The Ultimate Longhorn Reading List
Members of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers recommend 89 books you must read before you die (Better Get Started)
In 1987, UT’s College of Liberal Arts released a document titled “The Texas List of Unrequired Reading,” a four-year reading plan of books in philosophy, science, literature, and history. The 48 books and 48 on an alternate reading list ranged from the Bible to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the time, Dean Robert King said the college was immediately overwhelmed by the response. The Alcalde picked up the list and ran it in its March/April 1987 issue, and for 20 years, the Alcalde staff has been directing callers back to that issue. It is perhaps the most requested page ever published in the magazine.
In honor of the 20th anniversary of that great hit, because we’re overdue for another, and because a lot of great books have been written in the last two decades, we set out to create a new list. We considered going back to the College of Liberal Arts, or even to the Department of English, but quickly concluded both approaches would be too limiting. But neither did we have the means to open the survey to the entire 2,500-member faculty.
So we contacted all 90 members of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers — a body that was created in 1995 by President Robert Berdahl to honor the University’s top profs — and asked them to list their top five books of all time. We were intentionally vague about the criteria. We told them to imagine they were giving a friend five titles to read before they died, taking five books to a desert island, or any other cliché that worked for them. Twenty-one took up the challenge, and when it was all sorted out, we had our list of 89 books.
Top of the Stack
Without any micromanaging, the list fell out naturally into three well-proportioned categories: 36 nonfiction titles, 49 works of fiction, and four collections of poetry. Surprises? Indeed there were. Since we simply asked for the “best books” and not necessarily the most important or influential, we did not play to the literary canon (though it certainly is represented). In fact we got not one mention of he who is undoubtedly the most studied, quoted, and influential writer in the history of the English language, Shakespeare. Sorry, Bill. Good days, and bad days, we suppose.
There were not many duplicates, not too shocking given that we only asked for five apiece and given the breadth of the faculty members we polled, whose areas of specialty range from English to Slavic languages, architecture to physics, astronomy to management systems to advertising. (See p. 46 for a list of our jurors.) In the end, six books were mentioned twice:
•The American Political Tradition by Richard Hosfstadter
•The Bible
•Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
•Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
•The Master and Commander series by Patrick O’Brian, and
•Middlemarch by George Eliot.
Only one title was mentioned three times. So the somewhat surprising grand champion is: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
According to our respondents, the top authors, those listed for more than one title, were:
•Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, and a cheater vote for her complete works
•Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Bleak House
•Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground
•C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce
•Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and
•Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse.
A bit of housekeeping: In the list, if the description is in quotes, it was written by the faculty member who voted for it. The absence of quotes indicates the description was supplied by the staff; either way, the name of the voter is included at the end of each blurb.
But enough analysis. Here, then, are the favorites of some of the most effective teachers at The University of Texas. And for the nostalgic, we’ve reprinted the original 1987 list at the end of this package. Happy reading this summer, and for the rest of your life. . .
