Reading your list on the merits of hardcover books brought back a memory of my English teacher, MaryVirginia Rosenfeld, from John Adams High School in South Bend, Indiana. She said she never bothered to lock her car because "nobody steals books", and in 30 years she has never been proven wrong. In 1970 she distributed a bibliography entitled "Great Books For a Lifetime's Reading"; I am still working on it. My dear Miss Rosenfeld, now curled up in the most comfortable reading chair in the great beyond (it has excellent light plus tea and cookies at hand), you are never forgotten.

I was not a fan of my 10th grade English teacher until many years after I graduated. However, one thing she used to say all the time that has stuck with me is this: "No intelligent person is ever bored."

After some years, I've discovered that while it is not exactly true, it is a very close approximation to the truth. Intelligent people can keep their minds occupied nearly anywhere, nearly any time. One habit is to keep books (as well as paper and pen) everywhere - every room of the house, both cars, all the backpacks, at work - any place one is likely to find one's self stranded for any length of time. And oddly, I have never had a book stolen from me, though a few loaners have failed to make their way home.

Loosing them to theft would be easier to take than loosing them to careless borrowers. At least you would not ask yourself half your life
who the h it was that borrowed this and that particular favorite book you keep searching after.

When I was graduated from high school, my English teacher bought me a copy of Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan and urged me to pursue it. I did and have never regretted that commitment. I also deeply appreciate her nudge in the direction of a rich banquet of thought and expression.

Good gracious!!
Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan

Come on Jackie! You can do it.There are many authors of whom you only have to read one.
Personally I would have chosen Dostojevski over Tolstoy. And I miss Beowolf, but I guess everyone would make a few changes in the list.
Father Steve,honestly,you done them all?

(there is a beautiful movie by Kobayashi called 'K(w)aidan', short ghost stories from the 19th century , one of which is called 'Hoichi with the ears', about the battle of the Genji (see list) against the Heike ; fascinating! The movie dates from the 60-70 -ties. It might be hard to trace. But is so beautiful.)
And I saw a fantastic woodprint on the subject in the Leiden Museum.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwaidan_%28film%29

Nuh-uh. Jackie wont read Shakespeare

well, looking at that list just embarrasses me. :¬ P

my ex-wife inherited the complete Harvard Classics, and I made a brief attempt to read all of those, but alas, I was quickly unsuccessful...

"Act now while the supply lasts, and you can buy a rare facsimile of an 11th-century, illuminated German manuscript for only $16,425. After
March 15, the price will rise to $19,205. This is what the publisher
has told prospective German buyers interested in acquiring a 410-page,
gilded copy of a pericope."
Craig R. Whitney; Medieval Marketing; The New York Times; Nov 9, 1994.

Advertisements like these always cheer me up to a high degree.Especially the "for only" is hilarious. Come to look at it it's almost a gift. Good grief , it's a facsimile, a smiling fake and a pericope, meaning only a part of a book as well.

I guess however something like this might be attractive to thieves.

but alas, I was quickly unsuccessful...

Would you please consider sharing this list "Great Books For a Lifetime's Reading" by Miss Rosenfeld?? I would love to see it and share it with my book club!
Thanks for your heartwarming post.

I had an English teacher in year 6 who gave us a similar list. If memory serves it was 6 or 7 pages, printed front and back on a mimeograph machine (OK, now I'm showing my age!). In a 9-week timeframe, we were required to pick 8 books and read one a week. It included books by Tolstoy, the Brontes, etc. I would give anything to have that list again! So, may I echo A_Hallab's request? Would you be willing to share Miss Rosenfeld's list with us all?

For those of us not familiar with the Australian education system, can you tell us typically how old a student is in year 6? If it is eleven years old I would say your list is a sure-fire way to quench any desire in a student to enjoy reading.

Goodness, Fadiman does not include any books of the Bible in his list, the Pentatuch, Psalms, Isaiah, Song of Solomon, the Gospels, both Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Phillipians, Ephesians, et al.
But to keep on topic, the only books I know to have been stolen are college textbooks, in my husband's case a calculus text that was used for more than a year's worth of classes.

I love this post. I, too, would like to see MaryVirginia Rosenfeld's list. That is, if you don't mind sharing.

Thanks!

would dearly love to be able to compare ms. rosenfeld's list with fadiman's, if you don't mind going to the trouble! has anyone ever gotten a hold of helene hanff's list of indispensable reads? been trying to get a hold of that one for years...thanks!

Hello, newcomers, and welcome! I am pleased but not surprised to see that a thread on books garners so much attention.
Leo, this site hints that the list you're looking for may be contained within 84, Charing Cross Road. (That is, the books she inquires about.) In a paragraph about that book, this person says, "...Hanff provides a perfect "wish list" of authors..." :
web page

This site has some interesting personal facts about Ms. Hanff and how this book came into being.
BBC

Oh--Ensorcellor, congratulations on having your post included in the AWAD mail (issue 232)!

Ironic! I saw 84 Charring Cross Road as a movie and read Kwaidan as a book! Loved them both. And love this line as well:

"but alas, I was quickly unsuccessful..."

Clever people!

Hello Retta! Pleased to meet a fellow Kwaidan reader. (I read it too as a book.) Now if I come 84 Charring Cross Road movie I will go see that.

I didn't see the movie (didn't even know there'd been one), but the book has to be better.

