The Chinese Jar: Nicol Williamson In the Gravedigger scene from Hamlet

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GREAT BOOKS

The goal of this site is to read some of the great books and write about them. I am interested in the reactions of others to these books and to what I write about them. I intend to post some lists of the great books. I also want to post links to other sites about these books.

The great books are the books that have made major contributions to the great conversation. And that conversation is the ongoing discussion through the centuries of the major issues that have occupied mankind. Here are some of those questions. What does it mean to be human? What are good and evil? Is there a God? What is the nature of God? What is the best way to organize a government? How much can we know about the world? What is the nature of beauty? How should I behave towards my fellow men?

List Of Great Books

Here is a great books list that I have put together from my own reading and from refering to many other lists.

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* Epic of Gilgamesh

* Bible

* Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

* Aeschylus: esp. Oresteia

*Sophocles: esp Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus,
Antigone,

*Euripides: esp. Hippolytus; Medea; The Bacchae

*Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Clouds, Frogs, etc.

*Herodotus: History

*Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War

*Pre-Socratic’s: Fragments

*Plato: esp. the Republic, Symposium. Apology

*Aristotle” esp. Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Poetics, Rhetoric, Organon

* Cicero: various writings

*Ovid: Metamorphoses

* Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

*Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

*Virgil: esp. The Aeneid

* Livy: History of Rome

* Tacitus: The Annals

* Plutarch: Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans

*Plotinus: The Enneads

*St, Augustine: Confessions, City of God

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy

*The Koran

*Beowulf

*St Anselm: Proslogion, On the Existence of God

*Tristan and Isolde

*The Song of Roland

*The Nibelungenlied

*St, Thomas Aquinas: Summa Contra Gentiles, Summa Theologica,

*Dante: The Divine Comedy

*Boccaccio: Decameron

*Machiavelli: The Prince. Discourses on Livy

*Erasmus: The Praise of Folly, Colliquia

*Martin Luther: various

*Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel

*Montaigne: Essays

*Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion

*Cervantes: Don Quixote

*Francis Bacon: Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis

*Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus

*Shakespeare: Plays (esp. Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V part one, Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest), poetry

*Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan

*Rene Descartes: Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First Philosophy

*John Milton: Paradise Lost, Areopagitica, Of Education

*Molière: The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, etc.

*Blaise Pascal: Pensees, The Provincial Letters

*Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal

*John Locke: Second Treatise on Government, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A Letter Concerning Toleration

*Jean-Baptiste Racine: Phaedre

*George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

*Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

*David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

* STERNE: Tristam Shandy

*James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson

*American Constitution

*Hamilton, Madison, Jay The Federalist Papers

*Tocqueville Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

*Jean Jacque Rousseau: Confessions, Social Contract

*Goethe: Faust

*Pushkin: Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, The Tale of Tsar Saltan

*Hegel: Philosophy of History

*Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Either Or

*Gogol: Dead Souls, The Overcoat, The Inspector General, The Nose

*Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

*Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

*Herman Melville:: Moby Dick

*Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov. Demons, Notes From Underground

*Stendhal: The Red and the Black

* Honore de Balzac: The Human Comedy

*Flaubert: Madame Bovary

*Henry David Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience

*Marx: Capital, Communist Manifesto

*William Thackeray: Vanity Fair

*Charles Dickens: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations

*Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

*Trollope: Barchester Chronicles esp. Barchester Towers and The Vicar’s Wife’s Knickers

*Charles Darwin: Origen of Species, Descent of Man, Voyage of the Beagle

*William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism

*Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler. A Doll’s House

*Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, What Is Art?

*Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

*Henry James: The American, The Ambassadors, Turn of the Screw

*Fredrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathrustra, The Will to Power, Beyond Good and Evil, The Birth of Tragedy

*Sigmund Freud: Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Interpretation of Dreams, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

*Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past

*Edmund Husserl: Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of the European Sciences

*Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy, Human Knowledge: It’s Scope and Limits

*James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake

*Franz Kafka: The Trial

*W. B. Yeats: Collected Poems

*Martin Heidegger: Being and Time

*Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando

*Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus, Lotte in Weimar

*Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Philosophical Investigations

*Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game, The Journey to the East

*William Faulkner: Light in August, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

*Albert Camus: The Stranger, The Plague

*C. S. Lewis: Screwtape Letters, Mere Chriastianity

*Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle, The Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

*Joseph Heller: Catch 22, Picture This

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Nicol Williamson In the Gravedigger scene from Hamlet

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