Poetry
Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems (1860-86) “An authentic American voice who sounds as if she belongs with us, in this era, not with the Victorians.” —Betty Sue Flowers
Iliad by Homer (c. 7th century B.C.) “In its violence and humanity, still the best war literature we have.” —Betty Sue Flowers
Sappho: A Garland translated by Jim Powell (6th century B.C.) “Hearing these my words from afar, you listened and responded: leaving your father’s house, all golden, you came then … come to me again, and release me from this want past bearing. All that my heart desires to happen — make it happen. And stand beside me, goddess, my ally.” —Katherine Davis
Yeats (William Butler) Complete Poems (1886-1939) “Often regarded as the best poet of the 20th century.”—Betty Sue Flowers
Nonfiction
Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil (1999) “A wonderfully flawed book that pushes the envelope on where technology will take us as a civilization — an utterly staggering place just a couple of decades from now, and most folks walk around now like nothing is happening. Oh, and the reason we have never seen space aliens is that by the time they are advanced enough for space travel, they have created intelligent machines so small to do the travel that we simply can’t see them.” —David Laude
Alistair Cooke’s America by Alistair Cooke (1973) “Written from the perspective of a Brit who fell in love with his adopted country, Cooke provides an expansive view and insightful analysis of our wonderful experiment and how it came to be what it is today.” —John Murphy
The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter (1948) While many accounts have made political conflict central, Hofstadter proposes that a common ideology of “self-help, free enterprise, competition, and beneficent cupidity” has guided the Republic since its inception. Through analyses of the ruling class in America, he argues that this consensus is the hallmark of political life in the United States. —George Forgie and Rod Hart
Annals of the Former World by John McPhee (1998) “This is a fascinating collection of several short books on the geology of the United States around Interstate 80 beginning in New Jersey and ending in California, meandering through Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Nevada, among other places. The narrative is enlivened by the lives and personalities of the geologists he travels with.” —Philip Varghese
The Bible (King James Version, 1611) “A book with everything: poetry, history, sex, violence, redemption, and revelation. What other great religious text has been bowdlerized to protect its most innocent readers?” —Pat Kruppa
“Hard to beat this one. Believer or not, if you want to understand Western civilization, its art, literature, and laws, you must read the Bible.” —D.E. Winget
Blake by Peter Ackroyd (1996) William Blake, a London hosier’s son, began having mystical visions at the age of 8 and came to see his life as a revelation of eternity. While eking out a living as an engraver, he offered, quite unsuccessfully, his great series of prophetic books. For Ackroyd, Blake was a visionary, who long before Freud saw warfare as a form of repressed sexuality and believed there were eternal states of rage, desire, and selfhood through which a man passes, keeping his soul intact. —Suzan Zeder
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras (1994) The authors spent six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business success were devastated by their actual findings — along with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else. —John Murphy
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris (1989) “Beautifully written account of how we have arrived at our understanding of the physical universe. The prose is both exceptional and accessible.” —Melvin Oakes
Constructive Function Theory (3 vol.) I.P. Natanson (1965) “As an undergraduate I took twenty-some mathematics courses. Except for one course at the end, every textbook was resold in order to buy another. One instructor used Natanson and made much of its lucidity but did not ask us to purchase it. Nevertheless at graduation I used $27 of gift money (a seemingly huge amount in 1967) to buy myself the three volume set. I spent the summer reading them. Yes, it was for no course — only enjoyment. A year later for the purpose of a qualifying exam I very nearly committed Vol. 1 to memory. Certainly the ability to understand and enjoy these books is limited to a fairly small audience, but for those who can do it, Natanson provides mathematical exposition matched by very few.” —Alan Cline
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen (2003) “This is a great tale of the emergence of Chicago. It weaves the seedy side of the city and its lofty aspirations into a seamless whole that seems both authentic and compelling.” —Larry Speck
The Enchanted Boundary by Walter Franklin Prince (1930) “Because it shows how to use reason, logic, and elegance when thinking about something that is, supposedly, scientifically unthinkable (extrasensory perception).” —Jonathan Koehler
The Field Guide to Eastern Birds, Western Birds by Roger Tory Petersen (1934) “Not exactly literature, but the books I have spent more time with — reading, rereading, and yearning over in general — over the past 20 years, than any others. Petersen turns many small, innocuous, and essentially technical phrases in such a manner so as to lodge just before your consciousness, even if only describing the shape, for example, of a chimney swift in flight.” —David Heymann
