About the Newberries, that makes sense. [nod] I have some awards I trust more than others too.

Angie

One award that I’ve found to be pretty consistently worth noting is the Newberry medal for children’s literature. I’ve never been let down by a Newberry winner, and if I see a children’s book that has it while shopping, then yes, I’m more likely to stop and read the blurb and consider buying it. Some other books I’ve read that had won OTHER awards were not all that great and made me wonder who voted and if they had any sense. But Newberries seem uniformly good.

That’s pretty awesome, actually. I’d definitely sign that. And yeah, if people occasionally notice my words too, (in a positive way, of course [cough]) I can live with that.

Terry — whoa! Thanks. I got a similar list from one of my college English teachers. For a while I was hilighting the ones I’d read; I might even have it around somewhere.

Kacie — you’re right, of course. [nod] I like lists like this, though, because you can dump them all into a master list, with other lists of literature by women or people of color or gay people or whatever other little-represented groups you can find lists for, and then have a huge pile of Theoretically Good Or At Least Seminal stuff to read.

Terry — that’s funny; Huckleberry Finn is one of the few of Twains works I wasn’t able to get through. [wry smile] Tom Sawyer was good, I read that a few times as a kid, but it is a kids’ book. When I’m in a Twain mood these days, I prefer his short stories. I think my favorite is “The Jumping Frog,” especially in an edition which has all three versions back-to-back-to-back.

Kacie — I’ve never tried War and Peace, actually. Common wisdom is that it’s pretty awful as well as being long, and is only read because it’s one of those classics One Should Read. If it’s actually good, though, I might give it a shot some day. [scribbles note]

Angie

Other than a handful of semi-canonical women writers from the 19th century, this list is sorely lacking in perspectives that are non-Western, non-white, non-male…

Clifton Fadiman lead the New Yorker’s book review section in 933-1943; prior to it he was a chief editor of Simon & Schuster His Lifetime Reading Plan was first published in 1960. In the year of his death, 1999, it came back into print as The New Lifetime Reading Plan.

In The Beginning
Homer. The Iliad.
Homer. The Odyssey.
Herodotus. The Histories.
Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
Plato. The Republic, Selected Works.
Aristotle. Ethics; Politics, Poetics.
Aeschylus. The Oresteia.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone.
Euripides. Alcestis; Medea; Hipploytus; Trojan Women; Electra; Bacchae.
Lucretius. Of the Nature of Things.
Virgil. The Aeneid.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations.
The Middle Ages
Augustine, Saint. Confessions.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.

Plays
Shakespeare, William. Complete Works.
Molière. Selected Plays.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Part 1
Ibsen, Henrik. Selected Plays. Doll’s House
Shaw, George Bernard. Selcted Plays and Prefaces.
Chekhov, Anton. Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard.
O’Neill, Eugene. Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey
into Night.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Krapp’s Last Tape.
Watson, E. Bradlee and Benfield Pressey. Contemporary Drama
Narratives
Bunyan, John. Pilgrim’s Progress.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal; Meditations upon a
Broomstick; Resolutions when I Come to be Old.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice; Emma.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.
Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Bleak House; Great
Expectations; Hard Times; Our Mutual Friend; Little Dorrit.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the
Looking-Glass.
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure.
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo.
Forster, E, M,. A Passage to India.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando; The Waves.
Lawrence, D. H.. Sons and Lovers; Women in Love.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World; Collected Essays.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial; The Castle; Selected Short Stories.
Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Voltaire. Candide and Other Works.
Stendhal. The Red and the Black.
Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past.
Malraux, André. Man’s Fate.
Camus, Albert. The Plague; The Stranger.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Short Stories and Other Works.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter; Selcted Tales.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; Bartleby the Scrivener.
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying.
Hemingway, Ernest. Short Stories.
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift.
Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes de. Don Quixote.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths Dreamtigers.
Márquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of
Cholera.
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich. Dead Souls.
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich. Fathers and Sons.
Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers
Karamazov.
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich. War and Peace.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich. The First Circle; Cancer Ward.
Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Essays
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty.
Engels, Karl Marx and Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra; Selected Other
Works.
Freud, Sigmund. Selected Works.
Macchiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Selected Essays.
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method.
Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts (Pensées).
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Works.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; Civil Disobedience.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism and Four Essays from
The Meaning of Truth; The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct.
Santayana, George. Skepticism and Animal Faith; Selected Other Works.
Poetry
Donne, John. Selected Works.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity; Sonnets; Areopagitica.
Blake, William. Selected Works.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude; Selected Shorter Poems; Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads, 1800.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Ancient Mariner; Christabel; Kubla Khan;
Biographia Literaria; Writings on Shakespeare.
Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems; Collected Plays; The
Autobiography.
Eliot, T. S.. Collected Poems, Collected Plays.
Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems; Democratic Vistas; Preface to the first
issue of Leaves of Grass (1855); A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems.
Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes
Pearson.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and
Robert O’Clair.
History, Biography, Autobiography
Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris
The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Confessions.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century.

Annex
McNeill, William H.. The Rise of the West
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Story of Civilization.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People
Smith, Page. A People’s History of the United States.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World.
Whitehead, Alfred North. An Introduction to Mathematics.
Gombrich. The Story of Art.
Adler, Mortimer J.. How to Read a Book

I didn’t like all of them although, it must be said, I probably liked a higher percentage of them than if I’d picked up the same number of books at random.

I write popular fiction. I like to say that it is never my goal to have you notice my words. It is instead my goal to have you NOT notice when the phone rings.

Sometimes, with prizewinning books, I get both–a book that will keep me up to all hours reading it AND a that has an occasional paragraph that I have to reread and say “Damn, I wish I wrote that!”

Terry — that’s a very down-to-earth approach. I agree, just getting your name out there over and over and over is a big help, even if you don’t win.

Evanne — Stephen King is a bit weird for me [grin] but that’s a good idea, finding out what your favorite author reads and giving his or her favorites a try.

Jessa — right, the “touch” is what influences me too, I think. Even if I don’t generally read winners of a particular award, just hearing about a book or an author over and over can make me at least pick up one of their books if I see it in a bookstore, and give the blurb and excerpt a chance to catch my interest. That seems to be what it comes down to, getting your name or your book’s title into a reader’s head so that when they’re browsing you’ve got that bit of a leg up.

Reader — that does happen unfortunately. :/ Sometimes it’s just a matter of differing taste or philosophy.

Jess — another vote for the Hugos, then, even if by proxy. From a writer’s point of view, though, even that bit of piqued interest as you look down a list can be a significant advantage. One of the main problems is just how to be noticed out of all the thousands of other books published in your genre.

RfP — I can think of a few things I’d just as soon they left off covers too. [nod]

Angie

In other genres? Absolutely not. At this stage of my life, I’m a happy-ending kind of girl, and like Kerry Allen’s daughter, I’ve learned to associate anything outside of the romance genre that wins an award with someone somewhere dying tragically and horribly. Ugh. If I want stories like that, I’ll read the news.