Books Important to Me
These are books that I can remember that made the greatest impression on me
--- not, certainly, the books I have read of the greatest literary merit.
The list does not include plays or poems. This was very much off the top of
my head, so I probably left out some important ones.
Most of these are very well known; a few are obscure.
Some are by friends or family. As I say, it's a personal list.
Obviously, this displays my limitations conspicuously. The list here
reflects a mental world that hardly goes beyond traditional Jewish material
and modern Europe, and to a very large extent stays in England and the US
of the last 250 years. The underrepresentation of women authors and the
non-existence of authors who are people of color is also conspicuous. Hopefully
I can somewhat remedy this in the years that remain to me.
In roughly chronological
order by publication (I didn't check):
- The Hebrew Bible
- The Annals --- Tacitus
- Pirkei Avot
- The Passover Hagaddah
- The High Holidays Mahzor
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire --- Edward Gibbon
- The Life of Samuel Johnson --- James Boswell
- Pride and Prejudice --- Jane Austen
- Emma --- Jane Austen
- The Red and the Black --- Stendhal
- Macaulay's Essays
- Walden --- Henry David Thoreau
- Uncle Tom's Cabin --- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- David Copperfield --- Charles Dickens
- Great Expectations --- Charles Dickens
- Barsetshire Chronicles --- Anthony Trollope
- Anna Karenina --- Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov --- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Middlemarch --- George Eliot
- Life on the Mississippi --- Mark Twain
- Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass --- Lewis
Carroll
- Treasure Island --- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Sherlock Holmes (collectively) --- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Plain Tales from the Hills --- Rudyard Kipling
- Short stories (collectively) --- Anton Chekhov
- The Story of the Treasure Seekers --- E. Nesbit
- The Time Machine --- H.G. Wells
- The Varieties of Religious Experience --- William James
- Little House series --- Laura Ingalls Wilder
- The Victorian Age in Literature --- G.K. Chesterton
- Eminent Victorians --- Lytton Strachey
- The Trial --- Franz Kafka
- Haircut and other stories --- Ring Lardner
- The Magic Mountain --- Thomas Mann
- Legends of the Jews --- Louis Ginsberg
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man --- James Joyce
- The Life of Abraham Lincoln --- Carl Sandburg
- Right Ho, Jeeves --- P.G. Wodehouse
- The Hobbit --- J.R.R. Tolkien
- At Swim-Two-Birds --- Flann O'Brien
- Animal Farm --- George Orwell
- 1984 --- George Orwell
- Mimesis --- Erich Auerbach
- The Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism of George Orwell
- Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits --- Bertrand Russell
- The History of Western Philosophy --- Bertrand Russell
- The Lord of the Rings --- J.R.R. Tolkien
- Unpopular Essays --- Bertrand Russell
- The World of Sholom Aleichem --- Maurice Samuel
- Certain People of the Book --- Maurice Samuel
- The Thurber Carnival --- James Thurber
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions --- Thomas Kuhn
- Love in a Cold Climate --- Nancy Mitford
- The Devil in Massachusetts --- Marion Starkey
- The World of George Washington and The World of Abraham Lincoln
-- Genevieve Foster
- The Lore of Large Numbers --- Philip Davis
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics --- Richard Feynman
- The Aleph --- Jorge Luis Borges
- Labyrinths --- Jorge Luis Borges
- Other Inquisitions --- Jorge Luis Borges
- The Pooh Perplex --- Frederick Crews
- Civilisation --- Kenneth Clark
- The Siege --- Clara Claiborne Park
- Ever Since Darwin and other books of essays --- Stephen Jay Gould
- The Power Broker --- Robert Caro
- Fifth Business --- Robertson Davies
- The Yeshiva --- Chaim Grade
- The Thread --- Philip Davis
- Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid --- Douglas Hofstadter
- The Mathematical Experience --- Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh
- Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein ---
Abraham Pais
- Parting the Waters --- Taylor Branch
- Samuel Johnson --- John Wain
- Harry Potter (the series) --- J.K. Rowling
- The Language Instinct --- Steven Pinker
- Life of Lyndon Johnson --- Robert Caro
- In the Land of Invented Languages --- Arika Okrent
- Geometry Revealed: A Jacob's Ladder of Modern Higher Geometry ---
Marcel Berger
- Post-War --- Tony Judt
- Apollo's Angels --- Jennifer Homans