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (also published as Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals) by Immanuel Kant (1785) Kant’s first contribution to moral philosophy argues for an a priori basis for morality. Where the Critique of Pure Reason laid out Kant’s metaphysical and epistemological ideas, this relatively short work was intended to outline and define the concepts and arguments shaping his future work The Metaphysics of Morals. However, the latter work is much less read than this one. —William Powers
Franklin D. Roosevelt (4 Vol.) by Frank Freidel (1973) One of the most loved and most hated figures in U.S. history, Roosevelt has been viewed by opponents as shallow, incompetent, and dictatorial. Freidel amasses evidence that renders that view untenable. His FDR is a man of vision, sound judgment, and decisiveness who rescued the nation’s economy from imminent collapse and defended democracy not only in the United States but throughout the world. —John Murphy
God: A Biography by Jack Miles (1995) Miles provides a learned, original exegesis that will send readers back to the Bible in curious amazement. Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for biography. —Philip Varghese
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (1975) Named one of the 20th century’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books by the Modern Library, Fussell’s landmark study of World War I is original and gripping: a literate, literary, and wholly illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. —Pat Kruppa
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1997) “Diamond answers a question that dwells at the center of modern human relations: why have the Europeans and those descended from Europeans so dominated development in the last 10,000 years? He is able to answer without any appeal to some innate superiority or inferiority of any ethnic group. It is very well-written and displays the author’s diverse expertise although by the end has become somewhat repetitive.” —Alan Cline (also, Robert Prentice)
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos (1989) “Because it is a readily accessible discussion of why people are so lousy at reasoning with numbers.” —Jonathan Koehler
Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski (1974) “The basics of visual criticism most precisely spelled out in ridiculously well-written examples. Here, brevity is the soul of everything. The best introduction to criticism (of any sort) that I know.” —David Heymann
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986) “A wonderful combination of nuclear physics made understandable to the non-physicist and history at the level of personalities. I have read many books on the topic, and none did so well at the two aspects of the story.” —Alan Cline
The Mask of Command by John Keegan (1987) Through military profiles of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, Keegan masterfully argues that in the nuclear age, heroic leadership of any style would lead to the destruction of civilization. —Philip Varghese
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (1952) “A powerful, and surprisingly timeless, introduction to Christian theology and an exploration of the boundaries and interactions of science and religion.” —D.E. Winget
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno (1974) “Adorno was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, a member of the Frankfurt School. Minima Moralia is a collection of puzzling and seductive aphorisms about politics, history, power, and culture that was written while Adorno was in exile in the United States. He got out in time, while some of his colleagues did not. He examines the darkness of the 20th century and the possibilities of Humanitas, art, and enlightened and intellectual culture, as well.” —Mia Carter
On Revolution by Hannah Arendt (1963) Tracing the gradual evolution of revolutions since the American and French examples, Arendt predicts the changing relationship between war and revolution and the crucial role such combustive movements will play in the future of international relations. —George Forgie
Only in America by Harry Golden (1959) “Exposed for me as a young Southerner to the irrational nature of racism.” —Melvin Oakes
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch (1988) “Volume I of Taylor Branch’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is perhaps the most affecting biography that I have ever read. The importance of MLK and his movement coupled with the quality of the writing and the drama of the story give this book tremendous impact.” —Robert Prentice
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929) In this extended essay, Woolf deftly argues for the need for women writers to discover their own literary tradition while at the same time showing how they require an independent income and separate space in order to contribute toward it; the essay itself is a model of stylistic innovation — and one which reflects the claim that she makes for Shakespeare, namely that all great writing is androgynous. —Carol MacKay
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman (1985) “An utterly fearless scientist who didn’t mind putting himself on display, warts and all, for all to see. A book I make every honors student in my college read to remind them why they should like science in the first place.” —David Laude
