NEW History Reading Challenge Booklet 2012 Layout 1
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uncover discover Bibliography for History Reading Challenge Dear Student, During your time at university you have a fantastic opportunity to engage with a whole range of ideas, concepts and perspectives. Many of these will challenge you; others will inspire you; some you may reject entirely, but in all cases they will broaden your understanding and perspective. We in the History Depart- ment are keen to encourage you in this and so we have put together a bibliography of works that have shaped our lives and informed our views. We don’t necessarily agree with all the ideas contained in these works–sometimes exactly the opposite-, but we hope that you, like us, will find them stimulating. Exciting ideas come in many forms and for the purpose of this exercise we have chosen to challenge you to read 20 books and watch 6 films from the list shown below. If you have already read/watched any of the works then they cannot be counted towards your total. You will notice that the list of books shown below is broken up into categories and at least 2 works must be read from each section in order to complete the challenge. There is no specific section for either poetry or plays; instead these are interspersed among all areas. Likewise, there is some overlap between different sections because the author’s lifetime spanned two different centuries. All of the works shown here are available in different editions, so no publication data has been provided; they are available either on campus or are purchasable very cheaply online (some of the books from the ‘Outstanding works of world history’ may be a little more expensive). If you use an e-reader (such as a Kindle or a Sony Ebook Reader) or have the Kindle reading app on your PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android Phone, then some of the books may be downloaded as e-books for no cost or, in some cases, for a cost which is lower than that for a paperback or hardback copy. This challenge must be completed before the end of your undergraduate degree. When you have read/ watched the required number of books and films, please contact us and we will arrange an informal meeting just to make sure that you have completed the challenge correctly. Successful candidates will receive a certificate and a small prize. Regards, The History Department Tips for getting started! We realise that there are so many different books listed here that it can be difficult to know where to start! You might find any of these helpful: l We have indicated some of the works that have really influenced us over the years so why not have a go at some of these? l Get your friends involved; ask them which books they have read recently and what they thought of them, you could even form a reading group. l If you start reading a book and find that you are not enjoying it then don’t force yourself to reach the end. Different books suit different tastes and there is nothing more dispiriting than reading something you are not interested in! l This bibliography represents a small sample of the many thousands of works that we could have included. If there is a particular work that you really want to read then contact us and we can discuss its inclusion in your challenge. 1 Section 1: 20th Century Literature Individual Works l Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings A heartrending but ultimately uplifting auto-biography of a young black woman’s life under Jim Crow. l Barker, Pat, The Ghost Road l Barnes, J., Arthur and George l Camus, Albert, The Stranger or The Fall Neville Stankley recommends How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936) This is the grand-daddy of all business and self improvement books that later works have sought to emulate but never bettered. Its very accessible and full of lovely examples from the period including the likes of Al Capone, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. It was designed to help people and businesses be more confident in post depression era USA but ended up creating one of the ‘most significant movements in adult education’. Guess what – being nice to people is a good thing. l Cather, Willa, Oh Pioneers! l Cocteau, Jean, Les Enfants Terribles l Du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca l Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying l Faulks, Sebastian, Birdsong l García Márquez, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Chronicle of a Death Foretold l Gibbon, Stella, Cold Comfort Farm l Golding, William, The Lord of the Flies l Grahame, Kenneth, Tales of the Riverbank l Heller, Joseph, Catch 22 Bill Niven recommends The Castle by F. Kafka A nightmarish exploration of the horrors of modern bureaucracy, a bitter commentary on the disorientation of modern man. l Lee, Harper, To kill a Mockingbird l Loos, Anita, Gentlemen prefer Blondes l Mantel, Hilary, Wolfe Hall l McEwan, Ian, Atonement l Miller, Henry, The Tropic of Cancer Franz Kafka monument by the l Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita sculptor Jaroslav Rons, next to the Spanish synagogue, l Pasternak, Boris, Dr Zhivago in Prague. l Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude l Peake, Mervyn, Gormenghast 2 l Peake, Mervyn, Gormenghast l Remarque, Ernest Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front l Rand, A, The Fountainhead l Saint-Expury, Antoine, Wind, Sand and Stars John McCallum recommends The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson A minister who doesn’t believe in God falls down a well and encounters the devil. The basic premise of James Robertson’s novel is easily summarised, but this book in fact offers a rich web of intriguing plotlines, small-town politics, and the story, in his own words, of a man’s gradual breakdown into crisis. As well as touching on the universal theme of belief and unbelief, the novel particularly appeals to me for its evocative sense of the on-going presence of Calvinist religion in modern Scotland. Indeed, the nearest comparison to the book can be found not among Robertson’s contemporary novelists, but in a much earlier classic exploration of the anguish of the tortured soul, James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), also well worth a read. John also recommends Stewart Lee’s, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian If my first recommendation has some resonance with my main historical research interest, my second is entirely concerned with my main interest outside academia: live comedy (as a connoisseur, not a performer!). Not many have been able to write convincingly about such an elusive theme as humour, but Stewart Lee is a master of the craft, and this autobiographical work helps us to understand his techniques, what makes a joke funny, and the thinking behind some of his most successful routines. It is also very funny. And returning to the subject of academia, through the annotated transcriptions of his live performances Lee demonstrates that even the driest of scholarly tools, the footnote, can be used to hilarious effect. l Salinger, J.D., Catcher in the Rye Stuart Burch recommends, Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg, first published in English under the same title in 1963 and again in 2002 with a foreword by Margaret Atwood. Stuart also recommends "perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful, book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor"... Douglas Adams’, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The two-faced Whirlpool Galaxy, NASA image release January 13, 2011. l Spark, Muriel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Nic Morton recommends J. R. R. Tolkein’s, The Lord of the Rings Arguably the most exciting and inspiring fiction book I have ever read is Lord of the Rings. For those of you who haven’t read it already, or at least seen the film, it is the classic tale of the battle of good and evil set in a world populated by elves, dwarves, trolls and orks. I read it (or to be more precise I listen to an unabridged recording of it in the car) at least once a year and now I do so as much for the quality of the language and Tolkein’s underlying philosophy as for the brilliantly-conceived plot. l Wharton, Edith, Age of Innocence 3 Key Authors Alternatively, why not try any work written by these authors: Nick Hayes recommends “the first ‘adult’ [and not in the sense that it’s used today] book I ever read was Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles a set text in my first year at senior school. We were supposed to read a couple of chapters per week but I was so completely hooked that I finished it over the weekend. Nick’s other recommendations: “I still read Doyle today – and indeed also really enjoyed Julian Barnes’s parody, Arthur and George. I tend to read now in batches, so I’ll devour Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle the works of one author, then - locus like - move on to another. Recently Hillary Mantel (Wolfe Hall et al) has been a favourite, but also C.J. Sansom (Revelation). My most disappointing book ever was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; the BBC TV version staring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth was just so much better.” l Bernard-Shaw, George ( e.g. Pygmalion) l Bowen, Elizabeth (e.g. The House in Paris) l Bryson, Bill (e.g. Notes from a Small Country) l Buchan, John (e.g.