Ten Days That Shook the World - John Reed

175) The Russian Revolution - Leon Trotsky

176) THe Russian Revolution - Richard Pipes

177) Stalin - Adam Ulam

178) Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy - Dimitri Volkogonov

179) Hitler, A Study in Tyranny - Alan Bullock

180) Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives - Alan Bullock

181) A History of the Arab Peoples - Albert Hourani

182) Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak

183) Babi Yar - Anatoly Kuznetsov

184) The Romanovs - W. Bruce Lincoln

185) All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

186) Red Star Over China - Edgar Snow

187) Serial Murders and Their Victims - Eric Hickey

188) The Serial Killers, a Study in the Psychology of Violence -

Wilson and Seaman

189) Serial Killers - Joel Norris

190) Hunting Humans, An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers -

Michael Newton

191) Hunting Humans, Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers - Elliott

Leyton

192) Seven Days in May - Knebel and Bailey

193) Going After Cacciato - Tim O' Brien

194) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

195) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Vincente Blasco Ibanez

196) Toolmaker Koan - John McLoughlin

197) David's Sling - Marc Stiegler

198) Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

199) The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes

200) The Shadow of the Winter Palace - Edward Crankshaw

201) The World According to Garp - John Irving

202) Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving

203) The Book of Daniel - E. L. Doctorow

204) Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow

205) Disturbing the Universe - Freeman Dyson

206) Weapons and Hope - Freman Dyson

207) A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

208) Jedidiah Smith and the Opening of the West - Dale Morgan

209) The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey

210) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

211) Democracy in America - Alexis d Toqueville (often in 2 volumes)

212) The Difference Engine - Gibson and Sterling

213) Good News From Outer Space - John Kessel

214) A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara Tuchman

215) The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural

- Robert Darnton

216) Hidden History, Exploting Our Secret Past - Daniel Boorstein

217) The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould

218) Wonderful Life, The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History -

Stephen Jay Gould

219) The Golden Bough - James Frazer

220) Modern History, The World from the Twenties to the Eighties -

Paul Johnson

221) A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

222) Passages - Gail Sheehy

223) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain

224) Blue Highways, A Journey Into America - William Least Heat Moon

225) Letters From the Earth - Mark Twain

226) Idylls of the King - Alfred Lord Tennyson

227) Mary Queen of Scots - Antonia Fraser

228) Cromwell: Lord Protector - Antonia Fraser

229) The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron

230) archy and mehitabel - Don Marquis

231) The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk

232) Time Wars, The Primary Conflict in Human History - Jeremy Rifkin

233) Biosphere Politics - Jeremy Rifkin

234) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

235) A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain

236) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

237) Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

238) Peter Pan - James Barrie

239) John Brown's Body - Stephen Vincent Benet

240) The Matrix, Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide

- John Quarterman

241) Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Brad Denton

242) Wrack and Roll - Brad Denton

243) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

244) The Great Terror, A Reassessment - Robert Conquest

245) 334 - Thomas Disch

246) Oedipus Rex - Sophocles

247) Children of the Arbat - Anatoli Rybakov

248) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

249) Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabakov

250) The 900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad - Harrison Salisbury

251) The Nine Nations of North America - Joel Garreau

252) Rude Tales and Glorious - Nicholas Seare

253) Wilbur and Orville, A Biography of the Wright Brothers - Fred

Howard

254) Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All - Allan Gurganus

255) Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

256) Beloved - Toni Morrison

257) Hurry Sundown - K.B. Gilden

258) Russian Spring - Norman Spinrad

259) Little Heroes - Norman Spinrad

260) Darkness At Noon - Arthur Koestler

261) Libra - Don Delillo

262) Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

263) The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

264) Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

265) Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank

266) Nightwork - Irwin Shaw

266) Rich Man, Poor Man - Irwin Shaw

267) Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

268) Revenge of the Lawn - Richard Brautigan

269) Sombrero Fallout - Richard Brautigan

270) Lord of the Flies - William Golding

271) The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCulloch

272) Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

273) Warday - Whitley Streiber & James Kunetka

274) Nature's End - Whitley Streiber & James Kunetka

275) Failsafe - Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler

276) The Shoes of the Fisherman - Morris West

277) Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo

278) True Grit - Charles Portis

279) The Genius and the Goddess - Aldous Huxley

280) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

281) Truman - David McCulloch

282) The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - James Gunn

283) The Stand (revised) - Stephen King

284) The Sunlight Dialogues - John Gardner

285) Freedom - William Safire

286) East of Eden - John Steinback

287) The Red Pony - John Steinback

288) The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck

289) The Bog People - P.V. Glob

290) Erewhon - Samuel Butler

291) The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone

292) The Dogs of War - Frederick Forsyth

293) Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse

294) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

295) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Hannah Green (later

editions are under her real name, which I do not know)

296) The Brethern - Woodward & ?

297) My Life - Leon Trotsky

298) The Last Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky

299) Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917 -

Harrison Salisbury

300) Justice At Nuremburg - Robert Conot