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005) “Forget history. This is an inspiring book on leadership. It gives profound insight into the values and attitudes of a truly great individual, Abraham Lincoln.” —Larry Speck
The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone (1988) “This is a fascinating and lively book that reexamines the times and circumstances of the trial. Without justifying the execution, Isidore Stone shows that the Athenians had good reasons for being profoundly suspicious of the teachings of Socrates, who was deeply anti-democratic. His pupils tried more than once to overthrow the Athenian democracy. Socrates is often treated as something of a saint in Western philosophy, and the Athenians are vilified for executing him. The book presents a more complex and nuanced picture.” —Philip Varghese
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (1951) Discusses the psychological causes of fanaticism. —Rod Hart
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman (1987) Churches have died and been born, and millions of people have lost faith or found it, because of the last two centuries of debate about who, exactly, wrote the canonical texts of Christianity and Judaism. This survey of this debate may be the best-written popular book about this question. — William Powers
Working: What People Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do by Studs Terkel (1974) “It features the essential dignity of working and the essential dignity of those who perform it.” —Rod Hart
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose (1997) “This presents the classic description of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the corps of discovery adventures. This, plus other books and guides, served as the basis for a personal reenactment of the journey in 2002 with my son-in-law. In 11 days we drove the outbound and back legs between North Dakota and the Pacific across the Rockies and back, along the Missouri, Yellowstone, Columbia rivers, etc.” —John Murphy
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James (1902) “It shows that we share the world with a diversity of human beings, all of whom deserve respect.” —Rod Hart
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert Pirsig (1974) This book describes a journey across the United States, punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions (many of them on epistemology and the philosophy of science) which the author refers to as chautauquas. —Alan Cline
Fiction
All of My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry (1972) “Very early pre-Western McMurtry, an extremely funny (and sentimental) take on college and just-past college realities, set in (a larger love song to) Texas 40 years ago. Although this is not necessarily a great book, it is fun to reread because it is fresh, and open, and young.” —David Heymann
Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) by Lewis Carrol A work of children’s literature by the English mathematician and author, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, written under a pseudonym. It tells the story of a girl who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy realm populated by talking playing cards and anthropomorphic creatures. It is fraught with satirical allusions to Dodgson’s friends and enemies, and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. —Pat Kruppa
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877) Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered this book his first true novel. Although most Russian critics panned the novel on its publication as a “trifling romance of high life,” Fyodor Dostoevsky declared it to be “flawless as a work of art.” In a January 2007 Time magazine survey of 125 authors, Anna Karenina ranked No. 1. (For good measure, Tolstoy’s War and Peace ranked No. 3.) —George Fogie
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa (1977) “Perhaps the best introduction to this marvelous Latin American writer — funny, provocative, and spirited, at the same time allowing Vargas Llosa to show off his astonishing narrative skills without losing the reader.” —Henry Dietz
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) This novel about the legacy of slavery won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. It is loosely based on the life and legal case of Margaret Garner. —Robert Prentice
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853) “Dickens sets himself (and the reader) quite a challenge in this ‘loose baggy monster’ (Henry James’ term for the long, three-volume Victorian novel) by alternating chapters between the narration of a disembodied omniscient voice and that of a female character narrator who is trying to come to terms with an abusive and mysterious past.” —Carol MacKay
Blindness by José Saramago (1995) “Saramago is one of the world’s best writers and this study of the human condition is as thought-provoking a book as I have read in a long time. How would you react if you, and the whole world, went blind?” —Robert Prentice
The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith (1998) A spare, cold suspense thriller — Norwegian noir — with strong, enigmatic characters. —Katherine Davis
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) A dystopian novel set in London in 2540, the book anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to change society. —David Laude
