(Note: This is the original post from June 13, 2013.)
I’m on a book kick.
A tanning kick, too, but that’s just a side effect of it being summer and me being on the book kick. (Although I wish I meant animal hides, I only mean my own. If only I had someone to teach me, then I’d be on a hide tanning kick too.) My goal is to read two books every three days, adjusted for the length of the book, or 200 pages a day. Practically, 600 pages every three days, which is around two books.
I paid a visit to my former journalism professor, Jake Highton, who is now professor emeritus. We got to talking about the education at the journalism school and he handed me two columns he had written for the Sparks Tribune. One, part of a three-column series on journalism schools, titled “Five-year reading plan for journalists.” The column is more of an outline, but it has enough book suggestions to get started. I promised Jake I would try to plow through his five years in a much shorter period of time, condensing five years to, one, or a matter of months.
(Highton has set up a scholarship for students. Information here.)
I will, therefore, begin to document my efforts to tackle the Journalist’s reading plan. A few of the books and plays I’ve already read, especially Shakespeare.
“Consider setting a five-year plan to read the 75 to 100 most important books ever written. The lists will vary by individual taste and interest and no list can be definitive. But such lists are a foundation for a real education,” Highton wrote.
The five-year-plan wasn’t the only column Highton wrote on the subject. He also wrote (and gave me a copy of) a column on his world hall of fame for artists on June 21, 2007. The movies on the list, 15 in all, overlap some with his five-year-plan list. Those which appear only on the hall of fame will be marked by an asterisk.
The plan isn’t just for reading: it’s for film and music and art.
Below is Highton’s plan, taken from his column. I’ve italicized what I’ve already completed from the list.
HISTORY
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter
The Populist Movement by Lawrence Goodwyn
The Gulag Trilogy by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“Histories of Europe and Asia with special emphasis on England, France and Germany,” he wrote.
PLAYS
Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV (part one)
Tartuffe by Molière
Cyrano by Rostand
Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
NOVELS/FICTION
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Germinal by Émile Zola
Canide by Voltaire
Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
1984 by George Orwell
Crime and Punishment and Brother Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (My favorite novel of all time)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Christmas Story by H.L. Mencken
The Juggler of Notre Dame by Anatole France
King James Bible
NON-FICTION
Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Diary of Anne Frank
Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography by Albert Schweitzer
One Man’s Freedom by Edward Bennet Williams
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Working by Studs Terkel
Sigmund Freud
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Niccolò Machiavelli
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu
POETRY
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald
The sonnets of Shakespeare
Anthologies of American and English poetry
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
FILM
Citizen Kane
Casablanca
All Quiet on the Western Front
Grand illusion
Zorba the Greek
Dr. Strangelove
The Seventh Seal
Battleship Potemkin
La Dolce Vita
Fantasia
Birth of a Nation
The Grapes of Wrath
A Streetcar Named Desire
Grand Hotel*
Rashômon*
The Third Man*
Viridiana*
La Strada*
Wild Strawberries*
Jules and Jim*
Birth of a Nation*
(Birth of a Nation is marked in his column by the fact that it is racist. He quotes Pauline Kael: “One can trace almost every major tradition and most of the genres in movies to their sources in (Birth of a Nation.)”
Triumph of the Will*
(Triumph of the Will is marked by this comment: “Riefenstahl, perhaps the greatest documentary filmmaker even though she was a propagandist for Hitler.)”
*: These movies appear on Highton’s June 21, 2007 column, “Introducing World Hall of Fame for artists,” but not in his five-year-plan column.
ART
Van Gogh
Monet
Manet
Picasso
Lautrec
Goya
Rodin
Durer
MUSIC
Beethoven
Mozart
Bach
Handel
Stravinsky
Schubert
Rossini
Richard Strauss
Verdi
Puccini
Wagner
“All of that reading listening and viewing can be reflected in your writing: quoting, paraphrasing and alluding to,” Highton wrote.
As I progress, I will update this list. Probably write about it, too.