perfidy

Nice work, B! I would quibble with the attribution of the Bible, but it ain't my church and listing all the collaborator would take wa-a-a-a-y too much time, so "God" it is.

Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography
Chekov: The Cherry Orchard
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughter-House Five OR Breakfast of Champions
John Dos Passos: U.S.A.(or, Manhattan Transfer?)
Phil Dick: A Scanner Darkly
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Kushner: Angels In America
Strindberg: Miss Julie
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Weems: A Biography of George Washington
Mann: Magic Mountain
Stephen King: Misery
Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

For now, that's a good start. Work to do!

According to the Talmud, G-d rejected the authority of the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon). The Rabbis overruled him. Officially, not all of the Hebrew scriptures were written by G-d.

How about, "Various Artists"?

Actually, my favorite Vonnegut is, "Mother Night". What about, "Man in the High Castle" for Dick? Or, "Radio Free Albemuth"?

Never really liked Marquez. Either because he sucks (possible) or because my psycho ex-girlfriend was enthralled by the novel.

J,
Isn't "Misery" older than 1970? I dunno how SF heavy we want to be, but might consider:

Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Asimov: I, Robot
Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Light on poetry, agreed; keeping it light we might consider:
Various infidels: The Song of Roland

Non-fiction; history; arguable literary appeal:
Zinsser: Rats, Lice and History

Wild card:
Keegan: The Face of Battle (1976, but hey it's good)

My 2 cents.

Here is a chronologically sorted list of the Western">http://www.literarycritic.com/bloom.htm]Western Canon as set forth by Harold Bloom.

J,
Isn't "Misery" older than 1970? I dunno how SF heavy we want to be, but might consider:

Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Asimov: I, Robot
Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Light on poetry, agreed; keeping it light we might consider:
Various infidels: The Song of Roland

Non-fiction; history; arguable literary appeal:
Zinsser: Rats, Lice and History

Wild card:
Keegan: The Face of Battle (1976, but hey it's good)

My 2 cents.

J,
When I said "older", I meant of course "younger".

I'm going to utterly disregard Buckehead's ill-considered jihad 'gainst poetical works and offer the following:
Coleridge: Kublai Khan
Dickinson: collected works
Ginsberg: Howl

And philosophy:
Camus: The Stranger
de Beauvoir: The Second Sex

And add still more drama:
Becket: Waiting for Godot
Brecht: Threepenny Opera
Miller: Death of a Salesman
Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Mamet: American Buffalo

And then some more novels.
Achebe: Things Fall Apart
Warren: All The Kings' Men
Wilder: The Bridge over San Louis Rey
Miller: Tropic of Cancer

Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Wiesel: Night
Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Bernard Malamud: The Fixer
Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (a nice meta-meta commentary on this very process, especially as regards the plot of FP, and with regard to the subject book I chose FP over, "The Name Of the Rose")

Trying to resist. The body is strong, but the mind is weak ...

Paul Celan, Death Fugue
Habermas, Transformation of the Public Sphere
Weber, On Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Buber, I and Thou
Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being
Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed
James, Varieties of Religious Experience
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Zola, La Bete Humaine
Poems of Rimbaud
Boll, The Clown
Durrenmatt, The Visit
Gao, Soul Mountain
Levi, Drowned and the Saved
Sebald, Emigrants
Seuss, Cat in the Hat
Braudel, Mediterranean
de Tocqueville, Old Regime and the Origins of the French Revolution
Stendhal, Charterhouse of Parma
Fontane, Effi Briest
Njal's Saga
Calvino, Cosmicomics
Vargas Llosa, War at the end of the world
Kosinski, The Painted Bird
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Sembene, God's Bits of Wood
Ben Jalloun, Sand Child
Mahfouz, The Beginning and the End
Forster, Howard's End

Obscure selections:
Fante, Ask the Dust
Reichardt, February Shadows
Himes, If he hollers let him go

NDR: Good call on the Chet Himes!!! Great book.

I would argue that Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain," though a masterful novel, is too new to make the list. Time has not yet deemed it great, even though you and I have and that's almost as good.

NDR, from my pov, a few more of your selections should be in the "obscure" category. How many of those do you think deserve to be on an absolute-must-read list? And, of the works that are not novels, how many have redeeming literary qualities? Kant, as I recall, is not very readable.

I wasn't trying to shaft poetry, but I guess we can call it ill considered. However, there is a real distinction between important books and good books. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is an important book, but is it a good one? Newton's Principia is an exceedingly important book, but not exactly a page turner.

