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 . . .

Leisure

What is it? Is it simply the time to do something or is it the doing of something important or worthwhile? I'm not so silly as to think it has something to do with owning a boat, going on cruises or surfing. (Aside: why do most culturally-established "leisure activities" have something to do with water? E.g., the picture above was the first hit on a Google image search for "leisure". What's up with that? . . . but I digress . . .)

To descend from the intangible philosophical question into the reality of practical affairs: I'm really in a quandry as to what activities I should be employing in the minute bits of "free time" I possess. I feel as if it's important that I reinstitute some kind of intellecually worthwhile activity, but, which one?

Should I read more Chesterton? I mean, I list him third in the short list of life-shaping obsessions I possess, and all in all I've only ever managed to give serious time and thought to one of his books, a handfull of his essays and a smattering of his poems. At that rate I think I've given more serious thought to the works of Descartes (per force of it being assigned as homework, mind you. Modern philosophy is not leisure reading.), and that's just wrong.

However, Chesterton wrote little "enjoyment-oriented" fiction (most of it is that transcendental sort of fiction and/or poetry meant to let you float through intangible truths) and I'm not sure I find his preferred literary modes, fiction or non, very recreational. His works of theological and philosophical intent are difficult for me to take seriously and study, as his profound distractibility jumps from one thing to another, in a way that would be delightful if you didn't take it all too seriously and/or literally. However, I've been rigourously trained into an Aristotelian love of brevity that hungers and thirsts for clear, concise, syllogistic form. Due to this, Chesterton's somewhat erratic treatment of important ideas annoys me a great deal these days. I can no longer bring myself to devour Chesterton's intellectual works - I can only nibble.

Then, there are any number of intellecual treatises I could be reading, many of which are plenty systematic and quite worthwhile. My husband occasionally tries to tempt me to some of them, pointing at the piles of volumes he's required to peruse for classes. I know he misses the theoretically engaging aspect of our early relationship - fortunately for us we are also well-matched on nearly every aspect of the practical realm, so losing depth in the intellectual connection post-TAC has caused less pain than it has for other married grads I know. He still misses that, though - as do I. Last weekend there was a Humanae Vitae conference here at the University, and I made a point of attending the closing lecture (the only one I could manage with last weekend's work schedule). It was undoubtedly the best lecture of the event, given by Dr. Michael Waldstein, who is fantastically gifted, especially in the realm of answering questions. It sparked an evening full of discussion between my husband and I which was thouroughly delightful. I can remember noting how much I must be starving the deeper parts of my brain these days, such was the urgency with which I devoured every bit of the exchange. Yeeeaaaaah. So, uh, maybe I should try reading more deep stuff before my brain dies of malnourishment.

But, then again . . .

There lies this bothersome question regarding these pesky little things called my talents. I've been talking since I was 10 months old, and to this day I continue to delight in communication. Correction: as my husband pointed out, my delight is not so much in communication as in talking, as my powers of listening are decidedly limited in their scope. (Did I ever tell you how annoyingly perceptive my husband is?) Thus follows the great enjoyment I derive from talking to inanimate things like paper or webpage interfaces - I never have to listen to a thing they say so I can talk talk talk to my heart's content. Now, my love of talking led to developing a knack for "turning phrases", especially on subjects about which I am more than usually passionate. That being the case, I can't help but think it would be a good exercise to develop those talents more carefully, to indulge in venting the half-thought thinkings that float through my distracted brain all day. Whether that would be in the form of blogging or more formal composition, I don't know, but I know it's an activity I'm inclined towards and which some people insist I ought pursue.

*SIGH*

[Student returns some books. I check them in. *Beek* *Beek* *Beek* . . . ]

Ooooo, what is this?
(Reading)

Junk

This has been a very depressing week for me, professionally. I've sorted and/or catalogued 112 books, many (if not all) of them full of nothing but senseless, amoral drivel. They are the brain children of various modern (many of them "highly-acclaimed") novelists. Many of these works were tossed by WorldCat into a genre entitled "psychological fiction", and, from all appearances, the titles are every bit as bad as that sounds.

I've been trying to sort through them, reading the summaries on the insides of the dustjackets, to try and pull out the ones that are so filthy they ought not be tolerated in our collections. If it were up to me they'd all be feeding a bonfire on the lawn, but Terence, the Aquisitions Librarian, said, "Well, since we have a literature department we really ought to keep the works of well-known authors for the sake of their research." I responded, "But they're so seedy, Terry. They're either as bad or worse than romance novels. Do we really need to keep such junk?" "Well, it may be junk, but it's famous junk, so yes." He was amused at the expression this got him. "Who in the sam heck acclaims these pervs, anyway? . . . " I mumbled, turning back to my computer screen. "Go ahead and go through them, though." said Terence, "If there are any you think are really beyond all boundaries, set them aside and I'll look at them."

Sooo, yeah, it's been a tough week. Playing the "how immoral is this novel?" game all the day long, filling my mind with disgusting images and then filling bookcarts, databases and shelves with perverse stories about people breaking every command of the decalogue, and breaking them with pizazz.

I have the whole weekend off. God be praised!!!!