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The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classical Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded
Binding: Paperback
Author: Clifton Fadiman
Format: Bargain Price
Release Date: 1999-06-02
Manufacturer: Collins Reference
Average Rating: 4.0
Total Customer Reviews: 33
List Price: $15.99
Sales Rank: 482089
Product Description
Now in print for the first time in almost 40 years, The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Bront%, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many others. This fourth edition also features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century), making them easier to look up than ever before. It deserves a place in the libraries of all lovers of literature.
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Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: Not the best "to read" list anymore, but still very useful The first edition of this classic came out in 1960 and I was given a copy the next year as a high school graduation gift. I was an ambitious reader even at eighteen and I tried to read one or another of the included titles every couple of months. There were around 100 authors, from Homer to Orwell, and I reckoned I could finish the list in maybe twenty years. Of course, I never did finish. But I read at least one-third of Fadiman's recommendations and I'm definitely the better for it. This updated, revised, and expanded version drops some authors who simply didn't become as "standard" as Fadiman expected them to, and adds at least a dozen new ones. The latter are a nod (an unnecessary one in my opinion) to Asian, Latin American, and African literary classics. I say they're unnecessary because Western readers always have read certain key authors from non-European cultures. But we still favor authors who write about our own world and our own experiences. The chapters this time are arranged strictly chronologically by author's birth date, which I frankly prefer to the earlier arbitrary topical groupings. Each essay is brief and to the point, which makes for easy serendipitous browsing. I'm apt to dip into this volume whenever I don't know what I feel like reading next. A really nice added feature of this edition is a list of 100 second-level authors just in the 20th century -- those who didn't make the cut for the main list, or who are too recent for their staying power to be predicted. I was pleased to find that there were fewer than ten names on the list with whom I was not at least familiar, but there were perhaps twenty whose work I hadn't yet read. Aha, another list! Still, it was bit sad to note just how many of those hundred who were alive at the list's compilation a dozen years ago are now gone. And I can think of only a couple of new arrivals, people like Nicholson Baker and Jonathan Lethem, who might replace them. If you're a collector, as I am, of "to read" lists, this one is first-rate.
Product Review Summary: Classic in itself Hello
I was recommended this book by a friend and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. This book not only gives you a wide array of Literature, but also informs you on the various translations of the books. I highly recommend this book to all and in particular anyone that would like to expand his/hers reading of great literature
Product Review Summary: read the preface for goodness sake I haven't reviewed a book in a long time because customer reviews so often annoy me. Now I'm writing this one because another one has.
Another reveiwer here criticizes The New Lifetime Reading Plan and its predecessors for not including the Bible. That would be a good criticism indeed if not for this sentence from the preface to the book, " We assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; and there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous."
And for those who find the listing and others like it 'dogmatic', it is a list of the books that people who have read widely and deeply over many years have found lasting value in. The earlier works in the list were an influence on the later works. The later works have been appreciated by the contemporary authors influenced by the earlier ones. The list is a suggestion. These are the books I and people like me have enjoyed. Try them if they sound interesting to you. If they don't, then read something else. If you want to write a book suggesting your own favorites, knock yourself out.
And as for political correctness, while that is indeed a problem in modern scholarship, it is not a problem in this book. Hippies may very well have played at Buddhism, but it is a religion older than Christianity that is still practiced by many sincere followers in Eastern countries. Hinduism is also older than Christianity and still practiced by many people. The works of those religions and cultures have not had much influence on the literature of the West because they were not well known until relatively recently. The later Eastern novels included in The New Lifetime Reading Plan show the influence both of the great Western works and of those such as The Ramayana, The Bhagavad Gita, and The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
I have several books of this type, but this is the one I like best. The two to four page introductions to authors and their major works are interesting and informative. I used the book in particular to get more familiar with classical Greek drama and Asian literature. I have very much enjoyed several of the books I learned of through it.
Product Review Summary: Fadiman Has Caved Even Clifton Fadiman has caved, to the hippies, the yuppies, the politically correct, the Eastern mystics. It is beyond comprehension that a once-tenacious guardian of the gates has sold out. Make no mistake, the heavy-handed liberals hold sway over the contemporary lit scene, and they are not ever going to let go. The great tragedy of it, and what mainstream America doesn't understand (having, in their lust for money and material things, so willingly ceded the cultural and spiritual high ground to the leftists) is that we have given over our most precious birthright to those who neither understand nor value it at all.
Product Review Summary: Best of the "Best" I have the "Old" Lifetime Reading Plan (circa 1960), Hemingway and Faulkner are listed under " Some Contemporaries" in mine, and I will NEVER part with it. The older volume is one of the most well rounded reading lists one can find, this one is BETTER. In this case, Revised and Expanded DOES NOT imply Dummed Down and Politicaly Corrected. This new list is one-third longer than my edition and each new entry has merit equal to what has come before. We can debate the merits of the selections themselves ad-nauseum, but The Plan itself is beyond reproach.
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