Timothy L Pagaard: Reading list / Listening & viewing
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"A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us."
--Franz Kafka
What I read, listen to, and watch
How did my brain get this way? Here are the essentials, the books, music, and films that have meant the most to me, the ones I would take if I were stranded on a desert island and limited to two or three hundred of the best.
go to Top | Criticism | Politics, etc. | Religion, etc. | Comedy | Language | Listening & viewing
Literature
Poetry go to Long fiction | Short fiction | Drama | Miscellany
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney transliteration)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, La Vita Nuova
William Shakespeare, Sonnets
Edmund Spenser, The Færie Queene
John Donne, Poems
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Jonathan Swift, Poems
Robbie Burns, Poems
William Blake, Poems ("Tyger" mansucript)
William Wordsworth, Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems
John Keats, Poems
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems
Robert Browning, Poems
Matthew Arnold, Poems
Walt Whitman, Poems
Emily Dickinson, Poems
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems ("No worst, there is none")
William Butler Yeats, Poems ("The
Second Coming")
Wilfred Owen, Poems ("Dulce et
decorum est")
Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres
Alan Ginsberg, Poems (Pacifica
Radio on "Howl")
Gary Snyder, Poems
Ethan Coen, The Drunken Driver Has
the Right of Way
Long fiction go to Poetry | Short fiction | Drama | Miscellany
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), The Mill on the Floss
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield,
A Tale of Two Cities
George Macdonald, Phantastes, Lilith
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, The Heart of Darkness, Nostromo
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The
Brothers Karamazov
EM Forster, Howards End, A Passage to India
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock, Look Homeward
Angel
William Faulkner, Sanctuary, The Unvanquished, Intruder in the Dust
F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Franz Kafka, The Castle, The Trial
Charles Williams, All Hallows Eve, Descent into Hell
JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The
Hobbit
CS Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, The
Perelandra trilogy, The Great
Divorse
Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast trilogy
Virginia Woolfe, To the Lighthouse
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
TH White, The Once and Future King, The Book of
Merlyn
John Gardner, Grendel
Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
Edwin A Abbot, Flatland
Richard Brautigan, In Watermellon Sugar, Trout
Fishing in America
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse
Five, The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
Doris Lessing, The Children of Violence pentology
JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Jerzy Kosinski, Being There
Annie Dillard, The Living
Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons
Joan Didion, The Book of Common Prayer
John Kennedy Toole, The Confederacy of Dunces
Frank Herbert, Dune
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, The Road
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude
JM Coetzee, Disgrace
Halldór Laxness, Iceland's Bell
Peter Høeg, The History of Danish Dreams,
Borderliners
Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America
José Saramago, Blindness
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Michael Chabon, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, Kavalier
and Clay, Yiddish Policemen's Union, Gentlemen of the Road
Short fiction go to Poetry | Long fiction | Drama | Miscellany
George Macdonald, The Gifts of the Child Christ
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes stories
Joseph Conrad, Stories
William Faulkner, Stories
Ernest Hemingway, Stories
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, Stories
Richard Wright, Stories
Flannery O'Connor, Stories
Isak Dinesen, Winter's Tales
Kurt Vonnegut, Stories
Nadine Gordimer, Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth
Günter Grass, My Century
Phillip Roth, Stories
Michael Chabon, A Model World, Werewolves in Their Youth
Drama go to Poetry | Long fiction | Short fiction | Miscellany
William Shakespeare, Plays
Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire
Vaclav Havel, Unveiling
Miscellany go to Poetry | Long fiction | Short fiction | Drama
Jonathan Swift, Essays
Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs (essays)
Joan Didion, The White Album (essays)
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (creative nonfiction)
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale I and II (graphic novels)
Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins, Watchmen (graphic novel)
go to Top | Literature | Politics, etc. | Religion, etc. | Comedy | Language | Listening & viewing
Literary criticism
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, The
Western Canon, How To Read and Why, Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human, Genius
Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artifacts
Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends
Camile Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn
Matthew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, Culture
and Anarchy
Alfred Kazin, Writing Was Everything
VS Naipaul, The Writer and the World
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction,
After Theory
CS Lewis, The Allegory of Love
Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice
Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
go to Top | Literature | Criticism | Religion, etc. | Comedy | Language | Listening & viewing
Politics, history, and culture
Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse than Death
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night
Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth
Jim Wallis, God's Politics
George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think
David Brock, Blinded by the Right
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History
Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?
Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism
John H McWhorter, Losing the Race
Richard A Clarke, Against All Enemies
Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris
Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Rush Limbaugh Is a
Big, Fat Idiot
Michael Moore, Stupid White Men, Dude: Where's My Country?
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
Chelsea Green, Don't Think of an Elephant
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Capital
John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World
John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University
go to Top | Literature | Criticism | Politics, etc. | Comedy | Language | Listening & viewing
Religion and science
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker
Daniel C Dennett, Breaking the Spell,
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Christopher Hitchens, god Is not Great, The Portable Atheist (ed)
Sam Harris, Letter
to a Christian Nation, The End of Faith
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
Bart D Ehrman, Jesus
Interrupted, Misquoting Jesus
Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason
Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious
Thought
Victor Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis
Karen Armstrong, The History of God, The Battle for God, The Great Transformation, The Spiral Staircase
Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology (ed Shubert M Ogden)
Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Jaspers, Myth and Christianity (ed R Joseph Hoffmann)
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief, Towards a World Theology
Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible,
Believer Beware: First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith
Harold Bloom, David Rosenberg (and the Yahwist), The Book of J
Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, The American Religion
John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, The Sins of
Scripture
Marcus J Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, The Heart of
Christianity
Mel White, Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America
Erick Nelson, The Metaphorical Gospel Theory
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith
John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, God in the Dock
Charles Williams, Descent of the Dove
Michael Grant, The Search for the Historical Jesus
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
Anonymous (C14 English Carthusian monk), The Cloud of Unknowing
go to Top | Literature | Criticism | Politics, etc. | Religion, etc. | Language | Listening & viewing
Comedy
Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here,
Big Trouble, Tricky Business, ...and anything else
Harvard/National Lampoon, Bored of the Rings, High School Yearbook Parody
Martin A Cohen and Sheldon Shacket, The Profit by Kehlog Albran
George Carlin, Brain Droppings, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
go to Top | Literature | Criticism | Politics, etc. | Religion, etc. | Comedy | Listening & viewing
Language
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil, The Story of English
Suzette Haden Elgin, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, The
Native Tongue trilogy
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue, Made in America, Dictionary of Troublesome
Words
John H McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and
Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
go to Top | Literature | Criticism | Politics, etc. | Religion, etc. | Comedy | Language
Listening & viewing guide
Music
Newest additions to my little pantheon: Regina Spektor, The Decemberists, and Sharon Isbin
My nephew, Nathan Pagaard
I love Pandora go
to Best of I | Best of II | Film | TV
Pandora.com and its Music Genome Project work like this: (1) You create a "station"; (2) you "seed" it with the names of artists or songs; and (3) BINGO! Pandora draws from a seemingly infininte database of music (provided by its Genome wing), playing full-fidelity songs closely related to your seeds. It's that radio station you've always wished you could find but never quite do. And not just one station, but several of them!
Be prepared to grow your musical vocabulary, for your iPod to fatten to include great new (and old) artists and songs you'd never heard of and some whom you thought you knew but who you never imagined could be so close to your tastes. Most important, be prepared to see your tastes expand radically! I walk or bicycle every day for hours, my iPhone logged in to Pandora, a stream of new music coming through, forever surprising me. I invariably arrive home hot to lunge for iTunes, to add discoveries to my collection; then it's off to Pandora to bolster the seedings to my stations.
These are my Pandora stations, yes, "Phræsti Music": "All the Decemberists," "Sígur Rós-esque," "Bartók, Debussy, etc," "Roots of Tull and branches," "CSNY and friends," "Women and friends," "Peculiar jazz," "Zappa, Dan, and others," "Oberst and the like." Listen to them. (Click the name of a station at left, then "Play now.")
