Reading Rat 
Recommended reading
Reading Rat is a list of recommended reading, arranged chronologically by author's birth, and divided as follows.
I. Ancient:
II. Medieval:
III. Renaissance and Enlightenment:
IV. Modern:
To look for a particular author, you can check the alphabetical
The recommendations were made based on consulting works and lists of recommended reading found in the
Bibliography.
Annotations
The works and lists in the Bibliography were also the basis for rating works as shown by the star graphics
to
Other annotations are preceded by these graphics.
(etexts)
(bookseller)
(study guides)
(references)
(criticism)
(Humor)
that are found either with the author or work.
Some annotations have been moved to a post on my weblog linked from that author's name in the chronological list.
Some numerous annotations in one or more categories have been moved to weblog post, linked from that category or categories of annotations at the author's entry.
You will sometimes see unlinked names in the Criticism. These refer to the recommending works in the Bibliography. The links here are to their entries.
Downs |
Fadiman |
Finally, there is the
(comment) which follows some authors or works. The comment appears when your cursor is over this
graphic.
(You may see this changed to distinguish
notes from
comments.)
Many of the online sources are listed in the
Annotations page.
Most recently updated entries (to list or weblog post)
Sunday, May 4th: Carroll, Dickinson, Henry George, W. S. Gilbert, Hardy, William James, Kalevala, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Twain
Monday, April 28th: Baudelaire, Charles Darwin, Dickens, George Eliot, Fontane, Goncharov, Hugo, Marx, Melville, Mill, Musset, Newman, Sand, Thackeray, Tocqueville, and Turgenev
Thursday April 24th: Beaumarchais, Burke, Casanova, Paine, Rousseau, Sterne, Ts'ao Hsueh-Ch'in, and Washington
Sunday, April 20th: Francis Bacon, Calvin, Cervantes, Copernicus, Galileo, Hobbes, Luther, Montaigne, and Pare
Wednesday, April 16th: Basho, Fenelon, Milton, Moliere, Newton, Pascal, Spinoza, and Voltaire
Saturday, April 12th: Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Hurston, and Pound
Tuesday, April 8th:
Achebe,
Chomsky,
Mamet, and
Winterson
FAQ
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.
I started this list to set priorities for buying and reading. 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 above, 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, which I called Reading Rat.
That title comes from Peter Drucker's Adventures of a Bystander, his collection of autobiographical essays. In Drucker's native German, "leseratte" [readingrat] is a synonym for buchenwurm [bookworm]. Miss Elsa, one of his fourth grade teachers in Vienna, called him a "reading rat."
"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.
See also
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