The Loose Canon

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

William Blake: The Book of Urizen (1794). One of the most accessible of the poet-visionary's books, this is the story of Urizen ('your reason'), a chilly deity whose kingship over human beings keeps the imagination on the defensive. Allen Ginsberg (with Eric Drooker): Illuminated Poems (1996). A late collection that matches some of the Blake-loving New York poet's best works with Drooker's gritty-but-grandiose illustrations.

Jane Austen: Persuasion (1818). A serene story of love regained between two proud people, written by a novelist for whom the comedy of manners is a way into deeper truths. Lady Murasaki: The Tale of Genji (ca. 1000). The world's first novel of manners (the world's first novel, period) is a Japanese tale of a supremely attractive prince whose lovers form an unforgettable gallery of female sensibilities.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Ninth Symphony (1824). Reaches for the heavens, and gets as close as any music ever written. Gustav Mahler: Fourth Symphony (1902). Another musical imagining of life beyond this realm, joyous but with the recognition of loss.

Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854). Thoreau is as much a satirist as a nature rhapsodist in this famous memoir as he mixes serene reflection with political and social zingers. Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems (1992). Nobody puts fewer human beings in her poems than this singer of the magnificence and cruelty of nature. For Oliver, the world of moles, bears, and lilies is a vehicle for understanding deeper truths.

Walt Whitman: Song of Myself (1855). The greatest long poem in American English -- an epic that imagines a human self that's as vast as our landscape. Muriel Rukeyser: A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1935 - 1976). This poet, activist, and explorer of the American psyche was probing the relationship between sexuality, history, the body, and politics decades before the advent of feminist cultural studies.

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1875 - 1877). Tighter and more tragic than War and Peace, this story of doomed adultery is no less of a panorama of the corruption and idealism of Russian society. Alexander Herzen: My Past and Thoughts (1852 - 53). The most humane of Russian socialist revolutionaries tells, in prose as vivid as the great Russian novelists', the story of his adventures as a thorn in the czar's side.

Mohandas Gandhi: The Gandhi Reader (1900s - 1950s). No one in the 20th century more profoundly nor successfully challenged the prevailing order -- it's a life well stocked with lessons and inspiration for those seeking to change the world. Paulo Freire & Myles Horton: We Make the Road by Walking (1990). A seminal Brazilian educator trades ideas about social change and education with a legendary American organizer.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1910). The classic edition, acclaimed for its fine writing, offers a window on the world as it existed before the shiny-new, high-speed values of the 20th century took over. Bill Bryson: Made in America (1994). A riotous and grandly researched romp through the history of English that also serves as handy revisionist history of our land.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print