Hello confusion.I didn't really read higer up than this 84 Charring
Cross Road + Kaidan (missed a few days). The Title looked interesting to me as being maybe a book about burning disasters and charcoal drawings that had a link somehow with 84 Charing Cross Road and I thought OK : a nice wordplay with this road.
Now it appears to really be 84 Charing Cross Road. Have to think up a new suspence.

Sorry, Faldage, but while I currently reside in Australia, I grew up in the US and attended all 12 years of schooling there - mostly in the State of Florida. The list I got was from my year 6 language arts teacher, and I believe I was 12 at the time. (We were a bit of a nerdy "advanced" class, in that everyone in it tested at year 11 or 12 reading levels, hence the complexity of some of the reads we were expected to comprehend...)

You answered my question well enough, bk. It's just my question was wrong. More power to you if you made it through that list at age twelve and I hope others of your class did too. I got turned off to Shakespeare in high school (I was probably 15 at the time) by a totally incompetently presented English program.

year 6 = 6th grade.

Wow. I didn't hit Tolstoy or the Brontes till college.

We were a bit of a nerdy "advanced" class Welcome home, then. [open arms e]

bkmdano, could you please tell me what is a language art teacher.
All these international systems of education are so different. We have laguage teachers and art teachers. I never heard of a language art teacher.

When I hit Tolstoy and after 4 pages he still did´nt hit me back, I honored Tolstoy in movies of War and Peace only.
But Dostojevski, he hit me with all he wrote and never gave me reason to hit him.

I have an impression after having read only few works of each. If I put my mind to it and invested some effort, I think I could make a good thesis of it.

Dostoyevski is much more black and white. The good characters are nearly saint-like (Prince Myshkin, the younger Karamazov brother ); the villains epitomize evil (Karamazov's old man, The Grand Inquisitor). Those in-between characters are foolish and perpetuate evil, mostly because they are stupid and fail to respond to evil in themselves or in others.

Tolstoy's characters are more balanced. He's much more sympathetic to his characters, even the bad guys and the foolish ones. I noticed this first with Anna Karenina when I was mentally berating Anna's husband for being such an ass, and then thought suddenly, "You know ... I'm just not sure. Had I been in his situation, I might have behaved the same way."

Of course lots of books have characters that make you question your values, but a great many of those stories are contrived. People who really ARE wise are made to look stupid. People who are evil are made to appear good. Aristophanes can make Socrates look stupid when he's telling his own story. Doyle can make Holmes appear logical, when he's not. But Tolstoy's characters, particularly his central characters, are just like real people - partly because some of them are, and partly because even the fictional characters ACT like real people.

There's a lot of writers whose contributions I think are grossly overrated by intellectuals, or by other writers, or by people in general: Fitzgerald, Ibsen, Melville, Joyce. All of them clearly have or had some keen ability, to be sure, but not so great as they are reputed to be (at least not in my admittedly uneducated and unrefined estimation). I can see how someone would say that Melville is a Great Writer, but I just can't agree that he is, or ever was, the greatest writer in the English language or that Moby Dick was ever the greatest book.

I'm not saying that Tolstoy, as I've occasionally heard, is the greatest writer. But, imo, he's up there. I'm not surprised that others think he's there. I can say that he is among the greatest writers I've ever read and when I hear others say the same thing, I never suspect a hint of hyperbole.

OTOH, Madame Bovary is a solid refutation to the notion that sympathetic treament of all characters is necessary for a Great Writer. This really is a brilliant book, even if the characters are stilted. The druggist (was his name Homais?) is one of the truly despicable characters from literature. Nevertheless, I do wonder - could there really be someone quite that evil?

Bran, it's just a fancy, dare I say post-modern, way of saying "English teacher."

There is a sort of naming problem as in an English speaking school, your English teacher (hopefully) doesn't have the same goal as your Spanish teacher. Is the ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher an English teacher or not?

Is "English IV: British Literature" a redundant course title?

And is an English teacher someone from England?

Aha, thanks Anna! To keep these things clear we turn it around , teacher English, teacher French, teacher German etc.
If not postmodern it certainly is trendy. Language art teacher The outward stylistic upgrading of practically everything.

Most of my punctuations marks are out of order. Till I fix this problem my posts may not be totally punctilious.
/never were anyway/

Quote:

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Tolstoy's characters are more balanced. He's much more sympathetic to his characters, even the bad guys and the foolish ones. I noticed this first with Anna Karenina when I was mentally berating Anna's husband for being such an ass, and then thought suddenly, "You know ... I'm just not sure. Had I been in his situation, I might have behaved the same way."

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Dostojvksi may seem more black and white because he does not do the moral value thing. And I think he is thrice as sympathetic with his characters as Tolstoy, who, being of solid Russian noblity has the tolerant values of his class and the idealistic ideas too. I know he is one of the great writers for sure , but I would like to put Dostojevski against Tolstoy as Van Gogh stands against Rubens.
Dostojevski suffered like his characters. Acknowledged the injustice and arbitrariness of social structures and relations.
His writing is feverish, lucid, compassionate.
His smaller works are worth reading too. White Nights and the Meek One. - maybe the English title is Weak of Heart or The weak of Heart
Wonderful short stories.

Dostojevski was of lower Latvian noblity and suffered from epilepsy.
Was senteced to death but was then changed onto forced labor. He´s a realistic, he lived what he wrote. Maybe Tolstoy did too , but from a more comfortable desk chair.