The Meat of a Collection

Which of my books would I prioritize regaining if they were lost?

It’s a difficult question, and to my own surprise I found an unintentional theme while attempting to answer it. I feel perfectly comfortable with never again owning most of my fiction and poetry titles, knowing they can always be revisited via library. This is probably due to the fact that I’m now more interested in writing my own fiction than ingesting others’, and it’s rare that I need fictional works as a reference, whereas having major works of history and philosophy at hand are indispensable.

So, while I would never recommend anyone neglect fiction or poetry, it would be disingenuous to include such titles here. And, more often than not, I would simply recommend classics of the “no, duh” variety in those genres, whereas a few of my nonfiction selections manage to avoid the status of household names.

 

USA:

Theodore Draper’s A Struggle for Power

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Davis’ Three Roads to the Alamo

Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln (Prairie & War Years)

Shelby Foote’s Civil War

 

Grecorome:

The Landmark Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, Julius Caesar

Plutarch’s Lives

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall

Graves’ Greek Myths and White Goddess

Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

 

Indochina:

Lin Yutang’s The Wisdom of China and India

Watson’s Grand Historians of China

Hagakure

 

Christianity:

KJV

Dante

Milton

Beowulf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Le Morte D’arthur

William Blake

Chaucer

Spenser

Shakespeare

Marlowe Faustus

Goethe Faust

 

Philosophy:

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

Machiavelli’s Prince

Mishima’s Sun and Steel

Clason’s Richest Man in Babylon