Meaningful Books: 2007

And one last quick posting before I get back to work.  Thinking about Winesburg, Ohio made me think about a Meaningful Books talk that I gave back home at Champlain in 2007 (was it really five years ago?).  The series was the brain child of my brilliant friend Sarah Cohen, who also inspired this blog, come to think of it.  Sarah is getting ready to head off for a wonderful opportunity in California, and I don't Champlain will ever be the same (I know I won't).  On a related note, she was finally dragooned into giving her own Meaningful Books talk, for which I need to include a link.  It was very touching, and not simply because we share many of the same books.

Anyway, here's the list I came up with.  I thought it would be a good idea to post it before I completely forgot about it and the link died a natural death.  We just introduced the books and talked about what we loved about them.  I think I have the distinction of having the most painfully pretentious list (not surprisingly).  If nothing else I guess this qualifies as another history document.  I wonder how different that list would have been in 1987 or 1997 - and how different will it be in 2017?

Zhu Xi, Reflections on Things at Hand

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

Junichiro Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Paul Fusell, The Great War and Modern Memory

Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility cycle (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel)

Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book

Valmiki, Ramayana

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Julian Barnes,  Flaubert's Parrot

Herodotus, Histories

Basho, Narrow Road to the Deep North

Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings trilogy