If we're going to include the other stuff, Nietzche's Also Sprach Zarathustra is very good in English and Deutsch. The poetry of the Enlightenment has been given short shrift here, so how about the collected works of Pope and Johnson? Also, has anyone mentioned TS Eliot? Byron and Shelley? Kipling - especially the Just so stories.

Tocqueville's little book on America deserves mention, and is very well written indeed.

Since Johno's suggestion, Misery, has been putatively kicked to the kerb as too new, I'll can my suggestion that "The Stand" was a better novel.

Among the rest, all I can say is that the distilled list (pre-NDR's, only five of which I've read, and pre-poetry, which I avoid where possible) should provide me with a few more that I need to read than that I've read, and I look forward to it. I've nothing to add, sadly. But that could change, as I scan the shelves.

If there were a "how to" category, I'd suggest "The Prince", but there's not, so I won't.

I don't know what this is about, but just my two cents to throw in. I think that it's funny that the dostoyevsky book listed on the previous lists was crime and punishment...clearly an addition that only follows the trend of people who haven't read dostoyevsky and therefor add the one book that they had to read in high school and/or that others who haven't read dostoyevsky put on their lists as his greatest work...Brothers Karamazov folks...or The Possessed...and for the greatest non-fiction book...being and time...destroying the fucked up metaphysicis of the later greeks/descartes/western philosophy burdened us with...wait that was three cents...

Johno, Gao's book may be new, but by having been awarded the Nobel prize he has already surpassed many criteria for great writers: his collective works have been judged by a massive community of critics and scholars, have been widely translated and, as a result, have demonstrated their ability to appeal beyond the distinctiveness of individual languages. If we continue to debate its importance, its universality cannot be in doubt.

Buckethead, my list is not as obscure as you might think. They represent books that literate people would have read, especially those not restricted by the limitation of English language. You call Kant difficult to read. That is a failing of English--its prejudice against compounded substantives and long sentences. Moreover, German is an exceedingly precise and descriptive language. The art of German rhetoric and imagery cannot be represented in translation without making people's heads explode. Since you have admited that you know German, I recommend that you read Kant in German (after having read the English, if necessary). I do not think such a list must be limited to those things that sound good in English. Perhaps if you think that something should substitute, how about Descartes? Was his discussion of perception and reality more accessible? There are few aphorism more popular than the cogito.

On the other hand, I tried to inject a number of books that would be considered classics outside of the American readership. At the very least, they represent ideas that people ought to be familiar with. If anything, I tried to hard to inject works of theology into the discussion.

NDR, fair enough on Gao. I have to say, "Soul Mountain" is marvelous, and totally unlike any other book I've read.

Buckethead, I found "Uncle Tom's Cabin" quite readable as well as important. Not only is it a fairly easy read, but it's a landmark work of polemics, is enormously culturally significant, and was written by a woman in a day where women just didn't write serious novels and get taken seriously.

TAM, you may be on to something with the Dostoyevski. You would know; you're a philosopher.

I second "The Prince" for sure! To that I have to add Tom Paine, "The Rights of Man," and I thought of another poem that deserves inclusion: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. On that theme, the Koran deserves inclusion. Also, Sappho.

And how about children's fiction?
Watership Down
The Wind in the Willows
Through The Looking-Glass
Where The Wild Things Are
The Collected Brothers Grimm (un-bowdlerized, thank you!!)

M*A*S*H - Hooker
The Trial - Kafka (I liked it better than Metamorphosis
The Art of War - Sun Tse

If we're going for readable, like a piece with literary merit, I don't know that Heidegger meets that criterion. But I have only a passing familiarity with "Being", and would defer to people who know better.

J, I think Achebe was on the original list. But I may be wrong, as I'm too lazy to check.

NDR raises a fundamental question. How inclusive are we going to be? Are we preparing a list of the best works available in Engrish? Or the best works
(that we know of) of our species, ie without regard to original language of composition? Even collectively does the extended Ministry family have the skills to prepare a list of the best humans have to offer, without knowing every language and dialect, or falling to quarelling about which microcultures must be included? "What, no works by pearldiving Innuit amputees? Fucking racists! Fucking limb-ists!"

If we ARE going to advocate for cultural inclusion, I want to start by adding Vikings. Vikings!

GL, I think the best we at the Ministry can do is offer a highly idiosyncratic list of what we collectively think is worthy of canonization. NDR is well read in German, Three Armed Man is known to me as a deeply-read philosopher, Buckethead has political histories down cold plus a bunch of Classics, and yrself ditto for military works and Classics.

