Thanks for the T.S. Eliot above! I was so torn in these recommendations. I almost voted for "The Four Quartets."

Just lifting this up again; any more?

Yes... I am going to withdraw Where the Red Fern Grows by Rawls and put it on the kids' list. My post 1900's suggestion is now Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell.

C'mon folks!!! We need a bigger list than this! Can we call for another two entries each??

PAM

OOo, I love Orwell, and don't know this book. Tell me more, please?

And yes, come on guys I know there are many out there just itching to post (gack, our NPR station recently had their drive and I sound just like them :)

maybe a pledge gift of a travel mug decorated with the RP lady would spur them on? ;-) We just had pledge week too.

OK.

I think another two entries each is allowed. But we have to stop there.

And I'm going to remove the requirement that you have to have read the book, as well - so long as you promise that it's high on your TBR list.

Right my second pre-1900 book is Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. I surely don't have to justify that? (Though I really really should read it...blush)

And my second post-1900 book is Stan Barstow's seminal novel A Kind of Loving - one of the first "kitchen sink" dramas - a book about ordinary people, in an ordinary world; an age-old story about a boy, a girl, and a pregnancy. Brilliant.

Ooh, two more!

My second Pre-1900 is Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

My second Post-1900: Joeseph Heller's Catch-22

I'm going to go the Great Books route again and pick:

The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri for pre-1900 in the John Ciardi translation. I like "Inferno" very much; I'm not so enthusiastic about "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" especially the strained allegory at the end of the former.

And post-1900, I'm going to expand on "The Waste Land" and suggest the Collected Poems of Eliot because I want to include "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with its striking lines.

I am going to suggest the following:

Pre-1900 - "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin.
Post-1900 - "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

Yea!!! Here are my second two titles:

Pre-1900's - George Gissing: The Odd Women - the story of women who choose to remain single in Victorian London. He writes with startling insight into the emotion and minds of women. The women in his book are not independently wealthy but need to earn their keep in a society where women were not considered equals.

Post-1900's - E.M. Forster: A Room with a View

cindy, Martin got me started on reading the lesser-known Orwell titles. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is the story of a man who does not want to get caught up in the machine that is society, where everyone goes to work to earn money to buy stuff and then needs more money to maintain the lifestyle and then gets a raise so they get a bigger-better-fancier place to live and on and on and on. It is about his struggle to avoid the middle class life where everyone works hard, has a mundane existence (in his mind) and an aspidistra plant in their window. It's a great book.

Martin... another Gissing... did you win another bet with yourself?
PAM

Ok, another two it is then!

Pre-1900s : Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Post-1900s : Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer

My previous two were both fiction, so I'll choose nonfiction this time.

Dynomutt, you beat me to Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. George Orwell is already well represented. I love Gissing's By the Ionian Sea, but PAM has chosen two of his best novels...hmm.

Aha! I should have thought of these immediately:

Pre-1900 - Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Dana was a young, privileged Harvard man when he contracted the measles. He needed to recuperate; but instead of sitting at home or going the easy route, in 1834 he signed on as a common sailor to make the trip around the Horn to California. That was just the first of his memorable voyages. And what an original travel narrator he turned out to be!

Post-1900 - Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
Who says geology is a dull subject? Only those who have never had it explained to them so well! That's my opinion, of course, but I've heard people say that geology was just about incomprehensible to them before they read McPhee. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this collection of "Basin and Range," "In Suspect Terrain," "Rising from the Plains," and "Assembling California," with the new addition of "Crossing the Craton."

PAM, my DH and I were just talking about that very situation, this evening. Ok, I must read that book.

Mmm, I need to do some thinking; I want to include two non-fiction. I'll be back

My pre-1900 would have been Chas. Darwin, but I confess to skimming, not reading...I'm glad he's been included, though. I must give some more thought to my choice here.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl for post 1900.

josh

Martin, have you started compiling these into a list yet? It would be easier to make a considered second choice if we could have the bones of the list-so-far to look at.

Ah, I thought he was already picked. And I did read most of it - albeit in a class. But the book, whether you agree with his premise or not, was such an important book that it should be read. So

>for pre 1900 Origin of the Species by Chas Darwin

I'm still working on a non fiction 1900. Its so hard to choose!

Thank you, cjoseph, for taking my pre-1900 selection, thus allowing me to select Ovid's Metamorphoses. There are many worthy compilations of ancient myths, but this is my personal favorite: funny, brilliant, fantastic (in many senses).

For my post 1900 selection, I'll nominate a Joyce. I won't put Ulysses up--not because I don't think it's worthy, but because I think it should come with a secondary work to help out with some of the allusions. And that would be two works, and thus cheating. So I nominate Dubliners. This list is short on short stories, and this is Joyce's most accessible work. Plus reading "The Dead" is one of life's great pleasures.

Okay, two more,

pre-1900: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
post-1900: Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier

Pam, The Odd Women is in my TBR pile.

My first two picks were nonfiction spiritual books so this time I will choose fiction.

Pre 1900....Emma by Jane Austen
Post 1900....the complete works of Agatha Christie, but if I have to choose just one of hers, and this required some thinking, it would be "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd".
gbg

Have just skimmed all the previous suggestions, and therefore hope I'm not duplicating anything with my second choices - again, they are 'top of the head' picks:

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights - because it smoulders
and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (although it's hard to pick just one of hers...) because someone's got to put her on this list!

