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Dr. Bill - I'm *sure I am way out of line here, however, methinks that language and vocabulary are at odds with each other... even in this context (whatever that is?).  (more than happy to admit I don't understand the "quest"-e)
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old hand
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>It seems to me that many of the choices reflect the tastes of the contributors, with little clues as to the
reasons
I agree - it would be more interesting to know why but maybe tedious to write the reasons?
(working-on-my-list e)
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1. you always leave somebody out...Good point - I have left out Daedalus himself, so I would probably have to sub one of my original *team.  Musick, all I was trying to get at was how far there was communality and division amongst our views of the most important literature written in English - 'the canon', so called. I was also half expecting more than one voice to question the very notion of a canon...
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Dear musick: " I f you had to reduce a required reading list of literature" A required reading list obviously ought be chosen for educational value. It seems to me that many of the choices were based mostly on entertainment value. Without meaning to offend the member who chose it, but imagine requiring the reading of Dr.Seuss' entertaining but hardly educational works.
And it does seem to me that we have a chaotic set of selections with no easy way to compare their relative merits and agree on the best one.
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Dear maverick: Please don't hate me, but I feel strongly that we will never settle on one list of ten books. And from the educational standpoint, a much more appropriate list might be selections from a hundred authors. I have a private joke about the Harvard seal: VE on one book,RI on a book beside it, and TAS on a book below, which to me suggests that the whole of truth can be contained in three books - an obvious fallacy.
For instance, nobody mentioned the Bible.But even those of other religions might profitably read the Ten Commandments and The Golden Rule. And anyone studying English ought at least read excerpts from Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, and many other important authors.
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mav (et al),
I nearly jumped into this one with both feet, but then took note of your plea for "reflection time". and then, the more I reflected (and saw other's responses), the more I thought that I wasn't getting at the "formative experience" part of the question. furthermore, in reading the proferred lists, I had to ask myself "was this really the sort of stuff I read during my formative years?" (which I take to mean those writers and that work that profoundly influenced my use and abuse of language today)
so my list (there's no way that I could do "ten") would include a whole bunch of science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury... later to include Tolkien and other fantasy) and adventure (Jack London, Twain) and Civil War (Bruce Catton) and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Salinger, Kesey, Heller and Vonnegut, and so on; until by the time I got to Shakespeare and James Joyce and Gene Wolfe and all my other latter-day saints, I was probably beyond being saved.
oh, and I almost forgot the Usual Gang of Idiots (®Mad).
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tsuwm > "was this really the sort of stuff I read during my formative years?" (which I take to mean those writers and that work that profoundly influenced my use and abuse of language today)
These are the books, more or less in order my Father chose from his library when I asked for grown up books. I was about 10-year-old.
Conan Doyle's "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" unabridged.
1. The short stories of Guy de Maupassant.
2. Agatha Christie "Ten Little Indians" (I remember reading that during summer)
3. "Les Miserables"
Those books were wedged between school and all the reading required by the Good Sisters.which included poets Wordsworth, Longfellow, Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" and "MacBeth" The Old and New Testaments, et al)
Then about age 14 (1943) a leap into a lot of the war-experience books prevalent at the time : authors I cannot recall
4. "My Three Interview with Hitler"
5. "Guadalcanal Diary"
6. Rickenbacher's survival story "200 (?) Days On A Raft" number of days may be wrong. I'm sure 7 and 8 too were war stories.
9. "Madame Bovary (at about age 16 ... a lesson in morality???)
10. The sonnets of Shakespeare and Lord Byron's poems ....
And I was off and running!
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Tolkien Ah, yes...Tolkien! Forgive me for forgetting, J.R.R.! (well, back to the ol' drawing board!)  And, here, I've been beseeching children all year to please read the book(s) [The Hobbit and The Trilogy] before you see the movie, because after that your imagination won't belong to you anymore. But after 20 years of music videos I'm afraid I'm meeting with mostly blank stares and that "Aw, I'm just gonna see the movie" gleam in their eyes. [sigh emoticon] The power of the visual has become extreme. (Yeah, as I sit looking a a web page screen!...but it's a linguistic site, so that makes it verbal, right?)  Frodo lives!
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I was lucky that a college acquaintance who owned a bookstore suggested the Hobbit to me.I read to my kids starting perhaps about 1960. I have no way to fix date. My second daughter drew a picture of one of the characters and sent it to Tolkien, who autographed it and sent it back.It was a wonderful reading experience for my kids, and made them more eager to read other books.
But I would never call Tolkien required reading. That was the original topic, let us not forget.
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Oh! Oh! how could I have forgotten ... a.a.milne and the Pooh books and all the lovely poems.
I still dip into my childhood copy, now and then ... in fact ....if you'll excuse me ...
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