New Leaves

Earlier this year, when New Year’s resolutions were still fresh on everyone’s minds and were mostly unbroken, a friend of mine and I decided that this year we would make an effort to branch out in our reading.

I tend to read the same books over and over (there’s actually nothing wrong with that), and I’m just as much a creature of habit as other people, so of course I also tend to buy the same kinds of stories when I do get my hands on new reading material.

One weekend in January, before the snowpocalypse fell upon us, my friend Sam and I went through a massive list of some of history’s greatest works as well as current literature (lots of which is also great) and compiled a list of our own.

And, because we’re pretentious and have a serious pun problem, when I recently suggested we name our undertaking “New Leaves,” Sam happily agreed.

We do have a master list, and I will post it here, but take note that it isn’t in any particular order. We will be reading these titles as we feel like it.

Since I usually like to jump right into things, I was happy when Sam suggested that we begin with St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. A word of caution to the unfamiliar: the original version of this work is over 4,000 pages long.

I realize that A Song of Ice and Fire has surpassed that total, but don’t feel bad about getting a copy of a shorter version. This is the sort of work that should also be parceled out and read over time. It’s not exactly light reading.

It is, however, good for you.

Even if you are not a particularly religious person — and I should note, that while I am a spiritual person, organized religion is not quite my cup of tea — this work is a philosophical cornerstone. There’s a lot to chew on here, so don’t let the religious overtones deter you. Aquinas is a philosopher, and he treats his work with an even, rational-thinking tone.

Begin with the Summa if you like, but please feel free to explore new literary territory of your own. The following list is what Sam and I came up with, in case anyone is wondering how to possibly get started:

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce
  • 1984, by George Orwell
  • A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
  • The Maltese Falcon, by Dashell Hammett
  • Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
  • Middlemarch, by George Eliot
  • Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
  • Nicholas Nickelby, by Charles Dickens
  • The Iliad, by Homer
  • The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
  • The Saga of Gilgamesh
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte
  • Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
  • Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
  • Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
  • Confessions, by St. Augustine
  • Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
  • The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
  • Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
  • The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells
  • Beloved, by Toni Morrison
  • The Persians, by Aeschylus
  • Summa Theologica, by Thomas Aquinas
  • Pantagruel, by Rabelais
  • The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
  • School for Wives, by Moliere
  • Phedre, by Racine
  • Essays, by Michel de Montaigne
  • Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
  • A Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust
  • The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer
  • Ramayana, by Valmiki
  • Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
  • Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
  • A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
  • The Waning of the Middle Ages, by Johan Huizinga
  • Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello
  • The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot
  • Mourning Becomes Electra, by Eugene O’Neill
  • Life of Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht
  • Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
  • Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
  • Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt
  • Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
  • The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector
  • The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud
  • The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
  • A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by John le Carre
  • Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
  • Various collections from Pablo Neruda
  • Works by Margaret Atwood (TBD, though I am going to fight to include her poetry because it’s brilliant.)
  • Collections from Billy Collins
  • The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • 300, by Frank Miller
  • The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
  • From Hell, by Alan Moore
  • The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
  • All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
  • Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins
  • Bossypants, by Tina Fey
  • What She Saw, by Lucinda Rosenfeld
  • Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin
  • Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
  • Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
  • Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow
  • The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller
  • Dune, by Frank Herbert
  • The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells
  • Works by Christine de Pisan