“Theres is no way of
estimating the number of other books which have been lost, let alone, the
number of poems which never got written down,” says The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, edited by Pat
Rogers.
Just how much
literature has been lost over the years due to:
·
Fire
·
Flood
·
War
·
Theft
·
Misplacement
·
Sunlight/heat
·
Vandals
Crumbling books due to poor storage conditions or poor quality paper
Crumbling books due to poor storage conditions or poor quality paper
·
Book
bans and ordered destructions
Indeed, there could
be single copies of books long gone form public access that exist in a private collection,
unshared with the world. There could be
books lost to computers that are broken or outdated. There could be books boxed up in a warehouse
or library basement, uncatalogued or undiscovered. Books, over the years were intentionally destroyed
by kings, invading armies, political foes, or those who sought to limit what
people can know, think, or believe.
Up until the 21st
century, the world’s collection of books was somewhat limited. Now everything is
digitized and readily available – millions of books – with a million more added
to the pile each year. We went from not
wanting to miss a published book to not knowing how to properly digest all of
the books that flood our libraries, bookstores, and e-readers.
If we were to create
a time capsule to preserve the greatest works of the past as well as
contemporary titles, which would we choose?
In The Lifetime
Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, we are given a glimpse as to which books
seem important from every era of time. Here are the book’s choices for one
looking to read a list of society-shaping tomes:
The Beginning
Homer, The Iliad
Homer. The Odyssey
Herodotus. The
Histories
Thucydides. The
History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato. Selected Works
Aristotle. Ethics, Politics
Aeschylus. The
Oresteia
Sophocles. Oedipus
Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
Euripides. Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Trojan Women,
Electra, Bacchae
Lucretius. Of the
Nature of Things
Virgil. The
Aeneid
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations
The Middle Ages
Saint Augustine. Confessions
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy
Geoffrey
Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales
Plays
William Shakespeare. Complete Works
Moliére. Selected Plays
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe. Faust
Henrik Ibsen. Selected Plays
George Bernard
Shaw. Selected Plays and Prefaces
Anton Chekhov. Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry
Orchard
Eugene O’Neill. Mourning
Becomes Electra,The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last
Tape
Contemporary
Drama, edited by
E.Bradlee Watson and Benfield Pressey
Narratives
John Bunyan. The
Pilgrim’s Progress
Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s
Travels, A Modest Proposal, Meditations Upon a Broomstick, Resolutions When I Come
to Be Old
Laurence Sterne. Tristram
Shandy
Henry Fielding. Tom
Jones
Jane Austen. Pride
and Prejudice, Emma
Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights
William Makepeace
Thackery. Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens. Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Bleak
House, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit
George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland,
Through
the Looking-Glass
Thomas Hardy. The
Mayor Casterbridge
Joseph Conrad. Nostromo
E.M. Forster. A Passage to India
James Joyce. Ulysses
Virginia Woolf. Mrs.
Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
D.H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers. Women in Love
Aldous Huxley. Brave New World, Collected Essays
George Orwell. Animal Farm Nineteen Eighty-four
Thomas Mann. The
Magic Mountain
Franz Kafka. The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short
Stories
Francois
Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel
Voltaire. Candide
and Other Works
Stendhal. The Red
and the Black
Honoré de Balzac. Pére Goriot, Eugenie Grandet
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
Marcel Proust. Remembrance
of Things Past
Andre Malraux. Man’s Fate
Albert Camus. The Plague, The Stranger
Edgar Allan Poe. Short Stories and Other Works
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales
Herman Melville. Moby
Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener
Mark Twain. Huckleberry
Finn
Henry James. The Ambassadors
William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
Ernest Hemingway. Short Stories
Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s
Gift
Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra. Don Quixote
Jorge Louis Borges. Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
Gabriel García Márquez. One
Hundred Years of Solitude
Nikolai Vasilievich
Gogol. Dead Souls
Ivan Sergeyevich
Turgenev. Fathers and Sons
Feodor Mikhailovich
Tolstoy. War and Peace
Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita Pale; Fire; Speak, Memory
Aleksandr Isayevich
Solzhenitsyn. The First Circle, Cancer
Ward
Philosophy,
Psychology Politics, Essays
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan
John Locke. Second Treatise of Government
David Hume. An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto
Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Selected Other Works
Sigmund Freud. Selected Works
Niccoló Machiavelli. The Prince
Michel Eyquem de
Montaigne. Selected Essays
René Descartes. Discourse on Method
Blaise Pascal Thoughts
(Pensées)
Alexis de Tocqueville.
Democracy in America
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Selected Works
Henry David Thoreau. Walden, Civil Disobedience
William James. The Principles of Psychology ,Pragmatism and
Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience
John Dewey. Human Nature and Conduct
George Santayana. Skepticism and Animal Faith Selected Other Works
Poetry
John Donne. Selected Works
John Milton. Paradise
Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica
William Blake. Selected Works
William
Wordsworth. The Prelude; Selected Shorter Poems; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,
1800
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. The Ancient Mariner,
Christable, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
William Butler Yeats.