If we were to make an attempt at canonising EVERYTHING, we'd be pretentious fools. All we know is what we know, and thence we much proceed.

Vikings!

J,
Knowing what we know, we can still be pretentious fools. Without even attempting canonization.

GL - Vikings? Look no further than Du'Laire's Norse Myths and Greek Myths. (uh pardon the spelling of their names. It's French. I suck at French.) Wonderful children's books and cool illustrations.

I have no futher comment on this list because most of the good books I've read recently have been published after 1970. It's a fair criteria, but one that puts me out of the game.

Well, that and the fact that I've been reading lots of light fiction crap lately. Nothing better than reading Adrian Mole, Harry Potter, and Rosemary Rodgers on a sunny afternoon. (RR is my favorite smut novelist, because she's actually done some historical research. All her new stuff is crap though.)

I keep offering up the Iceland Sagas as great examples of literature from the Viking age. They reflect complex thought on law, warfare, revenge, and history, and they offer interesting examples of poetry as well.

ndr...wish i could read german...but then again that wouldn't help!! heidegger has no literary merit, but like i said i didn't bother reading the discussion so i didn't know what was going on and was just offering my 4 cents by including non-fiction

Three Arms,

There is the phenom. of writers who actually make more sense in other languages. Many of them were big fans of Heidigger (Paul Ricoeur most notably, who is more readable in German than in French).

Cryptonomicon is FAR newer than 1970.

No fair breaking your own rules, no matter how cool Stephenson is.

A few books I've read that I think are good additions:
Marx/Engels - The Communist Manifesto
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
Dante - The Inferno
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

And I see GL added 2001. I'm a huge Clarke fan...with the exception of 2001. Maybe it's just too artsy for my taste or something, but I thought it was dreck. Put in the Rama trilogy or Childhood's End instead.

Alex - I would disagree on the Marx/Engels Communist Manifesto. If you're going to say Smith and The Wealth of Nations and go down the thread of economic theory, I'd argue that Capital is the better book to read. Many of Marx's seminal ideas about the revolution and surplus value creation were put forth in Capital before the Manifesto. And then along with all this read Weber. Shit, add Veblen and 'Theory of the Leisure Class' while you're at it. But arguably, no one has to read the latter.

As far as my 2 cents goes on SF, Gibson and Dick are important SF writers. I can't speak about Asimov, Clarke or Heinlein. I've never read them. If they mold the genre such that guys like Gibson and Dick could exist, then fine, keep them on the list. But I don't think I'm any less of a well-read person for skipping those three. There are those who would say that SF-Fantasy is crap and not literature at all. I disagree, but Gibson and Dick created a future in their stories and books that influences the immediate world we live in and the technologies actually being invented in our own lives. Their worlds drive our research and innovations directly and make serious social comment about the direction of our economy and politics. Honestly though, I think on the basis of pure writing, they're still pretty stinky. Sometimes, their prose sucks.

B - I love Stephenson, (ordering The Confusion soon...), but I think some of his writing is crappy. He can't close a story to save his life. I never got a satisfied feeling from Crypto, but I guess I didn't want it to end. But the ideas in his books are great! Still though, it's not meeting the criteria you set up from the beginning...

hee hee - Silko is a SHE. Her full name is Leslie Marmon Silko. I haven't read Ceremony to know why anyone would want to include it. Turgenev, yeah, you can skip that. Morrison though... I don't know. She really is a great writer, but I'm telling you, Beloved is crap and her true greatness shows is Song of Solomon. I swear! It's the better book and really shows what a great writer she is. Give it a try!

Because I saw it on another list, I would add Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was a fantastic book and she really gets into the language of 'Black English Vernacular.'. I read TEWWG with a PhD's whose dissertation was on BEV, and it's amazing how Hurston picks up on it (Hurston was an anthropologist) and creates an entire world about poor black farmers from the turn of the century. It's worth reading out loud.

Marx - Das Kapital
Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hughes - Selected Poems
Hamilton - Federalist Papers
White, EB - Essays (a master of the style)
Golding - The Lord of the Flies
Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Aristophanes - Lysistrata
Homer - Illiad & Odyssey (sorry it's a poem, but that cannot be helped! 'twas the medium. How else are you going to memorize 20+ books?)
Vergil - Aeneid
Caesar - Gallic Wars (great military narrative/history)
Rousseau - The Social Contract
Hobbes - Leviathan

No on Adams (though I love HGTG) & Kundera. I could not make it through The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I thought it was simply 'unbearable.' Yes on Robert Penn Warren, CS Lewis, Marquez, Miller (both of them), Weisel, Orwell, Camus.

