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Inspiration
 Sharpen the Saw



 

Stephen Covey's analogy to Sharpen the Saw refers to the process of self improvement in the categories: body, mind and spirit. The following reading lists represent a comprehensive and useful reference for the mental exercise part of the Sharpen the Saw habit. Use these lists to select reading that will inspire you and broaden your mind.

The first list is reproduced from the BBC Big Read book list at  www.bbc.co.uk. It is an excellent starting point because the books all have literary merit and have also received popular acclaim. The second list is reproduced from http://readliterature.com and represents what is usually termed the Canon of English Literature i.e. the great classic works of English Literature. The third list is reproduced from www.cop.com and represents the great works of Wisdom Literature.

What to Read - List 1
The BBC Big Read Book List

 BBC Big Read List     English Literature Canon     Wisdom Literature
 

  1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garc? M?quez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick S?kind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garc? M?quez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie


 

What to Read - List 2
The Canon of English Literature

The following list is reproduced from the http://readliterature.com web site. It is not a complete, nor an official list of any kind, but I believe it contains essential works from what is usually referred to as The Canon of English Literature.


 BBC Big Read List     English Literature Canon     Wisdom Literature
 

 
Martin Amis (1949)
  • The Rachel Papers
  • Dead Babies
  • Success
  • Other People: A Mystery Story
  • Money: A Suicide Note
  • Einstein's Monsters
  • London Fields
  • Time's Arrow
  • The Information

Sir Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1995)

  • Lucky Jim
  • The Green Man
  • Jake's Thing
  • The Old Devils

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)

  • Emma
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • Mansfield Park
  • Persuasion

J.G. Ballard (1930)

  • The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard
  • Concrete Island
  • Crash
  • Cocaine Nights
  • Empire of the Sun
  • The Drought
  • Super-Cannes

Anne Bronte(1820 - 1849)

  • Agnes Grey

Charlotte Bront?(1816 - 1855)

  • Jane Eyre
  • Shirley
  • Villette

Emily Bronte(1818 - 1848)

  • Wuthering Heights

Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993)

  • A Clockwork Orange

Fanny Burney (1752 - 1840)

  • Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)

  • Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
  • Don Juan
  • The Corsair: A Tale
  • Selected Poetry

Thomas Carlyle 2 (1795 - 1881)

  • The French Revolution (3 volumes)
  • On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
  • The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederic The Great (6 volumes)

Geoffrey Chaucer (1342/43 - 1400)

  • The Canterbury Tales
  • Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
  • Memoirs of the Second World War
  • History of the English-speaking Peoples

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

  • Selected Poetry

Joseph Conrad 3 (1857 - 1924)

  • Nostromo
  • Lord Jim
  • Heart of Darkness
  • The Secret Agent
  • Victory: An Island Tale

Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)

  • Moll Flanders
  • Robinson Crusoe

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)

  • A Tale of Two Cities
  • David Copperfield
  • Oliver Twist
  • The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewitt
  • Bleak House

John Dryden (1631 - 1700)

  • Virgil's Aeneid (trans. by J.D.) {Virgil: Roman, 70 BC - 19 BC}
  • Virgil's Georgics (trans. by J.D.)
  • Eclogues of Virgil (trans. by J.D.)
  • All for Love
  • Ovid's Metamorphoses (trans. by J.D.) {Ovid: Roman, 43 BC - AD 17}
  • Plutarch's Lives (trans. by J.D.) {Plutarch: Greek, AD 46 - c. AD 119}
  • Plays of John Dryden
  • Astraea Redux
  • Annus Mirabilis
  • The Hind and the Panther
  • Eleonora

Lawrence Durrell 4 (1912 - 1990)

  • The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea)
  • Justine
  • Balthazar
  • Mountolive
  • Clea
  • The Black Book

George Eliot Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (1819 - 1880)

  • Silas Marner
  • Romola
  • Middlemarch

T. S. Eliot 5 (1888 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1948

  • Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
  • The Waste Land
  • The Family Reunion
  • Murder in the Cathedral

Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)

  • Joseph Andrews
  • Tom Jones
  • Jonathan Wild

Ford Madox Ford (1873 - 1939)

  • The Shifting of Fire
  • Romance
  • The Good Soldier : A Tale of Passion
  • Parade's End
  • The Call: The Tale of Two Passions
  • Some Do Not
  • Return to Yesterday
  • No More Parades
  • A Man Could Stand Up
  • Fifth Queen
  • Last Post

E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970)

  • A Passage to India
  • A Room with a View

John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932

  • The Forsyte Saga
  • The Man of Property
  • Indian Summer of a Forsyte
  • In Chancery
  • Awakening
  • To Let
  • A Modern Comedy
  • The White Monkey
  • The Silver Spoon
  • Swan Song
  • Castles in Spain
  • Flowering Wilderness
  • The Country House
  • The Patrician
  • The Freelands