Collected Poems, Collected Plays, The
Autobiography
T.S. Eliot. Collected
Poems, Collected Plays
Walt Whitman. Selected Poems Democratic Vistas, Preface to
first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855), A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads
Robert Frost. Collected
Poems
Poets
of the English Language,
edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson
The
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry,
edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair
History Biography
Autobiography
Basic
Documents in American History,
edited by Richard B. Morris
The
Federalist Papers,
edited by Clinton Rossiter
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Confessions
James Roswell. The Life of Samuel Johnson
Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams
Fernand Braudel. The Mediterranean
and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II Civilization and Capitalism
15th-18th Century
Annex
William H. McNeill. The Rise of the West
Will and Ariel
Durant. The Story of Civilization
Samuel Eliot
Morison. The Oxford History of the American People
Page Smith. A People’s History of the United States
Alfred North
Whitehead. Science and the Modern World
Alfred North
Whitehead. An introduction to Mathematics
E.H. Gombrich. The Story of Art
Mortimer J. Adler and
Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book
In
the Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom (1994), he identifies hundreds of American and
international titles that are worthy of consumption today. He properly notes
the following:
“Originally the Canon
meant the choice of books in our teaching institutions, and despite the recent
politics of multiculturalism, the Canon’s true question remains: What shall the individual who still desires
to read attempt to read, this late in history?
The Biblical three-score years and ten are no longer suffice to read
more than a selection of the great writers in what can be called the Western
tradition, let alone in all the world’s traditions. Who reads must choose, since there is
literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but
read.”
Before we get to the
“what” should be read, everyone has to answer “why” they choose to read at all.
Is it to further
justify a solitary existence – or do they sacrifice relationships, activities,
and first-person experiences in the world in order to read of the world through
the eyes or manifestations of others?
Is the motive to read
so that one feels they can have a similar experience with all of those who read
the same book, to feel united and akin to one another?
Do we read because
it’s safe – we can’t get hurt, risk anything, or lose by reading? We can certainly gain knowledge, feel empathy, and
gain insights on the views of others.
Reading is a deeply
personal experience, even if we end up sharing in a community of readers that
which feels truthful, pure, and wonderful.
Books provide so many
obvious benefits but they also give us the freedom to live beyond what we could
possibly do, know, or feel. They
supplement our lives.
So what should one do
with their precious time as readers? Do
you read the newest and latest books first – and then peer back into the past
by sampling classics from various eras?
Do you pick a genre and seek to consume the best it has to offer, old or
new, American or foreign? Are you into
fiction or non-fiction – or both? Will
you try poetry, essays, and short stories?
Is a reader capable
of appreciating so many different types of books and authors? Can one value reading the ancient Near East
text, Gilgamesh or The Apocrypha, as much as reading Stephen
King’s Carrie or E.L. James’s 50 Shades of Grey?
Could you digest Shakespeare,
The Mahabharata, Plato’s Dialogues, Aristotle’s Ethics, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Seneca’s Tragedies
as easily as you would consume St. Augustine’s The Confessions, Machiavelli’s The
Prince, Cervantes’ Don Quixote,
Hobbes’s Leviathan, Swift’s Gulliver Travels, or Hugo’s Les Miserables?
Will there come a
time when people don’t bother to look beyond a handful of classics, focusing
their attention on modern fare? That
time may already be upon us. If you’re
not an English major in college or if you’re not a writer, the average person
reads only a few books each year. Are
they more apt to read what’s on a bestseller list or a historically significant
book from three centuries ago?
How many people now
get to experience, understand, and treasure the Poems of William Wordsworth or
Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake?
They may be reading some Dickens, Twain, and Austen, but are they
reading William Morris, Wilkie Collins, James Cooper, and Francis Parkman?
So, the question
still remains unanswered – what should we read?
Why?
Individuals will need
to provide their answers but society should guide us and inspire people to not
only read, but to show why some books should still be read.
Just as each
generation looks to pass along certain values and ways of living, it also seeks
to provide a sense of culture and places importance on some books, movies,
music, and philosophy. What will we pass on to the next generation, by way of
new books as well as our recommendations from the past?
Who will be here to
whisper to propel us to check out David Mamet’s American Buffalo, Sam Shepard’s Seven
Plays, Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s
Complaint, William Kennedy’s Ironweed,
E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel,
or Thomas Pynchon’s V, while others think
that we should read George Orwell’s 1984, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, Norman Mailer’s
The Executioner’s Song, James
Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket,
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Truman
Capote’s In Cold Blood, Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita, Flannery O’Conner’s
Wise Blood, or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos? What of Faulkner, Hemingway,
Steinbeck, Fitzgerald or O’Neill?
We can go and
on. And as we debate what’s a classic
and which classics need to be read, more are added to the list. If one can live a thousand years – and
read a thousand books a year – both distinct impossibilities right now – one still couldn’t even read 5% of what’s known to exist in 2018.
By 3018, at current rates, a billion books will exist.
By 3018, at current rates, a billion books will exist.
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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative opinions, and
interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone and not that of
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@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels much more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2018. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in
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He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America and
participated in a PR panel at the Sarah Lawrence College Writers Institute
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