Category: Langauge

This list of essential books is floating around in the blogosphere, and I thought I would keep it going. I have bolded the books that I have read.

1. Beowulf
2. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
3. Agee, James – A Death in the Family
4. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
5. Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
6. Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
7. Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
8. Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
9. Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
10. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
11. Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
12. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
13. Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
14. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
15. Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
16. Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
17. Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
18. Dante – Inferno
19. de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
20. Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
21. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
22. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
23. Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
24. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
25. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
26. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
27. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
28. Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
29. Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
30. Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
31. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
32. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
33. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
34. Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
36. Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
37. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
38. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
39. Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
40. Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
41. Homer – The Iliad
42. Homer – The Odyssey
43. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
44. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
45. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
46. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
47. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
48. James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
49. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
50. Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
51. Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
52. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
53. Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
54. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
55. Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
56. Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
57. Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
58. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
59. Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
60. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
61. O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
62. O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
63. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
64. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
65. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
66. Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
67. Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
68. Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
69. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
70. Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
71. Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
72. Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
73. Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
74. Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
75. Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
76. Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
77. Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
78. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
79. Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
80. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
81. Sophocles – Antigone
82. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
83. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
84. Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
86. Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
87. Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
88. Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
89. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
90. Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
91. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
92. Voltaire – Candide
93. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
94. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
95. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
96. Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
97. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
98. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
99. Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
100. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
101. Wright, Richard – Native Son

How is it that two people can look at the same idea and see such opposite things?

There have always been huge discrepencies in perception. There is no way around it, actually. We think within the constructs of our language. Our truths are based in perception-based details (or, the phenomenon of our own, unique experience), and our language assumes those perceptions/shades of reality. In fact, our actual vocabulary is characterized by our history, memories, and perceptions. We are only agreeing that the a word (composed of letters–symbols) represents some external object.

Okay, an example. Say, for example, that when I was a little kid, there was a car accident and a bright yellow-green fire truck responded, and took my Dad to the hospital. And, let’s say that when you were a kid that you got to sit on top of the antique bright red fire truck during the 4th of July parade. Our perceptions–the image that is conjured in our heads when we think of the word “firetruck” are going to be different. It may not make a difference in everyday conversation, but if the word were something more important like “morality” or “liberal,” it could make a terrible difference.

Barack Obama said it on the news–that somehow, the Democratic party has shifted in the perception of Americans to NOT represent religious or centrist ideas (or, even morality apparently–it was a SIN for Catholics to vote for John Kerry–a Catholic. I am going to take the Bishops to task for that one.). Obama called for us to spend the next four years getting the Democrats back to that central value–away from the edges. Arianna Huffington just two days ago argued that we (the Democratic Party) needed a clearer message–not a centrist one. I think we need to dig a little deeper than both of their arguments imply. We need to tinker with the very language that we use, and no longer rely upon perception-based chasms to convey our meaning. We need more concrete language. We need better, more precise vocabulary.