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) “Because I like the relationship Holden has with his sister Phoebe. (Not coincidentally, Phoebe is the name of my daughter.)” —Jonathan Koehler
Cathedral by David Macauley (1973) “The people of Chutreaux wished to build the longest, highest, widest, and most beautiful cathedral in all of France. The new cathedral would be built to the glory of God, and it mattered little that it might take more than 100 years to construct it.” —Katherine Davis
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks (1998) A historical novel relating the story of abolitionist John Brown, narrated as a retrospective by Brown’s son, Owen, from his hermitage in the San Gabriel Mountains of California. —Melvin Oakes
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) “I found a voice for my Catholic guilt — started reading it as a 10th-grader about 9 p.m. on a Friday night and finished about 30 hours later without a break. Then I went to church.” —David Laude, also Melvin Oakes
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (c. 1308) “It captures the human community’s depth and shallowness and the struggle waged between them.” —Rod Hart
Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884) This novella is still popular among mathematics and computer science students and considered useful reading for people studying the concept of other dimensions. As a piece of literature, Flatland is respected for its satire on the social hierarchy of Victorian society. —William Powers
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) “This is just a great story filled with passion and intensity. But it also outlines a clear set of values about individuality, ambition, and creativity.” —Larry Speck
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein (1964) A children’s book that has been translated into more than 30 languages, it is a short moral tale about a relationship between a young boy and a tree in a forest. —David Laude
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis (1945) “An interesting and thought-provoking story built around the question of the existence and nature of hell; Lewis suggests a profound and satisfying answer.” —D.E. Winget
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861) “This classic is full of rich and colorful characters in heartbreaking circumstances. Sweetness and evil battle for the soul of a young man in a great ‘coming of age’ novel.” —Larry Speck
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) Narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an unnamed black man who considers himself socially invisible. His character may have been inspired by Ellison’s own life. Winner of the 1953 National Book Award. —Mia Carter
The Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke (2000) “An exciting and well-written science fiction yarn that gives a fascinating answer to the question, ‘What is history?’ We always wonder if actual historical events bore any resemblance to the historical accounts; this book explores how interesting it would be to give an empirical answer. The book might be subtitled, Quantum Mechanics Meets History.” —D.E. Winget
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) “Far from being the story of a pedophile as it is often sold in the United States, the novel is witty, funny, and poignant.” —Thomas Garza
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955) “Because, as C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘Here are beauties which pierce like swords, ... a book that will break your heart, good beyond hope.’ ” —Pat Kruppa
“Pure escapist fantasy, with interesting characters, and much richer and deeper than the movie. Tolkien definitely has a definite class world view shaped by his Victorian background, but his characters come to life and speak for themselves despite his own inclinations. I enjoyed the passage where Eowyn snaps at Aragorn: ‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.’ ” —Philip Varghese
“A rousing good story that survives the test of several readings. An inspiration for young and old alike.” —D.E. Winget
Love Medicine (1984) or Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich “A multigenerational saga of two extended families who live in and around a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. Erdrich’s prose is often luminous, and her characters blend tragedy and humor at will. The interface of magic and hardscrabble reality is constantly moving and never strident.” —Suzan Zeder
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) The novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris in 1856, resulting in a trial that made it notorious. After the acquittal, it became a bestseller in book form and is now seen as one of the first modern realistic novels. —George Forgie
Maigret Series by Georges Simenon (1931-72) “It would be too generous to say that these short detective novels — the series is countless — are about motive, since the reasons people here (mostly the French middle class) do things are at once simpler and impossibly more complicated and mundane than ‘motive’ implies. There is the story, for example, about the now dead woman who had come to the police to complain that someone was breaking into her home to mildly rearrange furniture. That is about as wild as it gets: truly useful.” —David Heymann
