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Reading Rat

Read Me What to read
1926 on < 1901-1925 < 1876-1900 < 1851-1875 < 1826-1850 < 1801-1825 < 1751-1800 < 1701-1750 < 1601-1700 < 1401-1600 < 1101-1400 < 301-1100 < 300 B.C.-A.D. 300 < through 301 B.C.


Index of Authors: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z


Selected Annotations
Etext: Etext:
The Online Books Page
Google Books
Poetry International Web
Academy of American Poets
Poet Seers
Poem Hunter
Every Poet
Famous Poems and Poets
Contemporary Writers in the UK
Listen to Genius!
Bookseller: Bookseller:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
AbeBooks
Alibris
Biblio
Book Sale Finder
Study: Study Guides:
Babel Guides
Cliffs Notes
Cummings Study Guides
eNotes
ISI Guides
Squashed Writers
Spark Notes
Reference: Reference:
Authors' Calendar
Guardian: Authors
Times Topics
New York Review: Authors
Poetry Archive
Theatre History
Luminarium
Criticism: Criticism:
Arts & Letters Daily
First Principles
A&LD Book Reviews Journal Sentinel
Shepherd Express
A.V. Club
Book Page
BookReporter
Bookslut
Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros
A&LD Magazines
Humor: Humor:
Book-A-Minute
Digested Read


Bibliography


Email


Search and Research
Google
Wikipedia
RefDesk
Library of Congress Catalog
Wayback Machine
Find Articles
Free Library
HighBeam Research
MetaGlossary


See also: Reading Log, Book Log, Milwaukee Booksellers,


This list of recommended reading is in reverse chronological order by the year of the author's birth, or of the work's publication when there are multiple or unknown authors. In other words, it starts with the latest recommended author and then goes back in time.

To create the list, I consulted books that consisted of or included book lists for the general reader. These were also consulted for rating works as shown by the star graphics to that precede some works.

Authors and works are sometimes also annotated as indicated by these graphics.
Etext: (etexts) Bookseller: (bookseller) Study: (study guides) Reference: (references) Criticism: (criticism) Humor: (Humor) The comment appears when your cursor is over this graphic. (comment) The comment appears when your cursor is over this graphic. (note)
that are found either with the author or work. If no text appears next to it, the text of a The note appears when your cursor is over this graphic. note or The comment appears when your cursor is over this graphic. comment appears when your cursor is over those graphics.

The major sources of recommended works and annotations, to date, are listed in the Bibliography.

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. Some newer annotations are in other posts on my weblog.


New! Here are the most recent annotations, updated posts, and revised entries.

June 28, 2009: updated reading list entries on Munro, Trevor, Updike, Charles Wright, Greene, Jarrell, Arthur Miller, Warren, Faulkner, Joyce, Remarque, Woolf, Chekhov, Mann, Whitehead, Yeats, Nietzsche, Twain, Dickens, Austen, Calhoun, Boswell, Burke, Addison, Chaucer, The Bible (King James Version), and The Vedas; new and updated author posts at Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 18;

June 21, 2009: updated reading list entries on Arenas, Merrill, Feynman, Gombrich, Waugh, Borges, Keynes, Wiener, Woolf, Mann, William James, Bernard, Borrow, and The Gospel of Truth; and new and updated author posts at Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 17;

June 14, 2009: updated reading list entries on Hart, Watson, Vonnegut, Lampedusa, Thoreau, Goethe, Racine, Pascal, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Augustine, Ovid, Virgil, Plato, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Homer; new and updated author posts at Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 16;

June 7, 2009: updated reading list entries on Pinter, Hemingway, Soseki Natsume, Kierkegaard, The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, Swedenborg, Basho, Chikamatsu, Hakuin, Saikaku, Kabbalah, Rumi, Dogen, The Tale of the Heike, No Plays, Kamo, Kenko, Saigyo, Yuien, Kokinshu, Kukai, Man'yoshu, Murasaki, and Sei; new and updated author posts at Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 15;

May 31, 2009: updated reading list entries on Zagajewski, Kuhn, Guerin, Byron, Johnson, Ts'ao Hseuh-Ch'in, Golden Lotus, Shakespeare, Wang Yang-Ming, Water Margin, Wu Ch'eng-en, Chu Hsi, Lin-chi Hui-chao, Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Vimalakirtinirdesa, Ovid, Han Fei Tzu, Hsun Tzu, Lotus Sutra, Songs of the South, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Book of Songs, Chuang Tzu, Confucius, The Great Learning, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Mo Tzu, Tzu Szu; new and updated author posts at Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 14;


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.


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Hypertext by Terrence Berres.
Dedicated to the memory of George Berres (1901-1974).
Revised June 27, 2009.

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