The Thousand Good Books

The “Great Books” movement of the last generation has not failed so much as fizzled, not because of any defect in the books—“the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase—but like good champagne in plastic bottles they went flat. To change the figure, the seeds are good but the cultural soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, adventures, which have developed into the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest. Western tradition, taking all that was best of the Greco-Roman world into herself has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones and for all the studies in the arts and sciences, without which such studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete and the foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the virtue of what Newman called “the gentleman.” Anyone working in any art or science at college, whether in the so-called “pure” or the practical arts and sciences will discover he has a made a quantum leap when he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under him—he will grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered. Of course the distinction between “great” and “good” is not absolute. “Great” implies a certain magnitude; one might say War and Peace or Les Misérables are great because of their length, or The Critique of Pure Reason its difficulty. Great books call for philosophical reflection; whereas good books are popular, appealing especially to the imagination. But obviously some writers are both and their works may be read more than once from the different points of view – this is true of Shakespeare and Cervantes, for example. It is commonly agreed also that both “great” and “good” can only be judged from a certain distance. Contemporary works can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly judged, and just as a principle must stand outside what follows from it (as a point to a line), so a cultural standard must be established from some time at least as distant as our grandparents’. For us today the cut-off point is World War I before which cars and the electric light had not yet come to dominate our lives and the experience of nature had not been distorted by speed and the destruction of shadows. There is a serious question—with arguments on both sides surely—as to whether there can be any culture at all in a mechanized society. Whichever side one takes in that dispute, it is certainly true that we cannot understand the point at issue without an imaginative grasp of the world we have lost. What follows is not a complete list: almost all the authors have written many books, some as good as the ones given; and there are undoubtedly authors of some importance inadvertently left out— but this is a sufficient worksheet. Everyone will find more than enough that he hasn’t read; and everything on this list is by common consent part of the ordinary cultural matter essential for an English speaking person to grow in. Remember that the point of view throughout a course of studies such as this is that of the amateur—the ordinary person who loves and enjoys what he loves—not of the expert in critical, historical or textual technology. The books have been divided (sometimes dubiously because some stand midway between the categories) into the stages of life corresponding to the classical “ages” of man and in general agreement with the divisions of modern child psychology as explained by Freud or Piaget. And because sight is the first of the senses and especially powerful in early years, it is very important to secure books illustrated by artists working in the cultural tradition we are studying both as an introduction to art and as part of the imaginative experience of the book. This is not to disparage contemporary artists any more than the tradition itself disparages contemporary experiment—quite the contrary, one of the fruits of such a course should be the encouragement of good writing and drawing. A standard must never be taken as a restrictive straitjacket but rather as a teacher and model for achievement. Book illustration reached its perfection in the nineteenth century in the work of Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, Gustave Dore, George Cruikshank, “Phiz”, Gordon Browne, Beatrix Potter, Sir John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and many others. The rule of thumb is to find a nineteenth-century edition or one of the facsimiles which (though not as sharp in the printing) are currently available at moderate prices. What follows is an incomplete work-sheet of unedited notes which may serve as a rough guide.

THE NURSERY (Ages 2 – 7)
Literary experience begins for very young children with someone reading aloud while they look at the pictures. But they can begin to read the simplest stories which they already love at an early age.

Aesop
Fables (The translation by Robert L’Estrange is the classic.)
Andersen, Hans Christian
Fairy Tales, Christine’s Picture Book, A Christmas Greeting: A Series of Stories
Arabian Nights
(There are two classic translations, one expurgated for children by Andrew Lang, the other complete by Richard Burton.)
Belloc, Hilaire
The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts
Caldecott, Randolph
Picture Books, 16 little volumes (Published by Frederick Warne)
Carroll, Lewis
Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. (Illustrated by Tenniel)
Collodi, Carlo
Pinocchio
De La Mare, Walter
Come Hither, Songs of Childhood
Edgeworth, Maria
The Parent’s Assistant, Moral Tales
Ewing, Juliana
Jackanapes
Gesta Romanorum
Translated by Swann (Scholarly facsimiles)
Grahame, Kenneth
Wind in the Willows (Illustrated by Ernest Shepherd)
Greenaway, Kate
Apple Pie, Birthday Book, Marigold Garden, Mother Goose; Under the Window, The Language of Flowers (Frederick Warne)
Grimm
Household Stories (Illustrated by Walter Crane)
Harris, Joel Chandler
Uncle Remus
Kingsley, Charles
Water Babies
Kipling, Rudyard
Just So Stories, Jungle Book
Lamb, Charles
Beauty and the Beast, Tales from Shakespeare
Lang, Andrew
Blue Book of Fairies and other colors, five volumes (Illustrated by H.J. Ford)
Lear, Edward
Nonsense Omnibus, The Owl and the Pussycat (Illustrated by Lear)
Lofting, Hugh
Dr Doolittle’s Circus, and others in the series
Milne, A.A.
Winnie the Pooh and others in the series
Mother Goose
(Dover facsimiles – Illustrated by Rackham)
Perrault, Charles
Fairy Tales (Illustrated by Dore)
Potter, Beatrix
Peter Rabbit and 23 little volumes (some available in French, Spanish, and Latin. All illustrated by Potter (An important feature of these books is their small size, designed for a young child. Buy the individual books, not all of them collected in one big volume.)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
A Child’s Garden of Verses

