It’s
no surprise that there are more women in my classes than men, and when I refer
to classic texts I get blank stares.
This is a result of women choosing to read popular books, or material
that doesn’t teach or enlighten, and time-fillers such as celebrity bios. Please don’t send me emails defending your intellectual
decisions- I understand that everybody is entitled to their taste and I don’t
judge anyone’s choices, but to be a writer you must be a reader and it is
imperative that you read a diverse selection of material as a reference point
to distinguish what is well-written from what is written poorly. Men readers often
concentrate on non-fiction and under-estimate the literary power of fiction. However,
today being President’s Day I’m going to focus on men.
As
I see it, there are books you read, and then there are the books that change
your life. We can all look back on the books that have shaped our perspective
on politics, religion, money, and love. Some will even become a source of
inspiration for the rest of your life. From a seemingly infinite list of books
of anecdotal or literal merit, I have compiled a list. A list that will shape a mind and in my
opinion also defines broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.
Whether a book is a tale of adventure, war, or history, there is so much to learn about life’s great questions from these gems. Let me know by your comments which of these you loved, disliked, and the books that meant a lot to you and should have been included(you can even get indignant about your favorite book). Here is my list.
The
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Bluebeard,
Kurt Vonnegut
The
Lord of the Flies, William Holding
Catch
22, Joseph Heller
Call
of the Wild, Jack London
Moby
Dick, Herman Melville
Brave
New World, Aldous Huxley
The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
For
Whom the Bells Toll, Ernest Hemingway
Catcher
in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Brothers
Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The
Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
1984,
George Orwell
The
Republic, Plato
Atlas
Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Les
Miserables, Victor Hugo
The
Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
A
Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
War
and Peace, Tolstoy
The
Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas
The
Prophet, Kahlil Gibran (poetic essays)
Fahrenheit
451, Ray Bradbury
The
Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The
Stranger, Albert Camus
The
Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
Grapes
of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Mephisto,
Klaus Mann
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
No comments:
Post a Comment