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A Small Library of Books by Gwen Williams

101 books for a small library:

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Aesop. Aesop's Fables. Translated from Greek. Andersen, Hans Christian. The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Translated from Danish. Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle. Translated from Greek. Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Translated from Latin. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Sonnets from the Portuguese. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: a tragicomedy in two acts. Translated from French by Samuel Beckett. Borges, Jorge Luis. Seven Nights. Translated from Spanish. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fiction. Translated from Spanish. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated from French. Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution: a History. Cervantes. Don Quixote. Translated from Spanish. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Translated from Chinese. Clausewitz, Carl Von. On War. Translated from German. Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated from Italian. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Dick, Phillip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated from Russian. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated from Russian. Dumas, Alexander. The Count of Monte Cristo. Translated from French. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Foucault, Michel. This is Not a Pipe. Translated from French.
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Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. Translated from Spanish. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated from Spanish. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories. Translated from Spanish. Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Translated from German. Gogol, Nikolai V. Collected Stories. Translated from Russian. Goethe, Johan Wolfgang Von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Translated from German. Goethe, Johan Wolfgang Von. Italian Journey. Translated from German. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. Homer. Iliad & Odyssey. Translated from Greek. Heaney, Seamus. Collected Poems, 19661987 Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Translated from German. Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables. Translated from French. Jacob, Francois. Of Flies, Mice, and Men. Translated from French. James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated from German. Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. Translated from German. Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Translated from Japanese. Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed: an essay in nine parts. Translated from French. Kundera, Milan. Immortality. Translated from Czech. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Translated from French. Machiavelli. The Prince. Translated from Italian. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays of Montaigne. Translated from French. Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated from German. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Cairo Trilogy. Translated from Arabic. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Morrison, Toni. Beloved.
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Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Neruda, Pablo. Odes to Common Things. Translated from Spanish. Neruda, Pablo. 100 Love Sonnets. Translated from Spanish. Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Translated from Turkish. Plato. The Death and Trial of Socrates: Four Dialogues. Translated from Greek. Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives (complete set). Translated from Greek. Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated from French. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated from French. Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Translated from German. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated from German. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated from German. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Saramago, Jose. The Elephant's Journey. Translated from Portuguese. Saramago, Jose. Journey to Portugal. Translated from Portuguese. Shakespeare. King Lear. Shakespeare. Hamlet. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Sophocles. The Oedipus cycle. Translated from Greek. Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Sunzi. The Art of War. Translated from Chinese. Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal. Terkel, Studs. Working. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Or Life in the Woods. Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated from Russian. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated from Russian. Tolstoy, Leo. Tolstoy on Shakespeare. Translated from Russian. Trumbo, Dalton. Johnny Got His Gun. Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. Translated from Russian. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated from French. Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eighty Days. Translated from French.
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! !

Voltaire. Candide. Translated from French. Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays. Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: the books and school of the ages.

If you want to add another 26 books to this library of 101, here they are:

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. Translated from French. Einstein, Albert. Theory of Relativity. Faulkner, William. Collected Short Stories. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Goethe, Johan Wolfgang Von. Faust. Translated from German. Grass, Gunter. The Danzig Trilogy. Translated from German. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Hesse, Herman. Siddhartha. Translated from German Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Translated from French. Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or. Translated from Danish. London, Jack. Call of the Wild. More, Thomas. Utopia. Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind. Translated from Polish. O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Translated from Russian. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems. Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.

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! ! General remarks about these books !

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated from German. Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems. Grossman, Edith. Translation Matters. Strunk, William. The Elements of Style.

I recommend cloth covers for all books. If cloth cannot be found, then I recommend hard cover, and nally, if the book is only available in paperback cover, then buy the paperback. A number of these books are available in a cloth edition called, Everyman's Library. These Everyman editions are excellent quality books, plus they always include an introductory essay by a prominent scholar or writer, translator's notes where applicable, relevant chronological and biographical tables, and bibliographies. They are very nice books to have!

