Slightly Better "Great Books" Memes

[tigermouse88]

This one is based on the Great Books Program of Mortimer Adler and others. Give yourself a point for every complete work on this list that you have read - i.e. if you've read 6 Shakespeare plays, 6 points; if you've read Goethe's Faust but not Dichtung und Wahrheit, one point. Also, note the names of the works from an author's oeuvre you've read.

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Comments

[anonymous]

Interesting entry; a few protests.

Firstly, since you mention Mortimer Adler, I believe that he was deeply against any sort of reading that was done for completion, i.e. some sort of 'passive reading.' I believe that he would read every book with a notebook to the side, rereading every page if it did not prompt him to write something. Thus, you might score more points with Adler for those books you did not complete, as long as you read them properly. Similarly, since you mention Njáls saga, I wonder whether it is right to say of all those secondary school pupils that they read Njála, when many read it word by word, and then decided that they were finished with it, once there were no more words left.

Secondly, I think it is unfair to rate Shakespeare in multiple points, and the Testaments in singles, considering that the Bible is simply a library, or an anthology, which explains why it can be so contradictory. Consider, for instance, how the book of Job (brilliantly) attacks the idea of infallible divine providence, which is otherwise a rather dominant idea throughout the books.

Thirdly, I don't know how reasonable it is to mark some of those books red and others not. Although there should exist a different sort of urgency towards reading those books, this is really judging a book by it's cover. Perhaps your priorities are soundly reasoned, but I personally would think that anyone should be ashamed for not having read, for instance, Hippolytus by Euripides, a tragedy that I feel perfectly describes the nature of love, and the struggle between the nature and the spirit of a person, or Wealth/Plutus by Aristophanes, which is so elevated and brilliant that it might have been mistaken for being proto-marxist were it any lesser.

If you decide to examine those examples, I recommend Helgi Hálfdánarson's translation of Hippolytus, which is both surprisingly accurate and startlingly beautiful, whereas I do not know of any good Icelandic translations of the Wealth, so probably you might find something in your library, or online and print.

That is all, except perhaps, that this delightful list is very leaky, heh.

[tigermouse88]

My reply to your comment was long enough to deserve an entry of its own. See next!