Every now and again, there might be some post where the poster waxes nostalgic about books read during a formative reading period in that person's life. For those that blog about SF books, doubtless most of them would discuss either reading the "classics" of SF fiction (long and short form alike) or might list a bunch of 1980s/1990s multi-volume epic fantasy works that they read which got them hooked onto reading works that are over 500 pages each and whose storylines often took a decade or more to unfold.
For myself, however, things are a bit different. Since I have an area set aside for my earliest books, I can now list some of the 100+ books I owned when I was a 21-23 year-old graduate student. I think these might be somewhat different than the typical reading selection for people my age then:
Charles Dickens, all of his novels and short stories
Aristotle, Politics
Alexandre Dumas, all of the Musketeer novels, plus Queen Margot, The Count of Monte Cristo, and a few other minor works.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Daniel Defoe, Roxana, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Robinson Crusoe
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus, Felix Krull, Buddenbrooks
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Pendennis
Jane Austen, all of her novels
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
William Langland, Piers Plowman
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
James Joyce, Ulysses
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables
Emile Zola, several of his novels, including Germinal
Honore Balzac, Cousin Bette
Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of his major works
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Ilych
Several plays by Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen
Pat Barker, Regeneration trilogy
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum
This is in addition to several dozen books that I had read on Weimar Germany, cultural history from the 18th-20th centuries, E.P. Thompson's seminal social histories, a few dozen primary sources on Hitler for my MA research, and a few assorted books whose authors I'm too lazy to look up now.
I wonder if it's time for me to re-read/review several of these as well.
For myself, however, things are a bit different. Since I have an area set aside for my earliest books, I can now list some of the 100+ books I owned when I was a 21-23 year-old graduate student. I think these might be somewhat different than the typical reading selection for people my age then:
Charles Dickens, all of his novels and short stories
Aristotle, Politics
Alexandre Dumas, all of the Musketeer novels, plus Queen Margot, The Count of Monte Cristo, and a few other minor works.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Daniel Defoe, Roxana, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Robinson Crusoe
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus, Felix Krull, Buddenbrooks
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Pendennis
Jane Austen, all of her novels
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
William Langland, Piers Plowman
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
James Joyce, Ulysses
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables
Emile Zola, several of his novels, including Germinal
Honore Balzac, Cousin Bette
Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of his major works
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Ilych
Several plays by Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen
Pat Barker, Regeneration trilogy
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum
This is in addition to several dozen books that I had read on Weimar Germany, cultural history from the 18th-20th centuries, E.P. Thompson's seminal social histories, a few dozen primary sources on Hitler for my MA research, and a few assorted books whose authors I'm too lazy to look up now.
I wonder if it's time for me to re-read/review several of these as well.
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6 comments:
I don't think that the list is that unusual at all. By that time (I was 17 fifteen years ago) I had read seven of the books on your list (though I always preferred DUBLINERS to Joyce's other work, a point of contention at the time between myself and a friend who preferred ULYSSES) and an awful lot of them a were required reading on any standard high school, college or university English course (in the UK at the time anyway).
Masters students! Always showing up us Bachelors.
Cousin Bette made me despair !
It seems Dumas is very much appreciated in USA but he is not very much studied in France. I had to read Balzac, Stendhal, Zola in highschool but Dumas was never mentionned. Snobbish, I'm afraid.
Hurray for Dickens and Austen!
Adam,
Virtually none of the books I listed are required reading in most American high schools, but I could see where more would be included in UK schools.
Ben,
The MA has to be worth something, right?
Hélène,
That certainly was a depressing read, I'll admit.
Interesting that Dumas is not often taught there. I guess it's considered too close to pulp fictions and penny dreadfuls for those who devise the curricula there?
Derrick,
I wonder how many would have pegged me as having read all of Austen's work without being required to do so? :P
I find Dickens quite empty (I am, however, going to give Bleak House a chance). I find Jane Austen (and also the Brontes) the emptiest. The German romantics (Goethe, Heine, Hölderlin) really kick things off. Read The Sorrows of Young Werther, Hyperion, and Germany: A Winter's Tale, etc. etc. Everyone should read all of the poetry by these three writers.
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