Reading Rat 
What to read
Search and ResearchThis 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
Authors and works are sometimes also annotated as indicated by these graphics.
(etexts)
(bookseller)
(study guides)
(references)
(criticism)
(Humor)
(comment)
(note)
that are found either with the author or work.
If no text appears next to it, the text of a
note or 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.
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,
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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