Well folks, I've received many suggestions via email, some from fellow bloggers and many of them from Facebook people, so I thought I would post the list as it is so far. I still need more nominations for the great books list! I want to try and present a completed list to you soon, so get 'em in!
Please keep those nominations coming! You can add them as comments on this post or feel free to email me your suggestions at randomshelf@hotmail.com.
Here is what I have so far, non-fiction and fiction
Non-Fiction:Victor Davis Hanson: Carnage and Culture
S.L.A. Marshall: The Soldier's Load and the Destiny of a Nation
Theodore Dalrymple: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass
Emory Thomas: Bold Dragoon (bio of J.E.B. Stuart)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Works
Thor Heyerdahl : Kon-Tiki
Aristotle: Nichomacean Ethics
Rene Descartes: Meditations
David Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
John Locke: Two Treatises of Government, Of Civil Government
John C. Calhoun: Disquisition of Government
Ludwig Von Mises: Human Action
Plutarch: Lives
Herodotus: The History (father of history)
Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War
Stephan Ambrose: Citizen Soldiers, Undaunted Courage
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
David Hackett Fischer: Paul Revere's Ride
Plato: The Republic
Rousseau: The Social Contract
Machiavelli: The Prince and Other Writings
Thomas Paine: Common Sense and Other Writings
Jay, Madison & Hamilton: The Federalist Papers
F. A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom
Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Madison: Debates on the Constitution
Hunter S. Thompson:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
Francis Bacon: Essays
Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia
Jonathon Edwards: Sermons
Clausewitz: On War
Frederick Jackson Turner: The Frontier in American History
Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August
Shelby Foote: The Civil War
Paul Johnson: A History of the American People, Modern Times
Fiction:GK Chesterton: What's Wrong With The World, Heretics & The Ballad of the White Horse
Rudyard Kipling's Collected Verse
C.S. Lewis: Chronicles of Narnia Series, The Screwtape Letters
John Kenneth Toole: Confederacy Of Dunces
Mark Twain: Works
George Orwell: Animal Farm and 1984
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Orson Scott Card: Enders Game
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Series
Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings series
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead
Jean Craighead George: My Side of the Mountain,
Beverly Clearly : Then Again Maybe I Won't
Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach
Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows
EB White: Charlottes Web
Walter Farley: The Black Stallion series
Richard Adams: Watership Down
Richard Bach: Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince
Gary Paulsen: The Hatchet
Madeleine L'Engle: A Wrinkle In Time
Natalie Babbit: Tuck Everlasting
Mildred D Taylor: Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry
Lois Lowery: Number the Stars
Shel Silverstein: The Giving Tree
Kenneth Grahame: The WInd in the Willows
Lois Lowry : The Giver
Jerry Spinelli: Maniac Magee
Norton Juster: The Phantom Tollbooth
Jane Austin: Pride and Prejudice
Daphne DuMaurier: Rebecca
Judy Blume: Freckle Juice
Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey
Dr. Seuss: The works
Shakespeare: The works
John Milton: Paradise Lost
Jonathon Swift: Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal
Edgar Allan Poe: The Works
Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Jerzy Kosinski : The Painted Bird
Herman Hesse: Siddhartha
Beowulf
Stephan Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Daniel Defoe:l Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens: The Works
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables
Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Horace: Satires
Aesop: Fables
Virgil: The Aeneid
Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte D'Arthur
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Parts One and Two
Voltaire: Candide
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables & Notre-Dame of Paris
William Wordsworth: Poems
William Blake: Complete Poetry and Prose
John Keats: Poems and Letters
Lewis Carroll: Complete Works
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Fairy Tales
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace & Anna Karenina
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems
Ambrose Bierce: Collected Writings
Louisa May Alcott: Little Women
H. G. Wells: The Time Machine, War of the Worlds
Bertolt Brecht: The Threepenny Opera
Robert Frost: The Poetry
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Jules Verne: Works
Washington Irving: Works
Obviously there have been more suggestions for fiction- we need to bolster the non-fiction list as well. This is shaping up to be a great list - and the best part is that it has been created by all of you! So keep those suggestions coming and in the next week or so I will present a completed list.
In the meantime- let's keep this conversation going- why do you think we even need to read any of these- and what is it about these books, about the "Western Canon" if you will, that is important for us to absorb and learn? Your comments and emails are welcome.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