Sir William Golding (1911 - 1993) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1983

  • Lord of the Flies

Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774)

  • Vicar of Wakefield

Robert Graves (1895 - 1985)

  • I, Claudius

Graham Greene (1904 - 1991)

  • Brighton Rock
  • The Power and the Glory
  • The Heart of the Matter
  • A Burnt-out Case
  • The Quiet American
  • Our Man in Havana
  • The Comedians

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

  • Tess of the d'Urbervilles
  • Jude the Obscure

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

  • Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)

  • Crow
  • Tales from Ovid

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

  • Point Counter Point
  • Brave New World
  • Eyeless in Gaza
  • The Devils of Loudun
  • The Doors of Perception

James I, King of England from 1603 to 1625 (1566 - 1625)

  • The King James Bible

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

  • The Lives of the Poets
  • The Vanity of Human Wishes
  • The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
  • Selected Poetry and Prose

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

  • Endymion
  • Sleep and Poetry
  • The Complete Poems

Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1907

  • Just So Stories
  • The Jungle Book

Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)

  • The Whitsun Weddings
  • High Windows

D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

  • Lady Chatterley's Lover

John Le Carre (1931)

  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
  • Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
  • The Little Drummer Girl
  • Doris Lessing (1919)
  • The Golden Notebook
  • To Room Nineteen
  • In Pursuit of the English

Richard Llewellyn 6 (1906 - 1983)

  • How Green Was My Valley

Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593)

  • Doctor Faustus

William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

  • The Moon and Sixpence
  • Of Human Bondage
  • The Narrow Corner
  • Cakes and Ale
  • Short Stories
  • Ashenden
  • Far Eastern Tales
  • South Sea Tales
  • For Services Rendered
  • The Razor's Edge
  • The Merry-Go-Round
  • Don Fernando
  • On a Chinese Screen
  • The Painted Veil
  • Catalina
  • Up at the Villa
  • Mrs Craddock
  • The Casuarina Tree
  • Christmas Holiday
  • Liza of Lambeth
  • The Magician
  • Selected Plays

Ian McEwan (1948)

  • Black Dogs
  • The Comfort of Strangers
  • The Child in Time
  • Enduring Love
  • Amsterdam
  • The Innocent
  • The Cement Garden
  • Atonement

John Milton (1608 - 1674)

  • Paradise Lost

Dame Iris Murdoch 7 (1919)

  • The Bell
  • A Severed Head
  • The Red and the Green
  • The Nice and the Good
  • The Black Prince
  • Henry and Cato
  • The Sea, the Sea
  • The Philosopher's Pupil
  • The Good Apprentice
  • The Book and The Brotherhood
  • The Message to the Planet

Sir V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul 8 (1932) Nobel Prize in Literature, 2001

  • The Mystic Masseur
  • The Suffrage of Elvira
  • Miguel Street
  • A House for Mr. Biswas
  • In a Free State
  • Guerrillas
  • A Bend in the River
  • The Mimic Men
  • The Enigma of Arrival
  • Beyond Belief
  • Among the Believers

George Orwell ( 1903 - 1950)

  • Down and Out in Paris and London
  • Animal Farm
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four

Harold Pinter (1930)

  • Complete Works, Volume I
  • Complete Works, Volume II
  • Complete Works, Volume III
  • Complete Works, Volume IV
  • Betrayal

Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)

  • An Essay on Criticism
  • The Rape of the Lock
  • The Dunciad
  • An Essay on Man
  • Poems, Epistles & Satires

Salman Rushdie 9 (1947)

  • Grimus
  • Midnight's Children
  • Shame
  • Imaginary homelands
  • East, West
  • Haroun and the Sea of Stories
  • The Moor's Last Sigh
  • The Ground Beneath Her Feet

(The Satanic Verses has been removed from this list because it is offensive to Muslims.)

 

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1950

  • History of Western Philosophy
  • Religion and Science
  • The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
  • Human Knowledge
  • Sceptical Essays

Sir Walter Scott 10 (1771 - 1832)

  • Waverley
  • Ivanhoe

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

  • Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • King Lear
  • Julius Caesar
  • Othello
  • Macbeth
  • Henry VIII
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • The Sonnets

Tom Sharpe (1928)

  • Riotous Assembly
  • Indecent Exposure
  • Porterhouse Blue
  • Blott on the Landscape
  • Wilt
  • The Great Pursuit
  • The Throwback

Mary Shelley (1797 - 1817)

  • Frankenstein

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)

  • The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Robert Louis Stevenson 11 (1850 - 1895)

  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863)

  • Vanity Fair
  • The History of Henry Esmond

Dylan Thomas 12 (1914 - 1953)