Master and Commander and the entire Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian (1970-2004) “Cocaine for the middle-aged. Nothing happens for a while, then all of a sudden you seem to have misplaced the better part of two months working your way through 20 novels. Prepare your excuses, and clear your calendar, before you sit down to read.” —David Heymann
“His 20-volume series reads as one integrated history of British naval life in the early 19th century and gives us two of the more convincing characters in 20th century fiction: Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin. Extraordinarily convincing, funny, enlightening, tragic, and altogether worth reading and re-reading.” —Henry Dietz
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966) “Possibly one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and certainly the best Soviet-era novel, Bulgakov’s work magically combines the story of the devil in 1930s Moscow with the story of Christ told from the perspective of Pontius Pilate into a powerful critique of censorship and bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.” —Thomas Garza
Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1871) “Some consider this the best novel ever written in English. Long — but repays the effort.” —Betty Sue Flowers
“Utilizing her celebrated human sympathy, Eliot here creates a portrait of a 19th century provincial community that provides a stand-in for readers to see themselves and their own world; as Virginia Woolf once observed, this is the only novel ever written for a grown-up readership!” —Carol MacKay
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) “This is Rushdie’s greatest novel; it manages to be funny, heartbreaking, historically rich, instructive, zany and colorful, sad and hopeful. This novel has never lost its pleasures or charms for me, even when the author sometimes drives me crazy.” —Mia Carter
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) This Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea. It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. —William Powers
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864) A short novel considered the world’s first existentialist work. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. —William Powers
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) “The quintessential marriage plot novel, this tale sparkles with the lively exchange of wit between the so-called warring sexes.” —Carol MacKay
With an additional vote for the collected novels of Austen: “How can I choose one? I would lug them all to a remote island to remind me of civilization.” —Pat Kruppa
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895) An impressionistic novel about the meaning of courage, as it is discovered by Henry Fleming, a recruit in the American Civil War. It is one of the most influential American war stories ever written, even though the author was born after the war and had never seen battle himself. —Alan Cline
A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959) A novel set in the fictional Devon School in New Hampshire during World War II. The book explores the human condition, hate, vengeance, and guilt. —George Forgie
Sherlock Holmes, Complete Series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887-1927) “What can be said? I’ve been reading and rereading them for 50 years, and they haven’t worn out their welcome yet.” —Henry Dietz
The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder (1942) “Not a book but a play with a messy message. It shattered the theatrical conventions of the time and left us laughing. Today it seems a bit ponderous, but I cut my theatrical teeth on it.” —Suzan Zeder
The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen (1997) A wonderful weave of science, metaphor, and prose, Quammen applies the lessons of island biogeography — the study of the distribution of species on islands and islandlike patches of landscape — to modern ecosystem decay, offering insight into the origin and extinction of species, our relationship to nature, and the future of our world. —Katherine Davis
Straight Man by Richard Russo (1997) “Exceptionally funny book with an academic setting.” —Melvin Oakes
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1994) “India really comes alive in this book about ordinary life in an extraordinary and complex culture. It portrays a vivid sense of place and revels in the tiny but important details of everyday life.” —Larry Speck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) “This is a great story with one of the best narrators and one of the best heroes ever conceived. Two for the price of one.” —Robert Prentice
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927) “One of Woolf’s modernist masterpieces, along with The Waves. This novel manages to be about so many things: life and death, the pleasures and limitations of family life, generational differences, WWI, social time and history and natural and organic time, and the necessity of change and experimentation in art and in life. It is one of the most beautiful novels written in English.” —Mia Carter
Trail of Feathers: Searching for Philip True by Robert Rivard (2005) “When a San Antonio Express-News reporter disappears in Huichol Indian territory in 1998 in Mexico’s forbidding Sierra Madre while on a backcountry trek, Rivard, the reporter’s editor, goes on his own long journey to discover what happened and why. The parallels between the author’s and the reporter’s lives set against the backdrop of Mexico provides an exceptional voyage of discovery for the author and the reader.” —John Murphy
Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. Today the novel is regarded as a masterwork in Modernist writing, celebrated for its groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique, highly experimental prose — full of puns, parodies, allusions — as well as for its rich characterizations and broad humor. —Mia Carter
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848) “Between the written text and the author’s own illustrations, this epic novel ends up critiquing Napoleonic English society and humankind in general; while humorously deflating our pretensions, it still manages to exalt our aspirations.” —Carol MacKay
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869) “A world unto itself.” —Betty Sue Flowers
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921) “Before there was Brave New World or 1984, there was Zamyatin’s We. The depiction of social utopia/dystopi
The Texas List of Unrequired Reading
(First Published March/April 1987)
Freshman
Philosophy and Other Topics
The Problems of Philosophy, B. Russell
The Worldly Philosophers, R. Heilbroner
The Religions of Man, H. Smith
Science
The Double Helix, J. Watson
Awakenings, O. Sacks
The Lives of a Cell, L. Thomas
Literature
The Odyssey, Homer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, M. Twain
The Sun Also Rises, E. Hemingway
History
The Historian’s Craft, M. Bloch
The American Political Tradition, R. Hofstader
Young Man Luther, E. Erikson
Sophomore
Philosophy and Other Topics
The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Democracy in America, A. de Tocqueville
Genesis, Exodus, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, and Amos
Science
Microbe Hunters, P. De Kruif
Science and the Modern World, A.N. Whitehead
The First Three Minutes, S. Weinberg
Literature
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, L. Carroll
Richard II, W. Shakespeare
Moby Dick, H. Melville
History
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, G. Mattingly
This Hallowed Ground, B. Catton
Melbourne, D. Cecil
Junior
Philosophy and Other Topics
Utilitarianism, On Liberty, J.S. Mill
Purposes of Art, 2nd Ed., A. Elsen
The Varieties of Religious Experience, W. James
Science
A Mathematician’s Apology, G. Hardy
The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, H. Reichenbach
The Cosmic Code, H. Pagels
Literature
Candide, F. Voltaire
Hamlet, W. Shakespeare
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Ed.
History
The White Nile, A. Moorehead
The Crisis of the Old Order, A. Schlesinger
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, A. Bullock
Senior
Philosophy and Other Topics
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, I. Kant
The Federalist, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Ed. B.F. Wright
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
Science
Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, M. Gardner
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn
Mankind Evolving, T. Dobzhansky
Literature
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, W. Shakespeare
The Brothers Karamazov, F.M. Dostoevsky
Bread and Wine, I. Silone
History
Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, G. Kennan
Tumultuous Years, R. Donovan
Stillwell and the American Experience in China, B. Tuchman
Substitute Lists
Freshman
Philosophy and Other Topics
The Republic, Plato
A History of Western Philosophy, B. Russell
The Social Contract, J.J. Rousseau
Science
The Discoverers, D. Boorstin
The Panda’s Thumb, S. Gould
King Solomon’s Ring, K. Lorenz
Literature
Antigone, Oedipus Rex,
Sophocles
Pride and Prejudice, J. Austen
Heart of Darkness, J. Conrad
History
Samuel Johnson, J. Wain
The Making of the Middle Ages, R. Southern
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, B. Franklin
Sophomore
Philosophy and Other Topics
The Prince, N. Machiavelli
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, P. Hallie
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, M. Weber
Science
The Creative Explosion, J. Pfeiffer
Knowledge and Wonder, V. Weisskopf
Einstein, J. Bernstein
Literature
Paradise Lost, J. Milton
Tom Jones, H. Fielding
Brideshead Revisited, E. Waugh
History
The Education of Henry Adams, H. Adams
History of the Conquest of Mexico, W. Prescott
Origins of the New South, C. Vann Woodward
Junior
Philosophy and Other Topics
Pragmatism, W. James
Meaning in Western Architecture, C. Norberg-Schulz
Witness, W. Chambers
Science
On Human Nature, E.O. Wilson
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, C.P. Snow
Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems, J. Ravetz
Literature
Don Quixote, M. Cervantes
Hard Times, C. Dickens
To the Lighthouse, V. Woolf
History
Huey Long, T.H. Williams
The Old Regime and the French Revolution, A. de Tocqueville
The Raven, M. James
Senior
Philosophy and Other Topics
The Road to Serfdom, F. Hayek
The Road to Wigan Pier, G. Orwell
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, K. Marx
Science
The Growth of Biological Thought, E. Mayr
Chance and Necessity, J. Monod
The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air, M. Minnaert
Literature
War and Peace, L.N. Tolstoy
Light in August, W. Faulkner
The Magic Mountain, T. Mann
History
Stalin as Revolutionary, R. Tucker
The Rebel, A. Camus
Autobiography of Malcolm X, M. Little
