The Old Book List

Here is a list of the names of books my dad sent to me in a big box, when I was about 17. He considered these books some of the best books ever written, classics, he said, and that I would be really smart after I read them all, or something like that. I'm still working on it, almost 20 years later, and all the pages are yellowed with age and most of them are paperbacks with well-worn, if not torn, covers. I'm not sure how he got them, whether he spent vast quantities of time at used book sales and happened to find them, or if he was shopping for certain titles, or if he sent me books that he already had, and was just getting rid of them because he didn't need them anymore. A few of these I may have purchased for myself, but, for the most part, these are the ones I remember that came from him in a big box in the mail, that still sit on my bookshelf:

Watership Down by Richard Adams (I read part of it)
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Stranger by Albert Camus (I read it because it was required reading in high school)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (I read part of it)
The Children Are Gone by Arthur Cavanaugh
King Rat by James Clavell
Huckleberry Finn by Samuel L. Clemens
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (I read part of it a long time ago but I wasn't interested in it at the time)
Reviewing Plane Geometry by Isidore Dressler
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by Ian Fleming
A Primer of Freudian Psychology by Sigmund Freud
The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders by Isidore Haiblum
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Methuselah's Children by Robert Heinlein
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (I read this one)
The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway (I've read bits and pieces of it)
The Cat From Outer Space by Ted Key (really? this will make me smarter?)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (I read this because it was required reading in high school)
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (I read this one.)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (I read this one, but might have purchased it for myself)
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (I read part of it)
Pierre and Jean and Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant
Hungry Hill by Daphne du Maurier
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (I read part of it in high school, but it was dry and sad)
Hawaii by James A. Michener
The Source by James A. Michener
Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat
The Peter Principle (Why Things Go Wrong) by Dr. Laurence Peter and Ramond Hull
The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand (I read part of it but lost interest)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (I finished reading this one in early 1995)
No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre (I read No Exit)
Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber (I started reading it, but I just didn't like it; saw the movie when I was in high school and it frightened me)
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare, with West Side Story by Arthur Laurents
Saint Joan (a play) by Bernard Shaw
Of Mice & Men by John Steinbeck
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
How to Calculate Quickly by Henry Sticker
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (I read this one)
The Double Helix by James Watson
The Hills Beyond by Thomas Wolfe
Worlds to Come, edited by Damon Knight (Nine Science Fiction Adventures by Arthur C. Clarke, H.B. Fyfe, Ray Bradberry, Algis Budrys, Isaac Asimov, John D. MacDonald, Robert A. Heinlein, C.M. Kornbluth, and James Blish)
Eight Great Tragedies, Complete Texts, including Premetheus Bound by Aeschulus, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, Hippolytus by Euripides, King Lear by Shakespeare, Ghosts by Ibsen, Miss Julie by Strinberg, On Baile's Strand by Yeats, and Desire Under the Elms by O'Neill

Of the few on this list of 46 books that I have read, I really enjoyed them. Was I little smarter after reading them? I don't know. Maybe. I have every intention of reading most of them on this list, but it may take a lifetime. I fear that by the time I have time to read them all, I won't need the knowledge anymore. If I had committed to reading about three per year, I could have had finished reading them all a few years ago. I think back to the "read 100 books" a year challenge by a local library not too far from here. Apparently, it's not impossible, but I notice it's not called "Read 100 Books a Year and Still Have an Occupation."