18, but I would do much better if I counted excerpts as well. (College! Where you read a lot of excerpts of things!) This list spans thousands of years, and there are some very strong choices on here (THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM) and a few I've never heard of before. Hey, why haven't I read NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING yet?
For fun, contrast this list with the Modern Library 100 best nonfiction books (which I haven't even attempted to tackle yet, but all right, 11). Interestingly, the ML list has Churchill's World War II history on there, but the British newspaper didn't seem to think it worth inclusion. For even more fun, contrast that list with the "Reader's List" on the right side, displaying a voting process clearly dominated by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard fans.
Thanks to regular commenter Elizabeth for mailing this in.
5 hours ago
4 comments:
I have only read four of these books all of the way through. Four!!! I've read selections or excerpts from many more. I am surprised at a few of the books they left off - The Education of Henry Adams, for instance, which was #1 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century.
To be honest, I'm surprised I wasn't assigned more of these books in college. I didn't take many philosophy or capital-H humanties courses in college, but even so . . .
I studied a lot of British history in college, and bought Eminent Victorians and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom shortly after I graduated. They were on my nightstand for a long time, before they were eventually . . . reshelved. It seems to me that it would be exceedingly difficult to read many of these non-fiction books outside of a university-level course of some kind. I just can't imagine bringing these books with me on the subway (even though many of them are free downloads on the Kindle).
"To be honest, I'm surprised I wasn't assigned more of these books in college."
Exactly! What's more, most of the ones I have read I did so outside of class. I guess this is what marks us as members of the post-Great Books generation.
And as much as I like lists, it's hard to imagine motivating myself to work through this one on my own, at least straight through. Maybe when I'm 50.
Guardian:
1. SILENT SPRING, Rachel Carson
2. NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, Frederick Douglass
3. THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, Anne Frank
4. THE SYMPOSIUM, Plato
5. ON LIBERTY, John Stuart Mill
6. THE PRINCE, Niccolo Machiavelli
7. LEVIATHAN, Thomas Hobbes
8. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
9. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Betty Friedan
10. INNOCENTS ABROAD, Mark Twain
Four were for college (all in the same course), two were for high school.
I find the choice of THE SYMPOSIUM a little odd for the representative Plato (not THE REPUBLIC?). In that same vein, I've read a few of the other authors (Rousseau, Orwell, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche), just not the books listed here. (I've also read fiction by Achebe, Wilde, Nabokov, Voltaire, and Solzhenitsyn, but that seems less relevant.)
I find the choice of INNOCENTS ABROAD as "nonfiction" odd as well. (I would have chosen ROUGHING IT over INNOCENTS ABROAD myself, but then I remembered that The Guardian is European.)
Modern Library:
1. SILENT SPRING, Rachel Carson
2. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN, Stephen Jay Gould
The Reader's List:
1. SILENT SPRING, Rachel Carson
In conclusion: I'm weak on 20th century non-fiction, and even weaker on objectivism.
I agree. Unlike the modern library and Radcliffe lists, which are full of the books you've always intended to read but just haven't gotten around to yet, the books on The Guardian's list seem to have a lot of books that were important, but do not really need to be read in their entirety in order to understand their importance. I'm not sure if that makes sense, and i may be short-changing them, but I would imagine that you do not have to read every word of The Prince in order to consider yourself a culturally literate person.
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