Thursday, November 29, 2012

From Multiply 081: The Carlos Aureus Reading List


Got this list from http://aiscracker.com/?p=1485

I was searching the net for information concerning my beloved Prof. Aureus and I found this. It seems his taste tends to difficult reads, seeing here many historical, philosophical and scientific books, as well as novels that require an encyclopedic knowledge. I wonder if he has read any of Umberto Eco's books. (I am a big Eco fan and I'm surprised no work of his is included in the list.) I also notice that he missed out some of my fave writers like Dickens, Twain, Alcott, Soseki and Mishima. As usual, the dominant elements are Anglo-American with a few Filipino novels included though the absence of F. Sionil Jose is somewhat of a shock. (I haven't read any of his works but I know a European who has done so and he's pretty much impressed, even telling me that he can be considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature.)

I also question the inclusion of Hemingway. Really! With his boring realism and dull, oh-so-common prose??? He did reinvent the way a novel should be, something that can be read by everybody, but I just find that so boring.

Going through the list, I lament that the only Jew I find is Einstein. (Okay, I'm obsessed with the Jews, just that they're so admirable in their forbearance.) And why is it that there are no Muslim writers? Basho's haiku and the Tang Dynasty poets are nowhere in the list. Not even Rig Veda nor the Kama Sutra. (And I'm so tempted to add "The Perfumed Garden".) And no Japanese writer! What happens to the four GREAT literary works of China, one of which is "The Dream of Red Mansions", a great favorite of mine???

Still, it's interesting to know his literary tastes. I really should start reading "Canterbury Tales", "Divine Comedy" (I'll see if I can find a nice translated version), "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained", the Dostoevsky novels (I hear they're great reads) and "In Search of Lost Time" (aka Remembrance of Things Past of which, after leafing through a few pages, I have the impression it can cure me of my insomnia LOL! But his prose is very beautiful, at times even lyrical.)

Highlighted works are what I've finished reading. Just note the difference in our taste. (I tend to go for extremely tragic and/or erotic novels. XD )
1. The King James Bible (or the Holy Koran)
2. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
3. The Surangama Sutra of Buddhism
4. Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey
5. Virgil: The Aeneid
6. Cervantes: Don Quixote
7. Dante: The Divine Comedy (Three Parts)
8. Sophocles: The Oedipus Trilogy
9. The Bhagavad Gita (also read the Mahabharata and the Ramayana)
10. Goethe: Faust (Parts One and Two)
11. Plato: The Republic
12. Aristotle: Poetics
13. Lao Tse: Tao Te Ching
14. Saint Augustine: Confessions (also read The City of God)
15. Saint Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
16. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
17. John Milton: Paradise Lost
18. Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur
19. John Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress
20. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
21. Herman Melville: Moby Dick
22. James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
23. James Joyce: Dubliners
24. James Joyce: Ulysses
25. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (also read As I Lay Dying)
26. Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls (also read The Sun Also Rises)
27. Saint Thomas More: Utopia
28. Henry David Thoreau: Walden (also read Civil Disobedience)
29. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
30. T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land (also read Tradition and the Individual Talent)
31. John Henry Cardinal Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (also read The Idea of a University)
32. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (also read Lord Jim)
33. Beowulf
34. Pearl: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
35. The Venerable Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
36. Karl Marx: Das Kapital
37. W. B. Yeats: A Vision
38. W. B. Yeats: Collected Poems
39. George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion
40. Bernard Lonergan: Insights
41. Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra
42. Manu: The Laws of Manu
43. Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
44. Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth
45. Harold Bloom: The Western Canon
46. James Hilton: Goodbye, Mr. Chips
47. James Hilton: Lost Horizon
48. Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West
49. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
50. T. H. White: The Once and Future King
51. Jean Jacques Rosseau: Confessions (also read The Social Contract)
52. Flaubert: Madame Bovary
53. Victor Hugo: Les Miserables
54. James Frazer: The Golden Bough
55. Ovid: Metamorphosis
56. Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
57. Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
58. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
59. Jose Rizal: Noli Me Tangere
60. Jose Rizal: El Filibusterismo
61. Albert Camus: The Plague
62. Jean Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness (also read In Camera)
63. Franz Kafka: The Trial
64. Boetius: The Consolation of Philosophy
65. Honore de Balzac: The Human Comedy
66. Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
67. Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology
68. Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man
69. Teilhard de Chardin: The Future of Man
70. Sir Isaac Newton: Principia Mathematica
71. Gilbert Highet: The Classical Tradition
72. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
73. Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
74. Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics
75. Foucault: Discipline and Punishment
76. Roland Barthes: Image Music Text
77. Walter Benjamin: Illuminations
78. Anton Chekhov: The Duel
79. Nick Joaquin: Prose and Poems
80. Gregorio Brillantes: The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories
81. Confucius: The Analects
82. B. F. Skinner: Small Is Beautiful
83. The Tibetan Book of the Dead
84. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
85. John Fowles: The Magus
86. Susan Brownmiller: Against Our Will
87. J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
88. B. F. Skinner: Beyond Freedom and Dignity
89. Ezra Pound: Cantos
90. William Golding: Lord of the Flies
91. Will and Ariel Durant: The Story of Philosophy
92. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message
93. Edith Hamilton: Mythology (also read The Roman Way)
94. Albert Einstein: Relativity, the Special and General Theories
95. Nicolaus Copernicus: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
96. Charles Darwin: Origin of Species
97. Documents of Vatican 11
98. Thomas Malthus: Essay on the Principle of Population
99. Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
100.Martin Heidegger: Being and Time


Dec 27, '09 10:38 AM
for Miracle's friends, Miracle's family and Miracle's online buddies

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