Cynthia, from Sorting the Pieces, tagged me to share my love of reading.
According to the rules of this game, I'm also supposed to tag others to share their love of reading. So, tag, you're it: Steven of LA Journal, Beth of Beth's Front Porch, and sweet Lily of This Drama I Call Life. Hope you three participate!
Reading is a way I achieve emptiness. We have to empty ourselves before we can fill ourselves with new insights. I have another Zen story that illustrates what I mean:
A CUP OF TEA
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
I love literature that empties my cup. When I come to a new work, I want to pour all my beliefs and assumptions out and let the capable author fill me with something different, something new.
I find I no longer read for "just entertainment" (if I ever did). The book must raise my consciousness. So here is a partial list, divided into categories.
To reread or read for the first time this year:
Don Quixote (Cervantes), Italian Folktales (Italo Calvino), Mist (Miguel de Unamuno).
A Very Partial List of Works that rocked my world:
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck); A Death in the Family (Agee); Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison); The House on Mango Street (Cisneros); Complete Stories (Maupassant); Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (Brautigan); Catcher in the Rye (Salinger); Jesus' Son (Johnson); Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson); The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood); Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut); The Things They Carried (O'Brien); The White Hotel (Thomas); To the Lighthouse (Woolf); Housekeeping (Robinson); The Optimist's Daughter (Welty)
Children's books: The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery); Millions of Cats (Gag); Fox (Wild); The Velveteen Rabbit (Williams); Charlotte's Web (White)
Poetry: Above the River (James Wright); Essential Rumi (Barks); Duino Elegies (Rilke); Blessing the Boats and The Terrible Stories (Clifton); Selected Poems (Trakl); Narrow Road to the Interior (Basho); The First Four Books of Poems (Gluck); Illuminatons (Rimbaud); Collected Poems and Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Neruda); American Primitive (Oliver); Collected Poems (Millay); Complete Poems (D. H. Lawrence); Refusing Heaven (Gilbert); Collected Poems (Kunitz); The Ten Thousand Things (Charles Wright); Border of A Dream/Selected Poems (Machado); My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (Bly); The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Khayyam); Diving into the Wreck (Rich); Leaves of Grass (Whitman); New and Selected Poems (Stephen Dunn); The Way of Chuang Tzu (Trans. by Merton); The Last Night of the Earth Poems (Bukowski)
Memoirs and Letters: The Seven-Storey Mountain (Merton); Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (Dillard); This Boy's Life (Wolf); Dwellings (Hogan); Gift from the Sea (Anne Morrow Lindburgh); Letters to Jane (Carruth); A Wild Perfection (James Wright); Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke)
Books About Writing: The Art of Fiction and Becoming a Novelist (Gardner); Writing Down the Bones (Goldberg); If You Want to Write (Ueland); Blue Pastures (Oliver); One Writer's Beginnings (Welty)
Individual Short Stories: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and "In the Region of Ice" (Oates); "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" (Flannery O'Connor); "Guests of the Nation" (Frank O'Connor); "Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr" (Unamuno); "My Sister Antonia" (Ramon del Valle-Inclan); "Paper Lantern" (Dybek); "The Annointed" (Kathleen Hill); "For Esme, With Love and Squalor" and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (Salinger); "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" (Marquez);
Drama and Screenplay: Hamlet; MacBeth; Faust; Streetcar Named Desire (Williams); Trip to Bountiful (Horton Foote); Magnolia (Anderson), The Misfits (Miller)
Psychology: Denial of Death (Becker); Women Who Run With the Wolves (Estes); Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl); Man and His Symbols and Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung)
14 comments:
you don't see richard brautigan mentioned that much anymore. he was a transient rage briefly in the 60s. the most thought-provoking brautigan tome, to me at least, was 'THE ABORTION' ... it was darkly disturbing.
two short stories i'd add: A GREAT DAY FOR BANANA FISH ... salinger
and THE LOTTERY by shirley jackson.
