Reading Rat 
What to read
Search and ResearchBrowsing. I used to pick books to read by browsing through the public library. At a used book sale I followed this same "this looks interesting" non-method. Soon it became clear that I would have many more books than I could ever read, or even shelve. So I consulted books, like those in the Bibliography, that consisted of or included book lists for the general reader. These lists varied in their recommendations, of course, and I set out to create my own to set priorities for buying and reading, which I called Reading Rat.
The list has recommended reading in reverse chronological order by the year of the author's birth, or of the work's publication when there are mutliple or unknown authors. In other words, it starts with the latest recommended author and works back in time.
The works and lists in the Bibliography were also the basis for rating works as shown by the star graphics
to
(etexts)
(bookseller)
(study guides)
(references)
(criticism)
(Humor)
(comment)
(note)
that are found either with the author or work.
Some annotations, particularly if numerous, have been moved to a post on my weblog linked from that author's name in the chronological list or from that category or categories of annotations at the author's entry.
The text of a
note or comment
appears when your cursor is over those graphics.
Considering so many sources can lead to what some think anomalous results. For example, some of Shakespeare's plays are rated lower than Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This results from the lack of consensus over which of Shakespeare's works to recommend. Almost everyone recommended Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Given that the authors of the works consulted for ratings were published in English, works not widely available in English are rarely recommended. The recommending works include some older ones that lean toward English-language writers, and some others specifically indicated they confined their recommendations to European (Western) works. Later authors and editions generally included works from Eastern civilizations. The net effect is that there are more Western works and they include the highest-rated works.
The title comes from Peter Drucker's collection of autobiographical essays, Adventures of a Bystander. Miss Elsa, one of his fourth grade teachers in Vienna, called him a "reading rat." (In Drucker's native German, leseratte [readingrat] is a synonym for buchenwurm [bookworm].) "You're reading under the desk when you think I'm not looking," she observed. I may be inventing a distinction, but we reading rats are in more of a hurry than bookworms. That is why we do not just browse, we take a list.
Most recently updated entries
Sunday, August 24th: Clarendon, Dryden, Hutchinson, Moliere, Pope, Richardson, and Traherne (and see this month's Quadaily Review)
Wednesday, August 20th: Burgess, Camus, Carmi, Cheever, Davies, Hawkes, Justice, Orwell, Percy, and Pires
Saturday, August 16th: Bachmann, Brodsky, Darwish, Hill, and Schama
Tuesday, August 12th: Benjamin, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Hitler, Lampedusa, and Peret
Friday, August 8th: Coetzee, Dove, David Grossman, Hart, Kushner, Naipaul, Thylias Moss, and Oates
Monday, August 4th: Gordimer, Lessing, Flannery O'Connor, Solzhenitsyn, and Vonnegut
Monday, July 28th:
John Ford,
Harvey,
Herrick,
Hobbes,
Marston,
Massinger,
Middleton and Rowley,
Quevedo,
Richelieu,
Selden,
Tirso,
Velez, and
John Webster
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