My list of 101 books ends with a book by Harold Bloom, The Western Canon. I included this book written by this very prominent scholar of English literature because it introduces and lists important works in western literature. The inclusion of this book is not necessarily my agreement with Mr. Bloom's arguments (for it is very much that) about the western canon; rather, it recognizes the ne work he has done in composing an excellent reference book for those who wish to know more about western literary traditions and know about interesting books and authors to read. I did not end my list with 101 books, although I did mark the cutoff point if one really wants to acquire only 101. As you have discovered, I have included 26 more books to make a grand list of 127! It was an effort to stop there, but I am satised with the 127. One may very well ask what difference is there between 101 and 127? Other than the obvious arithmetic, the difference is pronounced when one considers the 127 adds the poetry of Yeats, the theory of relativity, the famous Utopia, and those two famous dystopian novels, Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid's Tale, and much more. In other words, I believe the additional 26 expand the overall richness of the library in ways that beguile the mere addition of 26 books. More simply, the group of 127 please me more as a
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reader and as a compiler with yearnings toward wholeness than the group of 101. And to be satised with the 127 is to say that I am satised I have not excluded a work I clearly view as essential reading for some unique, particular, and important reason; and view as an obvious addition to a rather exclusive list of just over one hundred books. Of course I know others would certainly compile different lists of 127. But I also know that many of the works on my list would appear on many other lists. For a person who knows me welllet's say, Tahirthis list will bear the distinct marks of being a list compiled by Gwen. He may, I think, have much to say about why I have chosen the works I have. Certainly any reading list bears the mark of the reader who compiles it. The one who claims to be completely objective about recommending books is the one who cannot be trusted to know nor tell a simple truth. People may look at this list and nd serious fault with it, or may conclude many things about the compilersome of which may even be true! For example, one may conclude this list was compiled by a North American, specically from the USA (for some, this may warrant serious fault in itself), for there is a dearth of books believed to be fundamental to what the British themselves call, "Britishness." One may also conclude this list was compiled by someone very interested in modern 20th century literature, and not so excited with Victorian literature, ancient classic tomes, nor passing fads. One may also conjecture about my political sympathies or leanings. What do you suppose those could be? I leave that to your imagination. Now I know my list is short on dramas, does not include a comedy by Shakespeare, and passes over many works or authors deemed to be required reading for English literature courses. But when one considers 100 or so books, there are not that many dramas that warrant such exclusive listing. If my list went the distance to 200, then my personal favorite Shakespeare play, a comedy, Twelfth Night, would be there. So would Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Gulliver's Travels, The History of the Peloponnesian War, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Here's a secret from someone who knows English literature studies intimately: No matter the size of my library list, not every book in required English literature classes would make the grade. Of course my list goes beyond English literature courses! It's foolish to think one can stay within those limitations and build the best collection of books possible. My list may
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even be viewed as a challenge to that standard curriculum that I know very well. Hear, hear, Mr. Bloom. Granted, a weakness of my list is the fact that it is bound to the English language. But I am bound to that language, so the ignorant do they best they can with what they got. There's more: the vast majority of this list hails from western Europe or the Americas. But my reading experiences have been cultivated in those soils, so my sense for what are unequaled, ineffable works mostly come from those places and traditions. Perhaps the most egregious aspect of my list is the lack of histories. This absence is because I know enough to know that I know little about selecting good histories for a small library. I wish I knew what few essential books to include about World War I, for example, or the Spanish Civil War, both of which were watershed events during the 20th century that deserve to be explored and known. Industrialization, China's 20th century, atomic and nuclear weaponry, the Cold War, the rise of human rights discourses, decolonization especially in tragic Africa, and advances in education, medicine, science, and technology during the past century each and all warrant serious study, which begin, of course, on the pens of historians. Not to mention, all those previous centuries, right? Right. Where are the histories of such enormous events dening the conditions of our present lives? Where is that library of 127 books? I have omitted biographies from the list, for that particular genre is one that really depends on the interests of the individual reader. I do have a few favorite biographies, and if you are interested in Tecumseh, Neruda, Garcia Lorca, or Malcolm X, then I have great biographies for you! I would also add autobiographies are absent from the list for similar reasons. Exceptions to every rule: a few biographies or autobiographies from the ancient Mediterranean world are here, as you have discovered. That's because it's Plutarch and Augustine. In addition, I have left off works by Descartes, Locke, Newton, Russell, Fielding, Johnson, Freud, and Ibsen. Likewise, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, Tennyson, Hardy, Wells, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Achebe. And while I'm at it, O'Neill, Pound, Elliot, Wilde, Chekov, Carver, Kipling, Lawrence, William James and Henry James. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Eliot, Rhys, Bataille, Blanchot, Renan, Bergson, Fuentes, Paz, Pasternak, Pushkin, Ruskin, and Ovid. And Churchill. Such are the failings of a well-intentioned reader and compiler of a reading list of a hundred books.

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But yet, as towering as any of those names in the previous paragraph may be, I am still quite satised with the list I have compiled. For ultimately these 127 works are works I would recommend over any of the works by that impressive list of omitted authors. Why trudge through the fables of Freud when you can marvel at Aesop's? Perhaps by considering what is not here, the peruser of my list can get an idea of how exciting and astonishing the works on this list are. Yes, it's true. I would rather have a solitary ode by Neruda than have the complete works of Thomas Hardy. And I think most readers would, too.

So, there you have it. My subjective list of 127 unparalleled books, all of which are respected in some measure in most quarters, and all of which I could enthusiastically defend as to why they are here on this exclusive list. Don't worry: I won't defend them all here. My best defense for each book on the list is for you to read them yourself. Let me note the nal two books in the grand list of 127, Translation Matters and The Elements of Style. So many of the works in this library are in fact English translations of the originals from the original languages. For the record I'll say it clearly, it's very possible the most beautiful works on this list were composed in a language other than English. For this reason, I have included a very ne book about translation written by arguably the most outstanding translator working between English and Spanish languages today, Edith Grossman. I have also included the classic international best seller about writing, The Elements of Style: in my humble opinion, no library of English literary works is complete without this little gem. Thank you, Kaleem, for the pleasurable occasion to think about all these wonderful books!

Gwen Williams Kot Mithan, Pakistan 12 September 2012

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