60 in 60 Penguin Great Ideas, Second Set
By popular request, a list of the second set of Penguin Great Ideas books. (Tomorrow, #21…)
Any favorites here? I’ve marked with * authors I’ve read, and if I’ve in the past read any particular book listed below, I’ve marked it with **.
21 – Confucius, The First Ten Books*
22 – Sun-tzu, The Art of War**
23 – Plato, The Symposium*
24 – Lucretius, Sensation and Sex
25 – Cicero, An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
26 – The Revelation of St. John the Divine and The Book of Job*
27 – Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan**
28 – Christine de Pizan, The City of Ladies
29 – Baldesar Castiglione, How to Achieve True Greatness
30 – Francis Bacon, Of Empire*
31 – Thomas Hobbes, Of Man*
32 – Sir Thomas Browne, Urne-Burial
33 – Voltaire, Miracles and Idolatry*
34 – David Hume, On Suicide
35 – Carl von Clausewitz, On the Nature of War**
36 – Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling*
37 – Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Live For**
38 – Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption
39 – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus*
40 – Hanna Arendt, Eichmann and the Holocaust
4 comments on “60 in 60 Penguin Great Ideas, Second Set”
The Myth of Sisyphus was one of the books that changed my life senior year of high school. I then wrote a term paper on it sophomore year of college, comparing Sisyphus to Mersault, the main character of Camus’ “The Stranger”… its a solid piece of work – the only one on this list I’ve read, though.
I’ve read a lot of these authors, and don’t have any particularly negative feelings about any of them (even Job is one of my favorites of the books of the Bible, and one of the few I’ve read all of).
The one who is among my own personal pantheon, and has been one of the most influential writers for me, is Thoreau — my copy of Walden dates back to my high school years, and it is falling apart, full of marginal notes and underlined passages, its pages sunbleached and stained and dog-eared. He was an ornery old cuss, and I don’t think we would have gotten along very well if we’d hung out together in Concord (I can just hear myself getting frustrated and saying, “Oh come on, you don’t believe all that mystical crap, do you, Henry?!”), but there are only a handful of other writers I cherish as fully, and none I cherish more.
Glad to see Thomas Browne on the list, tho’ a bit surprised that it’s Urne-Burial when it could have been Religio Medici. I’ll look forward to your response to that.
I’m partial to Job. I know that it’s hard to believe coming from someone who is typically pretty cranky about religion, but the Book of Job remains a favorite. It’s a great story about the experience of suffering and finding the strength to endure despite it all. On another level, I particularly like the representation of Satan as a companion and servant of God. It’s interesting to see how the later church reinterpreted these myths.
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