In the early 1970s the poet Joseph Brodsky was teaching 20th Century Poetry at the University of Michigan. At the start of the semester, he handed out a reading list to the students, saying: "Here is how you need to spend your life for the next two years."
Bhagavad Gita
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Old Testament
Some thirty assorted works by Greek and Roman writers
St Augustine
Saint Francis
Thomas Aquinas
Luther
Calvin
Dante
Petrarch
Boccaccio
Rabelais
Shakespeare
Cervantes
Benvenuto Cellini
Descartes
Spinoza
Hobbes
Pascal
Locke
Hume
Leibnitz
Schopenhauer
Kierkegaard
Tocqueville
Custine
Ortega y Gasset
Henry Adams
Hannah Arendt
The Possessed
The Man without Qualities
Young Torless
Five Women
Invisible Cities
The Radetzky March
Some forty assorted poets including
Tsvetaeva
Akhmatova
Mandelstam
Pasternak
Khlebnikov
Zabolotsky
1 comment:
One of the first books I picked up as a serious reader, at a library sale in Las Cruces, New Mexico ca. 1977, was a yellow-covered Penguin edition (Juan Mascaro, translator) of the Bhagavad Gita. Approximately 8,000 books later, it remains a powerful talisman, not only for it's physical aspect (with a picture frome a Hare Krishna catalog I soon pasted inside) but for its remarkable clarity in describing responsibility in a world in which, as Dylan says "everything I know to be right been proven wrong". Skip the Old Testament. Everything you need to know is right here.
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