Alex,
Can't say I know Clarke well, beyond 2001 and a bunch of his short stories. I dug 2001 for its initial concept of hyperintelligent beings leaving clues and beacons that could only be found by an advanced culture.

Maps,
Yeah, Conquest of Gaul! Although lacking in literary merit, Caesar's dry, unimaginative prose shocks modern ears at times. WHen he describes razing a town, killing all the men, and selling the women to other tribes, all in retribution for arranging a false surrender, the understated, matter-of-factness of it all leaves a fella with severely arched eyebrows.

But Heinlein, Maps...Heinlein... how can you be the Ministry's #1 fan, knowing how often armored infantrymen from the future come up around here, and no Heinlein? Or Halderman, I take it?

Get back to the library!

GeekLethal,

Tacitus would provide more insights into warfare, empire building and administration, and is more literary (certainly quotable) than Caesar.

GL - No Heinlein and no Halderman. That time has been reserved for mindless shlock, or academic monographs. Someday, all of you will realize that Annalee Saxenian's book 'Regional Advantage' is brilliant. It will stand the test of academic time as one of the greatest books on economic/regional development. Ah, but it still doesn't meet the 1970 publishing date criteria.

In my defense, I have read Dune and I liked it... And if I take my shiny new (plastic) library card to the local branch this weekend, what Heinlein do you suggest? Buckethead says the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I didn't think he was cheating on Mrs Buckethead.

Mappy,
Ah, midless schlock. Where would we be without it? Brilliant perhaps; bored, certainly.

I would defer to Buckethead's superior knowledge of all things sci-fi. I'm a dabbler, not a connoiseur. I understand that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of Heinlein's signature works, but I've not read it.

But if we're still talking about armored infantrymen from the future, you'll want Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and/or Halderman's "Forever War". You can read both of them in a weekend without missing any meals.

Now that you mention it, I'm going to re-read Dune this summer. I read it when I was like 11- so long ago that it would basically be new again. Good catch. Although my summer reading queue is lengthening fast...

NDR,
Tacitus,eh? I should think it wouldn't be too hard to find more quotable stuff than Caesar's.

Although, one of my former teachers explained that when studying Latin, Caesar was quite refreshing. His class had to read/translate long winded oratory and argument for hours and hours, so "Veni, vidi, vici" and the like, the writings of a purposeful military commander, were a breath of fresh air.

GL,

Is that what Dan the Man taught?

My advisor says that, when he took the Latin translation exam when he entered Oxford, he was given a passage about the Magna Carta--which he translated as "Great Cart".

NDR,
No, Dapper Dan didn't teach Tacitus or Caesar. I read the Conquest of Gaul for shits and giggles later.

It was an undergrad prof, polisci 101, who told me that Latin story. But "Great Cart"? That's fucking priceless- love it!

Mapgirl: I stuck in the Manifesto because it's both the more famous/influential one, and, from what I've heard of Das Kapital, the readable one. I didn't necessarily aim for economic theory across the board(note Dante), I just picked things that ought to be read.

Also, I've never read Asimov myself(he's on that reaidng list somewhere though), but Clarke and Heinlein are excellent. If you're planning on reading Heinlein, the best ones I've read are Stranger in a Strange Land(post-1984 version only), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers.

GL: Yeah, 2001 had some interesting premises, but they were executed so horribly...

Alex,
You know, funny thing- I have a big single volume collection of AC Clarke short stories spanning several decades. That theme of extraterrestrial superbeings interfering/influencing/monitoring Earthlings comes up MANY times.

If you were to mind the dates of the stories in that collection, you'd see that 2001 was a sort of final draft of 3 or 4 earlier short stories. That happens with other tales there as well, where you're a few pages in and you get deja vu. It's cause you just read an earlier one with similar ideas 2 nights before.

Maps, whose prose sucks? Gibson and Dick? Granted, the vast majority of all fiction is crap. This is true of sf, and especially true of fantasy as well. I think you are still buying into the literary world's fantastic effort to pretend that the genre doesn't exist. These walls are breaking down, I think - finally. The fact is, though, the best SF ranks on both the importance <I>and<I> literary scales.

When we look back on the twentieth century, whose works have influenced the world more? The unbearable Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Wells, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Zelazny and Gibson? Those sf authors created the future that we are living in. Harold Bloom argues that Shakespeare defined the modern sense of self, and I am not going to argue with him. But the science fiction of the golden age – late forties and fifties – almost literally created the world we live in. Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, the big three, gave us a destination which thousands if not millions of people then worked to make real. The influence of the atomic distopias of the fifties, sociological/new wave sf of the sixties and cyberpunk in the eighties had and continues to have huge effects on our culture and technology.

