Thursday, October 21, 2010

Arthur Henry King's Reading List for a Lifetime

This list is found at the back of the book Arm the Children: faith's response to a violent world by Arthur Henry King.  I think this is the list that I trust the most because I think so highly of the author and his viewpoint.  I got the list online from this site:

http://www.mormontimes.com/article/241/A-reading-list-for-a-lifetime

He prepared this list for an honors program at BYU (he thought the students should have read these already before going to the University, but "better late than never," he said.  He also said that although he wouldn't revise it now, he might just concentrate on the five greatest writers: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.

Bold= I've read them and would recommend them

Arthur Henry King's "Reading List for a Lifetime"
  • The Standard Works (the scriptures)
  • Homer, "The Iliad" (translator Richmond A. Lattimore), "The Odyssey" (translator Emile V. Rieu)
  • "The Bhagavad-Gita" (The Song of God) (translator Christopher Isherwood)
  • Aeschylus, "Aeschylus I — Oresteia" (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
  • Sophocles, "The Oedipus Cycle" (translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald)
  • Plato, "Phaedo," "The Republic"
  • Euripides, "Euripides One" (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
  • Herodotus, "The Persian Wars" (translator George Rawlinson)
  • Virgil, "The Aeneid" (translator John Dryden or Robert Fitzgerald)
  • Livy, "The Early History of Rome"
  • Josephus, "The Jewish War"
  • Plutarch, "Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans" and "Lives of the Noble Romans" (editor Edmund Fuller)
  • Eusebius, "The Essential Eusebius"
  • Augustine, "The City of God"
  • Bede, "The Ecclesiastical History of the English People"
  • Dante, "The Divine Comedy" (translators John D. Sinclair or Dorothy L. Sayers)
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Canterbury Tales" (translator Nevill Coghill)
  • Niccole Machiavelli, "The Prince"
  • William Shakespeare, "Hamlet," "Othello," "Measure for Measure," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Coriolanus," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest"
  • Miguel de Cervantes, "Don Quixote" (translator Walter Starkie)
  • Rene Descartes, "Discourse on Method" (translator Wollaston)
  • John Milton, "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," "Samson Agonistes"
  • George Fox, "Journal" (editor Rufus M. Jones)
  • John Bunyan, "The Pilgrim's Progress"
  • Jean Baptiste Racine, "Athaliah," "Phaedra"
  • Moliere, "Tartuffe," "The Would-Be Gentleman," "The Precious Damsels," "The Misanthrope" (translators Morris Bishop or Kenneth Muir)
  • Jonathan Swift, "Gulliver's Travels"
  • Antoine Prevost, "Manon Lescaut"
  • Samuel Richardson, "Pamela" (Part I), "Clarissa"
  • Montesquieu, "The Spirit of the Laws" (translator Thomas Nugent)
  • Voltaire, "Candide"
  • James Boswell, "Life of Samuel Johnson"
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile"
  • Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
  • Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
  • John Woolman, "Journal"
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Faust I, II" (translators Walter Kaufmann or Charles E. Passage), "Wilhelm Meister"
  • William Wordsworth, "The Prelude" (Books I and II)
  • John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, "The Federalist Papers" (editor A. Hacker)
  • John Keats, "Letters" (editor Robert Gittings)
  • Jane Austen, "Persuasion," "Emma"
  • Stendhal, "The Red and the Black"
  • Soren Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling," "The Sickness Unto Death" (translator Walter Lowrie)
  • Honore de Balzac, "Eugenie Grandet"
  • Karl Marx, "Early Writings"
  • Henry David Thoreau, "Walden," "Civil Disobedience"
  • Parley P. Pratt, "Autobiography"
  • Charles Dickens, "Little Dorrit," "Great Expectations"
  • George Eliot, "Middlemarch," "Daniel Deronda"
  • Gustave Flaubert, "A Sentimental Education" (translator Robert Baldick)
  • Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"
  • Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace" (translator Rosemary Edmonds), "Anna Karenina"
  • Sarah Orne Jewett, "Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories"
  • William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience"
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (translator Walter, Kaufmann)
  • Henrik Ibsen, "Peer Gynt" (translator Michael Meyer), "Rosmersholm," "Ghosts," "Hedda Gabler"
  • Thomas Hardy, "The Mayor of Casterbridge"
  • Henry James, "The Ambassadors," "What Maisie Knew"
  • Anton Chekhov, "The Cherry Orchard," "The Seagull," "Uncle Vanya," "The Three Sisters" (translator David Magarshack)
  • Joseph Conrad, "Nostromo"
  • James Joyce, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
  • Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams" (translator James Strachey)
  • Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain," "Joseph and His Brothers"
  • Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way" (translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
  • John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace"
  • D.H. Lawrence, "Women in Love"
  • E.M. Forster, "A Passage to India"
  • Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
  • Hermann Hesse, "Steppenwolf," "The Glass Bead Game" (Chapter 7)
  • George Santayana, "The Last Puritan"
  • Montaigne, "Essays" (translator John Florio)
The list is from the appendix in "Arm the Children: Faith's Response to a Violent World," by Arthur Henry King and published by BYU Studies in 1998. King wrote that if he did not indicate a particular translator, the translations are "all equally bad or indifferent, as the case may be." Or it is in English.

5 comments:

  1. Wow. I'm just impressed you've read War and Peace. I've heard that's a pretty heavy duty book. I need to work on this list, but nothing jumped out at me so I guess I must still be in love of learning :)

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  2. I love that this list is called "a list for a LIFETIME." Isn't it nice to know that we don't have to read it all right now, and that if we pace ourselves we will have quality things to read until we die. I like to think of these lists that way. It's much nicer than thinking how far "behind" I am because I read very few classics until recent years.

    Thanks for posting all of these reading lists. I am finding that I don't trust a lot of "classic book" lists. Some of the books considered "must reads" by some people are not only not worth my time, but detrimental as well.

    A friend of mine reccommended a website with some great book lists. They were written by an LDS Charlotte mason homeschooling mom whose children are all grown. The list is all the books that she felt were most worthwhile. I've been comparing her lists to the lists in the TJEd books, and I am surprised by the differences.I can't remember the address off hand. I'll go look it up and come back and post it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. OK, the address is:
    http://www.milestonesacademy.com/Site/Welcome.html

    If you click on "curriculun" at the top it will take you to a list of pages for each grade level.

    I think her standards are more similar to mine than those of Oliver deMille, so I feel safer reading what she recommends. I figure that when I finish all the books that she recommends (many years into the future!) then maybe I'll start on someone elses lists.

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  4. Wow, Christy! Thanks for the website - I've been looking through it this morning and I love it! I think I'll type up the recommended books and add them to my reading lists. I love how they are divided into grades and that they are recommended by a homeschool mom of high standards. Thank-you!

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