  • Eighteen Poems (18 Poems)
  • Twenty-five Poems (25 Poems)
  • The Map of Love
  • Fern Hill
  • Deaths and Entrances
  • Under Milk Wood
  • Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (1934 - 1952)
  • Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

  • The Hobbit
  • The Lord of the Rings

Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882)

  • Orley Farm (1860)
  • He Knew He Was Right (1869)
  • The Way We Live Now (1875)
  • Dr. Wortle's School (1881)
  • The Barsetshire Chronicles:
  • The Warden (1855)
  • Barchester Towers (1857)
  • Doctor Thorne (1858)
  • Framley Parsonage (1861)
  • The Small House at Allington (1864)
  • The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
  • The Palliser Novels:
  • Can You Forgive Her? (1864)
  • Phineus Finn (1869)
  • The Eustace Diamonds (1873)
  • Phineas Redux (1874)
  • The Prime Minister (1876)
  • The Duke's Children (1880)
  • Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966)
  • Decline and Fall
  • Vile Bodies
  • Black Mischief
  • A Handful of Dust
  • Put Out More Flags
  • When the Going Was Good
  • Brideshead Revisited
  • Men at Arms
  • Officers and Gentlemen
  • Unconditional Surrender
  • The Loved One
  • The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
  • A Little Learning
  • Diaries

Denton Welch (1915 - 1948)

  • In Youth is Pleasure
  • Maiden Voyage
  • A Voice Through a Cloud

H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866 - 1946)

  • Invisible Man
  • The Time Machine
  • The War of the Worlds
  • Tono-Bungay
  • The History of Mr. Polly
  • The New Machiavelli

Patrick White 13 (1912 - 1990) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973

  • Happy Valley
  • The Tree of a Man
  • Voss
  • Riders in the Chariot
  • The Solid Mandala
  • The Twyborn Affair
  • A Fringe of Leaves
  • The Vivesector
  • The Cockatoos
  • Collected Plays

Sir P.G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse 14 (1881 - 1975)

  • The Code of Woosters
  • Jeeves and the Tie That Binds
  • How Right You Are, Jeeves
  • Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
  • Jeeves in the Morning
  • Cocktail Time

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)

  • Mrs. Dalloway
  • To the Lighthouse

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

  • Selected Poems


What to Read - List 3
Wisdom Literature
by Cop Macdonald

BBC Big Read List     English Literature Canon     Wisdom Literature

The following information is reproduced from the web site www.cop.com It is not an official list of any kind, but it contains some important works from what is usually referred to as Wisdom Literature.

The scientific literature was written to help us understand the laws of nature. The traditional Wisdom Literature was written to help us understand the laws of life and our place in the universe. Some of this literature dates from 3000 years ago, or before, and includes works from India, China, Greece, the Middle East ? and later from Europe.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the teachings of Moses, The Book of Job, The Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the teachings of Jesus, and later, those of Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and other Christian Mystics. In the Hindu tradition we find The Upanishads, and The Bhagavad Gita. In Taoism the Tao Teh Ching and the I Ching. In Buddhism we have teachings of the Gautama Buddha embodied in the Sutras, and elaborated upon in a myriad of later works. From the Greeks we have the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus.

To get a taste of this literature, compilations can be helpful. Among my (Cop Macdonald's) favorites are:

 

  • UNIVERSAL WISDOM: A Journey Through The Sacred Wisdom of the World by Bede Griffiths, Editor, Harper San Francisco, 1994
     
  • THE ENLIGHTENED HEART: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, Stephen Mitchell, Editor, New York: Harper and Row, 1989
     
  • THE ENLIGHTENED MIND: An Anthology of Sacred Prose, Stephen Mitchell, Editor, New York: Harper and Row, 1991
     
  • A MANUAL OF ZEN BUDDHISM, D.T. Suzuki, Editor, London: Hutchinson (Rider), 1983
     
  • THE ESSENTIAL TEACHINGS OF BUDDHISM: Daily Readings from the Sacred Texts, Kerry and Joanne O'Brien, Editors, London: Hutchinson (Rider), 1989
     
  • THE COMPLETE WORKS OF LAO TZU: Tao Teh Ching and Hua Hu Ching, Ni Hua Ching, Translator, Malibu, CA: Shrine of the Eternal Breath of Tao

 

Larry Kahaner noticed that I hadn't mentioned the TALMUD. I should have. The Talmud is a major work in the wisdom literature, and has a central place in Jewish culture. He notes that "the Talmud is not a sacred work, a mystical work or a religious document. The Talmud is a guidebook for life that contains everything from how to raise children, grow crops, and heal the sick, to how to run your business. Most important, the Talmud teaches ethics. It offers precise instruction on how to handle everyday matters in a fair and just manner."

A more detailed bibliography appears in the Covey/Merrill/Merrill book First Things First which is available from our RESOURCES.
 

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