Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

I just downloaded and went through the spreadsheet list today and noticed the Shakespeare-less-ness of it. It has been mentioned that the 1001 list is limited primarily to fiction novels. Could we not create a non-prose list? This could include plays as well as epics like Beowulf and Paradise Lost, etc. Maybe it would be a list of 100 rather than 1000 works.

Well these would be on my "Poetry Books You Must Read Before You Die" List. (I think it's best to omit any "collected" works and just put actual titled books or long poems published):

The Book of Psalms
The Book of Job
Ecclesiasties
The Tao Te Ching
The Bhagavad Gita
Paradise Lost – Milton
Beowulf – anon.
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
In Memoriam – Alfred Lord Tennyson
An Essay on Criticism – Alexander Pope
An Essay on Man – Alexander Pope
The Black Riders and Other Lines – Stephen Crane
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience – William Blake
Don Juan – Lord Byron
Absalom and Achitophel – John Dryden
Where the Sidewalk Ends – Shel Silversteen
Rape of the Lock – Alexander Pope
The Singer Trilogy – Calvin Miller
Goblin Market – Cristian Rossetti
The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam – Edward Fitzgerald
My Last Duchess – Robert Browning
The Cry of the Children – Elizabeth Barret Browning
The Divine Comedy – Dante
Astrophil and Stella – Philip Sydney
The Faerie Queen – Edmund Spencer
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman


Here would be my "Plays You Must Read Before You Die" List:

King Lear – Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare
Richard III – Shakespeare
Measure for Measure – Shakespeare
(Here I am aiming for one of each kind – tradgedy, comedy, history, and problem play, otherwise the list would be all Shakespeare)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard
Doctor Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
The Crucible – Arthur Miller

(And there I must end, as I haven't read many plays)


And this would be on my "Nonfiction You Must Read Before You Die List:

This Is My God – Herman Wouk
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton
Night – Elie Wiesel
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (though this is on the list despite being nonfiction)
The Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis
Eat the Rich – P.J. O'Rourke
Confessions – St. Augustine of Hippo
A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis
A Personal Odyssey – Thomas Sowell
Up From Slavery – Booker T. Washington
The Autobiogrpahy of Malcolm X – Alex Haley
The Professor and the Madman – Simon Winchester
Literary Converts – Joseph Pearce
The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
The Everlasting Man – G.K. Chesterton
The Cost of Discipleship – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Virtue of Selfishness – Ayn Rand
The Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – John Locke
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstencraft
The Kama Sutra

Great lists - so far! To the plays I would add:
The Importance of Being Ernest
Death of a Salesman
A Doll's House (Ibsen)
The Glass Menagerie

My Shakespeare choices would differ: Hamlet for the tragedy and The Taming of the Shrew for the comedy, and I also would include The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar. Not sure which of the histories myself, and I've only read three or four.

Regarding the poetry, there's just too many poems to try to list individual ones, but one larger work I would add is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I like some of your non-fiction choices, but I'm not even going to try to go there...

Oh, and two more plays: Oedipus Rex and Pygmalion!

To reiterate my previous sentiment, Goethe's Faust should absolutely be on that list.

Linda wrote: "I just downloaded and went through the spreadsheet list today and noticed the Shakespeare-less-ness of it. It has been mentioned that the 1001 list is limited primarily to fiction novels. Could w..."


Alexander Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN was included in the latest (2010) list. It looks like a long poem to me, although Pushkin was said to have described it as "a novel in verse."

Anyone here has read it?

Eugene Onegin is a fairly long poem, but well worth the read. I only read the original, and can't say much about the quality of the translation, but if the translation was done well it's also a very easy and rapid read.

In this vein, some non-fiction and poetry I'd add (in no particular order and without many subdivisions):

The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
The Bible
The New Testament
The Qu'ran
The Duino Elegies - Rilke
Mzyri - Mikhail Lermontov
The Seagul - Anton Chekhov
All My Son - Arthur Miller
Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesko
Hamlet- Shakespeare
Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Macbeth - Shakespeare
The Tempest - Shakespeare
The Imaginary Patient - Moliere
Dialogs (Gorgias, timaeus, Crito, etc') - Plato
Apology - Plato
The Republic - Plato
The Symposium - Plato
Metaphysics - Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle
Poetics - Aristotle
On the Soul - Aristotle
Histories - Herodotus
A History of the Peloponnese War - Thucidides
Elements - Euclid
Guide for the Perplexed - Moses Maimonides
Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals - Immanuel Kant
Utilitarianism - john Stuart Mill
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl popper
The Structure of Scientific revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
Collapse - Jared Diamond
Syntactic Structures - Noam Chomsky
The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould
The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
Relativity - Albert Einstein
Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl
Principia Mathematica - Isaac Newton
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus - Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
Das Capital - Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Mark
Principia Mathematica - Bertrand Russell
Art of War - Sun Tzu
De Bello Galico - Julius Caesar
The Jewish Wars - Flavius Jesephus
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil - Hannah Arendt
The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

...

That's... probably enough for now. There's also several list of "The Most influential Books Ever" which should definitely be consulted and collated. The ones I mentioned are, pretty much, the ones I could think of offhand, looking at my own bookshelf.

which translation of Eugene Onegin would you recommend? I learned that Vladimir Nabokov also has a translation of this, do you think that's a good one?

I really haven't a clue, because I've never looked at any. I can recommend the original, but I don't know that that helps you much. ;)