SF differs from literary fiction. Literary fiction and sf have both moved away from simply telling a story – but literary fiction has gone in the direction of no story, while sf has edged into mythmaking. SF (broadly speaking – you could include a big chunk of movies, and comic books, too) is the Iliad, Aeneid, and Beowulf of the Twentieth Century. If a scholar of the 22nd century wants to understand the American century, he’ll be reading Wells, Heinlein, Gibson and Dick; not the Beloved and a thousand other pointless darlings of the effeterati.

On the literary scale, I’ll put the prose stylings of Zelazny, Dick, Herbert, Ellison (god, no one’s mentioned Harlon Ellison!) up against the best the litfic world has to offer. And I’ll even argue that some of the best recent litfic has had a sf tone – especially the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. To go back further, Heinlein was the man who invented modern sf. The whole practice of embedding the explanations necessary to sf into the narrative rather than having indigestible lumps of exposition was his. He played with viewpoint, dialect – invented dialect, which might be harder than having a good ear for existing dialect. He laid the groundwork for even more impressive feats of language from Zelazny, Ellison and on down to the present.

B- So make a recommendation. Do I read the Moon is a Harsh Mistress first?

No, I don't buy in to the argument that SF sucks. I read quite a lot of it actually. But I don't think the stuff I like to read is monumentally great prose. I like Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks, but they are more the fantasy genre. And no, I don't think their prose stylings are the best literature out there. I don't think I've read a line of SF that's taken my breath away. I haven't read a line of SF that has inspired me to copy it out onto a notecard. Never. Sorry. Hm... MAYBE the one exception is a story called The Belonging Kind by Gibson. I will forever love that story.

GL - as my Latin teacher told me... They used to do orals in Latin at some college. But here's how they started 'Ignis capit!' Now, if that isn't an opening, I don't know what is.

Caesar is great stuff for it's brevity. But considering his use of the abalative absolute and trying to figure out the actual day he crossed the Rubicon, I'm not sure clarity is always his best suit... heh heh... That always makes for a fun debate. I love reading Caesar with 2nd years. It's fun for them, a confidence booster and it's pretty exciting to read about wars and fighting when you're in class.

GL,

It was priceless. The passage dealt with how the nobility modified the consitution over the course of several centuries, keeping it alive. In Prof P's version, the noble kept fixing the Great Cart so that it could continue down the road.

Perhaps an error of mine was worse. In Hunt's, when I was reading a historical work in German, I translated a passage in which a medieval princess painted her mistress as "she beat him to a pulp". The word that was used, to grind, specifically referred to the making of pigments. Uli caught the error for me.

B,
You know you're onto something. Even consider Margaret Atwood, whose latest work is about an ugly future and whose best known work is about a different ugly future.

MapGirl,

It would be really cool if more works from regional studies could make theire way to the attention of the public. I would consider works by Mumford and Vidal de la Blanche to be classics. But regional studies has had a difficult time establishing its independence and importance: it is often considered nothing but a subsection of other disciplines, or a subset of a bigger picture, or even just "local". Currently there is a lot of re-evaluation of regional studies. A new groundbreaking monograph would be welcome right now

Mapgirl, THIAHM is a good pace to start with Heinlein. When you're done with that, we'll talk about Zelazny and ELlison. A lot of their best work was short stories, but they have good novels as well. I think you've said you read Dune, Herbert's other great story is the Dosadi Experiment.

NDR, my German is now 17 years rusty. Mrs. Buckethead was also a Deutschspracher, in college; we're thinking about starting up again to teach Sir John-the-right-now-not-even-monolingual. I'll take your word on Kant, never having read it personally in German, but I seem to remember reading that Kant himself admitted to his poor prose style, and bemoaned the fact that subsequant German philosophers started imitating him.

I did read Faust and a fair bit of Neitzche in German, albeit with constant reference to an English translation.

I did it. I got The Confusion yesterday. The library had it!!! 'Tis free! 'Tis good! 'Tis long!

For some reason, I couldn't find the SF section at the library. The new releases had all kinds of SF stuff on it, but no readily identifiable SF section of the library. I might actually have to talk to one of them the next time.

Maps,
If you live in the Alexandria area, the George Mason branch of the Fairfax County Public Library (7001 Little River Turnpike, Annandale, VA) has devoted much of the back wall to a very rich SF selection. When I lived down there, that was my little mecca of the mind.