Okay, Bosox, I added Bananafish and The Abortion. Don't know why I didn't before. "Bananafish" is my favorite Salinger story and The Abortion is an important Brautigan story, one I enjoyed very much. "The Lottery" I read in Junior High School and have not gone back to it with the "wisdom" that adulthood brings (ha). I'll have to give it another look. --Theresa
I read for entertainment. BUT you have to know that I read the whole set of The Children's Book of Knowledge for pleasure.......
Theresa, this is great. I see so many books and authors here that I love and some that are either on or need to be on my To Be Read list. If a book truly does raise my consciousness, I find that to be the element that separates the merely good from the great.
lol oh dear... tagged... Well this'll take me a day to write lol
Lovely entry. There's certainly a list there for me to read lol If I ever finish all the books I bought last time ::sigh::
~Lily
Okay, Theresa, I've posted my list of books, thanks to your challenge.
Steven
Theresa... what fun to think about...as I look at my book shelves, I see I've given my favorites away...I'm left with a lot of the banal stuff. I love your list. I'm currently being a squirrel, setting aside the books I'm gonna read this winter. Your list will help. --Beth
Wonderful list! Now you`ll have me buying!!
V
I see on your list a number I have read and some, more than likely, must reads. I think I shall be busy all fall with my head in a book!
"The only drawback I can imagine to this system is that the potential
combinations are so tantalizing, and so fun to explore, that it's hard to
imagine having time left for actually reading any of these books. But
that's the price you pay for progress."
Steven Johnson, concluding his article in Slate Magazine about Amazon.com's
new full text search, offering an inadvertent but comprehensive critique
of the information society.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090298/
"For aesthetics is the mother of ethics... Were we to choose our leaders on
the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs,
there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas,
but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to
shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has
read no Dickens."
-Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940), Russian-born American poet
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop
reading them." -- Ray Douglas Bradbury
Make books your companions; let your bookshelves be your gardens: bask in their beauty, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, take their spices and myrrh. And when your soul be weary, change from garden to garden, and from prospect to prospect.
Ibn Tibbon, c. 1120-1190 ?
Spanish Jewish scholar
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
— Groucho MARX
Bravo! Here's to reading- and luxuriating in time with a book!
ggw07
Ah Theresa, my dear, I've just been roaming through this journal, and I think I have to go somewhere and put my head down and cry for a long time now.
It's way deeper than I can deal with in my life currently - I had to stop, because of the tears. Hard to read with them in the eyes.
This list of books is wonderful, I must go see what Cynthia has. Because I've been longtimegone, no one will tag me, but I might do it anyway. Many of them, not a surprise, would be the same as many of yours - Agee, Tim O'Brien, Vonnegut, Atwood, Welty. EB White, Rilke, Millay, Oliver, Neruda, Merton, O'Connor, Garcia-Marquez, Williams, Foote - These are the stories of my life, these and many more.
Shall I leave the Blue Voice? Do you ever read it? I feel that what I am doing there is important, but it's so nonfiction, sometimes my soul just feels dried up.
I'd love to give you some of these tomatoes - we are overrun. The garden is wild and overgrown; the other day I finally spent some time in it, weeding, tying things up, picking masses of vegetables. I took cukes to my colleagues at the college when we had our faculty meeting on Weds.
Okay, enough now. I miss you. I miss me. I miss AOL Journal land.
Oh, my, Theresa. Where have I been that I have not visited for so long? So much to read, so much to meditate upon, to celebrate, to weep on.
Thank you, my friend, for sharing your thoughts again after your long drift down the river. Thank you for sharing, and no more will I be gone myself for so long. You have inspired me to return to my own journal.
As for a love of reading, oh yes yes yes. (To my embarrassment) I just read Slaughterhouse Five for the first time this summer. Oh heavens, what a mighty work.
I am currently reading, "How the Scots Invented the Modern World," so I have more to brag about, but I shall be consulting your list, many of which I have read and loved, but many others are new.
Oh, how wonderful to be back!!!
Vicky x
What a great, in-depth list! Thank you for posting all of those! Lisa
The proper motivation yields the finest lists. Good to see the Don on there. I read recently that more people appreciate the book than have read it. It is truly wonderful, all the way through.
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