Purchase
Sharpen The Saw
Will Edwards on
Habit 7
from
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People
by Stephen R Covey
Purchase
Will Edwards on Habit 7
from
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
by Stephen R Covey
Introduction
BBC Big Read
List English Literature
Canon Wisdom Literature
What are you doing to sharpen your mind? This is the essence of the Mental exercise part of the Sharpen the Saw habit from the 7 Habits of Highly effective People. Are you engaged in a programme of education or learning of some kind? How you should go about improving your mind is, of course, for you to decide, but you should ensure that you are reading regularly. Naturally you want to put in the good stuff - so it's not a case of reading for its own sake; it is reading carefully selected material which allows you to broaden and deepen your understanding. Here are three excellent book lists you can use for the purpose of broadening your mind.
What to Read - List 1
The BBC Big Read Book List
The following list is reproduced from the BBC Big Read book list at www.bbc.co.uk It represents an
excellent starting place for the mental exercise part of the Sharpening the Saw habit.
Introduction
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 Brontë 11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller 12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë 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 García Márquez 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 Süskind 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 García Márquez 98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson 99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot 100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie |
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.
Introduction
BBC Big Read
List English Literature
Canon Wisdom Literature
Martin Amis (1949)
Sir Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1995)
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)
J.G. Ballard (1930)
Anne Brontë (1820 - 1849)
Charlotte Brontë (1816 - 1855)
Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848)
Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993)
Fanny Burney (1752 - 1840)
Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)
Thomas Carlyle 2 (1795 - 1881)
Geoffrey Chaucer (1342/43 - 1400)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
Joseph Conrad 3 (1857 - 1924)
Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)
Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)
John Dryden (1631 - 1700)
Lawrence Durrell 4 (1912 - 1990)
George Eliot Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (1819 - 1880)
T. S. Eliot 5 (1888 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1948
Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)
Ford Madox Ford (1873 - 1939)
E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970)
John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932
Sir William Golding (1911 - 1993) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1983
Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774)
Robert Graves (1895 - 1985)
Graham Greene (1904 - 1991)
Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)
Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
James I, King of England from 1603 to 1625 (1566 - 1625)
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
John Keats (1795 - 1821)
Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1907
Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)
D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)
John Le Carre (1931)
Richard Llewellyn 6 (1906 - 1983)
Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593)
William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)
Ian McEwan (1948)
John Milton (1608 - 1674)
Dame Iris Murdoch 7 (1919)
Sir V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul 8 (1932) Nobel Prize in Literature, 2001
George Orwell ( 1903 - 1950)
Harold Pinter (1930)
Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)
Salman Rushdie 9 (1947)
(The Satanic Verses has been removed from this list because it is offensive to Muslims.)
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) Nobel Prize
in Literature, 1950 |
Wisdom Literature
by Cop Macdonald
Introduction 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 avaiable from our Bookstore.