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Tuesday, September 2, 2014

My 26 Favorite Books


1.) "Orthodoxy," Gilbert Keith Chesterton

2.) "The Four Canonical Gospels," Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Although it is important to read the canonical Gospels in different translations, my eyes have been opened by the remarkable 1990s' translation -- "The Message: The Bible In Contemporary Language" -- by professor Eugene H. Peterson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Message_(Bible)

3.) "Tao Te Ching," by Lao Tzu - The Lionel Giles Translation. http://sacred-texts.com/tao/salt/index.htm

4.) "Tools for Conviviality," Ivan Illich

5.) "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," Neil Postman

6.) "The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture," Wendell Berry

7.) "A Christmas Carol," by Charles Dickins. (Disney's animated version of "A Christmas Carol" with Jim Carrey "doing all the voices" is a tour de force - the one version I recommend above all others. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2011/12/daily-dose-112911-christmas-carol.html)

8.) "A Wizard of Earthsea" (The Earthsea Cycle), Ursula LeGuin

9.) "Things Fall Apart," Chinua Achebe

10.) "The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again," J.R.R. Tolkien

11.) "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Robert Louis Stevenson

12.) "No One Writes to the Colonel: and Other Stories," Gabriel (José de la Concordia) García Márquez

13.) "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee

14.) "The Laughing Man" (and other stories) - Nine Stories - by J.D. Salinger

15.) "Notes from Underground,Fyodor Dostoyevsky

16.) "The Silver Chair" (The Chronicles of Narnia #4)C.S. Lewis

17.) "The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America," Timothy Egan

18.) "The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis

19.) "Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales," a very irregular collection but with a number of masterpieces including "The Fisherman's Wife," a tale that begs "Disney/Pixar" rendering.

20.) "The Winter of Our Discontent,John Steinbeck (I will take this opportunity to spotlight Steinbeck's own translation of Mallory's "L'Morte d'Arthur" entitled "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights")

21.) "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology," Neil Postman

22.) "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel (José de la Concordia) García Márquez (N.B. To avoid possible frustration while reading "One Hundred Years Of Solitud," make continual reference to the genealogy at the beginning of the book. Otherwise, the presence of characters across several generations, all with the name "Aureliano Buendia" will cause considerable confusion.)

23.) "Macario," B. Traven "B. Traven was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the few certainties about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre(1927), which was adapted for the Academy Award winning film of the same name in 1948."

24.) "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote

25.) "Life Of Pie" by Yann Martel

26.) "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America(Caveat emptor. I am reluctant to include this book. It is a brilliant but unrelenting study of evil and will leave "a ring around your soul."

Newsweek's "Top 100 Books: The Meta-List"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Best_Books_of_All_Time

"The 10 Best Top 100 Book Lists"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-10-best-top-100-book-lists.html



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