SCHOOL DAYS (Ages 7 – 12)
Adams, Andy
Log of a Cowboy (Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth)
Alcott, Louisa May
Little Women, Little Men, and others
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
Story of a Bad Boy
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Tarzan series
Browning, Robert
The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Illustrated by Kate Greenaway)
Burnett, Francis Hodgson
The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy
Collins, William
John Gilpin’s Ride (Illustrated by Caldecott)
Cooper, James Fenimore
Deerslayer, and many others
Dana, Richard Henry
Two Years Before the Mast
Dickens, Charles
Christmas Carol, Cricket on the Hearth, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist (These last may be reserved for adolescents or re-read.)
Dodge, Mary Mapes
Hans Brinker
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe
Garland, Hamlin
Son of the Middle Border, and others
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Tanglewood Tales
Henty, George William
A hundred “Boys Books”
Irving, Washington
Sketch Book
James, Will
Smoky, Lone Cowboy, Book of Cowboys (Illustrated by James)
Kingsley, Charles
Westward Ho, others
Kipling, Rudyard
Captains Courageous, Stalky and Co. (Illustrated by Millar)
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Hiawatha, Evangeline
Marryat, Frederick
Midshipman Easy; Masterman Ready, and others
Masefield, John
Jim Davis
Porter, Gene Stratton
Freckles, and others
Pyle, Howard
Robin Hood and others (Illustrated by Pyle)
Sewell, Anna.
Black Beauty
Shakespeare
Comedy of Errors
Spyri, Johanna
Heidi
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and others (Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Tarkington, Booth
Penrod and others in the series
Til Eulenspiegel (Translated by Mackenzie)
Twain, Mark
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper (but not Connecticut Yankee and later novels)
Verne, Jules
Around the World in Eighty Days, and many others
Wilder, Laura Ingalls
Little House on the Prairie, and others
Wyss, Johann
Swiss Family Robinson

ADOLESCENCE (Ages 12 – 16)
Bronte, Emily
Wuthering Heights
Collins, Wilkie
Moonstone, and others
Dampier, William
A Voyage Round the World
Daudet, Alphonse
Tartarin, Fromont Jeune
Dickens, Charles
Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Sherlock Holmes series, White Company
Du Maurier, George
Trilby
Dumas, Alexander
Three Musketeers, others
Eggleston, Edward
The Hoosier Schoolmaster
Eliot, George
Romola, Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss
Fabre, Henri
Selections from Souvenirs Entymologique
Hughes, Thomas
Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom Brown at Oxford
Hugo, Victor
Quatre-vingt-treize, Les Miserables, Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Ibanez, Blasco
Blood and Sand, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Le Sage, Alain
Gil Blas
Park, Mungo
Travels in Africa
Parkman, Francis
Oregon Trail
Poe, Edgar Allen
Tales, and poems
Polo, Marco
Travels
Reade, Charles
The Cloister and the Hearth
Rhodes, Eugene
Best Novels and Stories (Edited by Dobie)
Scott, Walter
Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and many others
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Shakespeare
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice
Sienkiewicz, Henryk
Quo Vadis, With Fire and Sword
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver’s Travels
Wallace, Edgar
Four Just Men, Sanders of the River, and others
Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and others
Wister, Owen
The Virginian

YOUTH (Ages 16 – 20)
Austen, Jane
Pride and Prejudice, and others
Balzac, Honore
Pere Goriot, and many others
Bellamy, Edward
Looking Backward
Bernanos, Georges
Diary of a Country Priest
Blackmore, Richard
Lorna Doone, and others
Borrow, George
Romany Rye, and others
Bronte, Charlotte
Jane Eyre
Buchanan, John
The Thirty Nine Steps and many others
Butler, Samuel
The Way of all Flesh, Erewhon
Cabell, James Branch
Jurgen, and others
Cable, George Washington
Old Creole Days, and others
Cather, Willa
My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and others
Chekhov, Anton
Stories, and plays
Chesterton, G.K.
Father Brown series; Everlasting Man; A Man Called Thursday
Columbus, Christopher
Four Voyages to the New World
Conrad, Joseph
Lord Jim, and many others
Cook, James
Captain Cook’s Explorations
De Maupassant, Guy
Stories
Dickens, Charles
Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Martin Chuzzlewit
Dostoyevsky, Feodor
Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov
Doughty, Charles
Travels in Arabia Desert
Fielding, Henry
Tom Jones, Jonathan Wilde
Hakluyt, Richard
Voyages to the New World
Hawkins, Anthony Hope
The Prisoner of Zenda
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Scarlet Letter, and others
Irving, Washington
Life of Columbus, Conquest of Granada, Life of George Washington
Jackson, Helen Hunt
Ramona
Lagerof, Selma
Jerusalem, Gosta Berling, and others
Loti, Pierre
Iceland Fisherman, and others.
Manzoni, Alessandro
The Betrothed
Melville, Herman
Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and others
Moore, Tom
Lalla Rookh
Morris, William
News from Nowhere
Scott, Robert
Scott’s Last Expedition
Shakespeare
MacBeth, Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It
Stendahl
The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma
Stanley, Henry Morton
How I Found Livingstone
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, and others
Tolstoy, Leo
War and Peace, and others.
Trollope, Anthony
Barchester series
Turgenev, Ivan
Fathers and Sons, A Nest of Gentlefolk, and others
Undset, Sigrid
Kristin Lavransdatter, and others
Verga, Giovanni
The House by the Medlar Tree, and others (Translated by D.H. Lawrence)
Washington, Booker T.
Up from Slavery