Hee - actually if I were going to chose an Atwood, I'd pick Handmaid's Tale. Tho I did love Robber Bride.

And me, I'd put The Blind Assassin. But then, I've not read The Robber Bride.

As I said, not an easy choice! I picked the Robber Bride because the characterisation was so powerful. Blind Assassin or Cat's Eye are my alternatives.

Pre 1900, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Post 1900, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Pre-1900 I'd nominate the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. His ideas had an unimaginable impact on millions of people who lived under Communist rule to some degree throughout the last century. Even our lives were affected, as wars were fought, but just as important, our freedoms of association and speech were restricted, and our education system debased in the name of fighting communism. josh

Mmm, if we are talking impact -

1900+ Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (and I have read some of it, via class discussion)

While I don't agree with most of his theses, there is no doubt that he changed the way we think about our emotions, how we treat mentally ill, and paved the road for others as the field of psychiatry grew and changed over the years.

for the 2nd go-round:

pre-1900: Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"

post-1900: Camus' "The Stranger"

Woodnymph - is that the book that's translated in England as The Outsider? "Mother died today".

Ok, second choices.

Pre-1900, David Copperfield by Dickens.

Post-1900, If This Is A Man by Primo Levi.

Martin, yes, that's the one.

OK - here is the list so far as an Excel spreadsheet. I'll tidy it up soon.

Tell you what - it's odd that there are FOUR Mitchells in post-1900, and none of them related to any of the others as far as I know.

Here is a link that might be useful: The RP Essential Books

Pre 1900 Little Women Louisa May Alcott - this is probably my all time favorite book

Post 1900 - well my tastes run to fiction, but to try and stay in the types of books that have already been chosen, I am going to say Pearl S. Buck - Pavilion of Women. This is a wonderful book dealing with struggles of women and family.

And since you asked for another, I will say A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer. I think this book helps raise awareness of child abuse (the social worker in me never sleeps :)

Okay, I think I've resolved my dilemma. Since so many of my favorites have already been mentioned, I've been searching my bookshelves to try to come up with author's who have not already been listed. With the two names I have in mind, I had to find out if the one was considered pre or post 1900's. After consulting some sources for verification of publication dates, I have made up my mind.

pre 1900's I have chosen The Complete Sherlock Holmes (in two volumes) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although a couple of his works were published post 1900, most were published before. There are so many detective stories out there, but Sherlock Holmes plays a special part. I don't know of many who have not heard of him, let alone read at least one of his stories.

for after 1900 I have chosen the Complete Works of O. Henry (William Sidney Porter). The majority of his works were published after 1900 so I considered it fair to put him in this category. His short stories concentrate on ordinary people living ordinary lives with the problems facing many people even today, yet they have hope (The Gift of the Magi) and humor (The Ransome of Red Chief).

Never been a big fan of the first, but oh I loved and still love the latter! Our sixth grade teacher turned us on to his stories (as well as stories by Saki and Poe). In fact - thinking about it, if someone was thinking of a book to get a jr hi kid, that O'Henry might just be it.

IÂm a latecomer to this thread, so without further ado, here are my choices:

Pre 1900: The Arabian Nights and the Eddas (SnorriÂs Edda and the Elder Edda).

Post 1900: Perfume by Patrick Süskind and the collected Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton.

If plays are allowed: The Oresteia by Aeschylus for pre-1900, and Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill for post-1900.

I'd like to throw in O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten with the latter because at least one character is in both plays. I just saw Kevin Spacey's wonderful performance as Jim Tyrone at the Old Vic in London.

I'm still thinking impact, I guess. I want to change (if allowed) my post 1900 to Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique'. josh

Pre 1900 - The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Post 1900 - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
any collection of "The Tales of Hoffmann," by ETA Hoffmann

modern:
Madame Solario- Gladys Parrish Huntington
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

Well drat - Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov have already been mentioned. So then I would have to say the Bible, but that leads the list. And BTW, the Jewish Torah consists of only the first five books of the Old Testament. The Torah and the remaining books of the Old Testament comprise the Hebrew Bible, which is virtually identical to what Christians call the O.T.

Post-1900: Anya, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, an exquisitely written book about the survival of a young girl through the Holocaust.

Pre would have to be Great Expectations and post--the Chosen--Potek.

Leaves of Grass- Whitman
A Brief History of Time - Hawking

1. "Tom Jones" Henry Fielding

2. "All Quiet on the Western Front" Erich Maria Remarque

Pre - Beowulf

Post - Dune by Frank Herbert

I just can't do it. I can't stop at two. It's like the Lays commercial, no one can eat just one *L*

Perhaps my tastes are more pedestrian, but I can't help but think about Watership Down, Treasure Island, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Secret Garden, and tho' it was mentioned before, Lord of the Rings.

There just are too many good books to shorten down to two.

Hee, you should have seen us try to answer the 'best fiction ever' thread!

And I don't think your tastes are pedestrian at all - those are all favs of mine.

Back to the top -- are there any additions?

PAM

Maybe it should be a list of Essential Authors

Essential authors? Hmmm, that's a neat idea. Do you think this should be the same thread or a new one?

PAM

This thread will be at its 150 post limit soon, so maybe start another?