Recommended Reading

"Hello, Professor Pearce,

I am hesitant to ask you this question, as it is a very large one, but I cannot think of anyone else I know of who is qualified to answer it, and whose taste and ethical standards I would reasonably trust.

Several other Thomas Aquinas College graduates and I were recently discussing that we'd like to broaden our experience with literature, but we're uncertain where to begin. I myself have noticed, while thumbing through the items I catalog for the library, that there seems to be a massive amount of literature not worth the paper it's printed on. Do you have a list of works, from various periods and styles, that you might recommend to us?

In Christ,
Mrs. Emily"

In reply:

"Dear Emily,

This is a particularly frenetic time for me so please forgive the relative brevity of this response. I hope that the following cursory list will suffice for your present purposes. If you'd like something more detailed, please write to me again in a couple of months when, hopefully, I'll have more time at my disposal. Any way, here goes, roughly chronologically:

Homer: The Iliad and Odyssey (of course!)
Aeschylus: Oresteia
Sophocles: Oedipus Cycle
Virgil: The Aeneid
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
Augustine: Confessions, and The City of God
Anonymous: Beowulf (Tolkien or Heaney translations)
Other Anglo-Saxon Poems: The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Seafarer
Dante: Divine Comedy (Penguin Classics edition for Dorothy L. Sayers' superb Thomistic notes)
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Anonymous: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien translation)
Anonymous: The Song of Roland
Thomas More: Utopia
Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare: All! But begin with Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, etc.
Robert Southwell: Poems
Donne: Poems
Herbert: Poems
Crashaw: Poems
St. John of the Cross: Poems
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Milton: Paradise Lost
Dryden: Religio Laici, and The Hind and the Panther
Boswell: Life of Johnson
Gray: Elegy in a Country Churchyard
Goldsmith: The Deserted Village
Mazzoni: Il Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)
Blake: Poems
Wordsworth: Poems
Coleridge: Poems
Byron: Poems
Shelley: Poems
Keats: Poems
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
Huysmans: A Rebours, La Bas, and En Route (La Bas has an horrifically sordid depiction of a Black Mass which is not for the squeamish)
Newman: Loss and Gain, Apologia pro Vita Sua, and his Poems
Hopkins: Poems
Stevenson: Jekyll and Hyde
Dickens: A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Dostoevky: Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and Notes from Underground
Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Earnest
Chesterton: The Man Who was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Ball and the Cross, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, and his poem, Lepanto.
Belloc: The Path to Rome, The Four Men, Belinda and his Poems
Baring: Robert Peckham, Cat's Cradle, C, and many of his Poems
R.H. Benson: Come Rack! Come Rope!, Lord of the World, and his Poems
Wilfred Owen: Poems
Siegfried Sassoon: Poems
T.S. Eliot: All of his Poems but particularly The Waste Land and Four Quartets, also his play, Murder in the Cathedral
Roy Campbell: Poems
Greene: The Power and the Glory
Waugh: A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited
Orwell: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Animal Farm
C.S. Lewis: All of his fictional works are marvellous
Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, his essay On Fairy Stories, his short story Leaf by Niggle and his poem Mythopoeia
Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago
Bolt: A Man for All Seasons

This should keep you busy for a while!

God bless,

JP"

While a good number of these works are already included the TAC Great Books program, there's still a great many works that aren't, so I thought I'd share the wealth. :)

Modernity

I've been reading a novel lately, to try and make time pass more quickly during my husband's absence. I think I chose poorly, considering the melancholy nature of my mood (Nordic people are so . . . depressing . . . no offense, Tasik) but the book came highly recommended by trustworthy persons. I can easily see that there are many redeeming qualities to the novel but in my moody preggo state I am overwhelmingly annoyed that my personality is so unlike the heroine's that I can't relate to her at all. -SIGH- Oh well. I've read and enjoyed other novels where that was the case. It seems people just don't write novels about women like me.

However, as I continue through the novel (the storyline is well written, so now it's just going to annoy me if I don't keep going on to what comes next, no matter what effects it may have on my already bad mood - a self-destructive habit, I know, but there's no way out of it), I have had a couple of constantly recurring thoughts, and they're probably worth sharing.

In some ways, modernity pretty much rocks - so many of the stodgy social conventions presented in the novel block the eyes of the characters from common sense. Nowadays, there are plenty of other things to block our common sense, but at least they're not stodgy social conventions. PLEH. :P

Also, in a similar vein, the old days just weren't all that great. People often speak of the past as a golden age long gone, where people didn't sin like they do now. While in some ways this may be true, depending on the age and society referred to, in most ways it's plainly false. People always sinned, and they pretty much always sinned the same way we sin now. Men failed of their commitments and shirked their responsibilities; women, swept away by unchecked passions, married flakey men thinking they could change them later (1-800-D-R-L-A-U-R-A, people); jealousy and lust ran every bit as rampant and children were just as likely to go undisciplined. It was always the same for us human beings - when it comes to sin, modernity doesn't really manage to be all that original. Sins are the only acts human beings can perform of themselves, unassisted by the Hand of Grace - and my, my, my aren't we woefully unimaginative. Not that I'm advocating a new effort to be more creative. It would be entirely futile. I'm simply pointing out the fact that sin is unbelievably boring. We should give up, already.

Oh, and one more thing: I wholeheartedly thank God I was not born into an age where I would be known my entire life as Emily Johnsdatter. Don't get me wrong - I love my daddy, but seriously . . .