The very best of my iPod (alphabetically) go to Pandora | Best of II | Film | TV
The Allman Brothers, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Tori Amos, Arctic Monkeys, Chet Atkins, Johann Sebastian Bach, Bad Religion, Anita Baker, Barenaked Ladies, Béla Bartók, Basia, The Beach Boys, The Beatles (and permutations), Adrian Belew, Ludwig von Beethoven, Björk, Blind Pilot, David Bowie, Billy Bragg, Johannes Brahms, Jackson Browne, Dave Brubeck, Jeff Buckley, Kate Bush, The Byrds / Roger McGuinn, Tracy Chapman, Clannad / Enya, Johnny Clegg / Savuka, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Paula Cole, Judy Collins, John Coltrane, Shawn Colvin, Elvis Costello, Cowboy Junkies, Cream / Eric Clapton, David Crosby / Graham Nash / Stephen Stills / Neil Young (and permutations), Miles Davis, The Decemberists, Claude Debussy, Dire Straits / Mark Knopfler, Donovan (Leitch), John Dowland, Antonín Dvořák, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Duke Ellington, Fairport Convention / Richard Thompson, Neil Finn / Crowded House, Roberta Flack, The Flaming Lips, Focus, Dan Fogelberg, Ben Folds, Peter Gabriel / Genesis (through 1975), George Gershwin, Egberto Gismonti, Henryk Górecki, Macy Gray, Lisa Hannigan, Michael Hedges, Jimi Hendrix, Hildegard von Bingen, Janis Ian, Sharon Isbin, It's a Beautiful Day, Joe Jackson.
The list goes on go to Pandora | Best of I | Film | TV
Jellyfish, Janis Joplin, King Crimson, Leo Kottke, Kronos Quartet, L'Ham de Foc, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Jonny Lang, Led Zeppelin / Robert Plant, Mahavishnu Orchestra / John McLaughlin, Gustav Mahler, Cheb Mami, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Dave Matthews, Sarah McLachlan, Don McLean, Pat Metheny, Midnight Oil, Joni Mitchell, Alanis Morissette, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Modest Mussorgsky, Harry Nilsson, Connor Oberst / Bright Eyes, Old 97's, Charlie Parker, Tom Petty / ...and the Heartbreakers, Sam Phillips, The Police / Sting, Portishead, Procol Harum, R.E.M., John Renbourn / Pentangle, Damian Rice, Roxy Music / Bryan Ferry, Carlos Santana, Joe Satriani, Seal, Wayne Shorter, Jean Sibelius, Paul Simon / Art Garfunkel, Sígur Rós, Elliott Smith, Phoebe Snow, Regina Spektor, Bruce Springsteen, Stealers’ Wheel / Gerry Rafferty, Steeleye Span, Steely Dan / Donald Fagen / Walter Becker, Cat Stevens, Al Stewart, The Supremes, T Rex, James Taylor, Tears for Fears / Roland Orzabal, Tenacious D / Jack Black, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Tool / A Perfect Circle, Traffic / Steve Winwood, Jethro Tull / Ian Anderson, U2, Uncle Bonsai, Michal Urbaniak, Vangelis, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Waits, The White Stripes / The Raconteurs, The Who / Pete Townshend, Lucinda Williams, Stevie Wonder, Yes, Dweezil Zappa, Frank Zappa
Film go to Pandora | Best of I | Best of II | TV
(In
no particular order at all...) Raising Arizona, Reds, Harold
and Maude, Bagdad [sic] Café,
Groundhog Day, Mulholland Drive, Blindness, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs,
Milk, Amores Perros, Changeling, Doubt, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, In Bruges, Pan's Labyrinth, Let the Right One In, Bonnie and Clyde,
Play Misty for Me, Rent, Das Boot, Religulous, Monty Python and the Holy
Grail, Time Bandits, The Fisher King, Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, The Adventures
of Baron Munchausen, Princess Bride, Cool Hand Luke, Blade Runner, Altman's M*A*S*H (not the
Alan Alda travesty on TV!), Memento,
Blazing Saddles, The Year of Living Dangerously, Gallipoli, Zeffirelli's Romeo
and Juliet, Brother Sun Sister Moon, The Man Who Would Be King, Kelly's
Heroes, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Twelve O'Clock High
Television go to Pandora | Best of I | Best of II | Film
I never watch TV--except via Netflix: The Prisoner, Oz, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Big Love, The Wire, Rome, Father Brown Mysteries, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all the George Carlin specials, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Twin Peaks, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Get Smart (Don Adams version), Hogan's Heroes, anything with Jonathan Winters, The Story of English, Twelve O'Clock High
Bonus | go to Top
Inspiration
The official Phræsti beverage: Carlsberg Elephant, Denmark's finest beer.
"Probably the best beer in the world," nectar of my Danish gods, what fuels my bicycle.
