Saying that, I have to admit that my knowledge of and interest in many very recent and popular books and other writings isn’t infinite. I have not forgotten Ralph Waldo Emerson’s injunction: “Read no book that is not a hundred years old.” A century is needed, he thought, for good books to emerge from the throng of titles which, then as now, presented themselves. I have disobeyed him in a few cases but really not many, and when I have done so I may turn out to have been wrong. Will anyone be reading about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin or Harry Potter a hundred years hence? I hope so, but I’m not at all sure. I’m not sure that anyone will be reading anything a hundred years hence—but that is another question.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
There are, I suggest, four different ways to use The Joy of Reading. The first is as a reference in which a given author or title can be researched, perhaps because it is mentioned in something else you may have been reading. You could look it up elsewhere—on the Internet, for instance—but the book might be more convenient if it’s sitting on your desk next to a dictionary and a thesaurus. If you looked up a writer or a work in my book, you would also be assured of the authority of the information, something the Internet does not always provide.
Second, it can be used as an introduction to the history of literature (taking that word in its most general sense, to include history, philosophy, even mathematics and science up to a certain level, as well as fiction, drama, and so forth). Used in this manner it need not be read straight through. The table of contents alone may suggest all you want to know about what I believe to be a reasonable history of literature (in that sense). Or parts of it, for example the Golden Age of Greece or the Romantic Age, might especially interest you, in which case you could read some or all of the entries in those chapters and leave the others for another day. If I myself were new to this book, I might turn first to a chapter about the seventeenth century, if there was one, because that is a period I like and know quite well. (And if I did find such a chapter, I might be annoyed because the author had left out this or that figure.)
Third, the book can be read from cover to cover. I know this is unlikely. My editor, Hillel Black, may turn out to be the only man who has ever done it. His reasons were professional, but he pleased me by saying he enjoyed doing it. (The book has been read from cover to cover by one other person: my computer guru. Her name is Laurel McKiernan and she too said she enjoyed it. But she may have just been polite. In any case, I owe her a great debt for all she did to make the manuscript presentable.)
Fourth and finally, the book can be used as the basis for a reading program that can be followed for a number of years. In the Afterword that follows the text, I present a program covering ten years. It includes ten books a year, or one hundred all told, which may be too many or too few—that depends on you. If you undertake this program, I wish you the best. I can assure you that almost all the books that are included are really good, so you will not be wasting your time.
Contents
For an alphabetical list of authors and their works.
CHAPTER ONE. The Golden Age
Homer
Hesiod
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Aesop
Herodotus
Thucydides
CHAPTER TWO. After the Fall
Hippocrates
Plato
Aristotle
Euclid
Archimedes
CHAPTER THREE. The Silver Age of Tyranny
Lucretius
Virgil
Ovid
Tacitus
Plutarch
Epictetus
Marcus Aurelius
CHAPTER FOUR. The Middle Age
Ptolemy
Boethius
Augustine
Anonymous (The Song of Roland)
Anonymous (The Tumbler of Our Lady)
Joseph Bédier
Thomas Aquinas
Dante Alighieri
Geoffrey Chaucer
CHAPTER FIVE. The Renaissance, Part One
François Rabelais
Niccolò Machiavelli
Nicolaus Copernicus
William Gilbert
Johannes Kepler
Galileo Galilei
Francis Bacon
Michel de Montaigne
William Shakespeare
Miguel de Cervantes
CHAPTER SIX. The Renaissance, Part Two
René Descartes
Jean de La Fontaine
Molière
Blaise Pascal
John Donne
George Herbert
Robert Herrick
Thomas Hobbes
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
Benedict de Spinoza
CHAPTER SEVEN. The Age of Reason
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens
John Dryden
Alexander Pope
Daniel Defoe
William Congreve
Voltaire
CHAPTER EIGHT... and Revolution
John Locke
John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Henry Fielding
James Boswell
Robert Burns
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
CHAPTER NINE. Romantic Spirits
Goethe
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Jane Austen
Honoré de Balzac
Stendhal
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
CHAPTER TEN. Critics and Seers
Claude Bernard
Charles Darwin
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Dickens