Thursday, April 23, 2009

Um...I was behind

Books I should have read before I graduated from high school...
(bold--ones I did read; italics, ones I've read, but post-high school;
"Shakespeare's plays, especially "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," were the only works listed by a majority of the participants - 71 percent.

"Fifty percent cited such documents of United States history as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Next came "Huckleberry Finn," the Bibleand these works of literature, philosophy and politics:

- Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad."

- Dickens's "Great Expectations" and "Tale of Two Cities." (on my own)

- Plato's "Republic." (some in class, more on my own)

- John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter."

- Sophocles' "Oedipus."

- Melville's "Moby Dick." (YUCK)

- Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

- Thoreau's "Walden."

- The poems of Robert Frost.

- Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby."

- Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." (read more of them in college)

- Marx's "Communist Manifesto."

- Aristotle's "Politics."

- The poems of Emily Dickinson.

- Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment." (still need to finish it)

- The novels of William Faulkner.

- J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye."

- De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America."

- Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice."

- The essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

- Machiavelli's "Prince."

- Milton's "Paradise Lost."

- Tolstoy's "War and Peace." (It's on my shelf. It wants to be read again. But I don't think so).

- Virgil's "Aeneid.""

So...how's you do?

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