As I Lay Dying went down pretty easily, but I remember many nights struggling my way through The Sound and the Fury, Cliff notes at my side. It felt like scaling Everest, and the vistas at the top were worth the climb.

A couple of weeks ago, as part of my ongoing project to read great novels, I decided to revisit The Sound and the Fury, and I’m more than glad I did; I finally have an answer to give the next time I’m asked what one novel I’d bring to a desert island. But what I’m flabbergasted by is this: How did this book ever get assigned to high school students in the first place? I ask for at least two reasons:

• The story is saturated with sex and racism (societal racism, that is, not Faulkner’s). It’s all “whore” this and “nigger” that, to the point where I’d have thought the PC police — you know, the guys who banned Huckleberry Finn — would have intervened long ago. (Come to think of it, high school was long ago. Maybe they have intervened.)
• What high school student has the patience to figure out what’s happening in a book like this? The first quarter is narrated by an idiot with no sense of time, so that he jumps back and forth between periods of his life mid-page, mid-paragraph, and sometimes mid-sentence, as he starts describing one event and finishes describing another similar event that took place twenty years earlier. Nobody (except maybe the Cliff Notes) ever warns you about the ever-shifting time frame. (I have no idea how the Cliff Notes people figured it out.) The narrator of the second quarter is no idiot, but seriously disturbed, and obsesses on events that are never described, but which we have to infer from the obscure references in his internal monologue. There are multiple characters with the same name, and single characters with multiple names — and not a shred of of warning about all this.

As I said, my high-school-self relied on Cliff Notes for guidance. I am not ashamed to tell you that my adult self required Cliff Notes, Barron’s Notes, Spark Notes, and the full power of the Internet. My strategy was to read a few pages, then seek help to find out what just happened, then reread. When I got to the halfway mark, I went back to the beginning and read the book straight through (the second half is mostly downhill). I am eager to return to the beginning and read it straight through one more time.

Make no mistake; this is perhaps the best novel I’ve ever read. The rewards are surely commensurate with the effort, but I can’t help believing that few high school students would invest enough effort to earn the rewards.

And yet—something magical did happen to me back in high school (belated thanks, Mrs. Schreiber!), something that left me with a decades-long intention to reread this book someday, and now I have, and I’m about to read it again. Maybe I should have also dipped into the Hemingway.

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The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow): Not an easy read, even with the iPhone’s automatic links to dictionaries and Wikipedia. But well worth the effort, I think. Rewarding in the small and in the large — while I was reading, I kept caring what would happen next, and after I’d finished, I felt like I’d had a good workout and I was glad I’d gone to the gym. This made me want to read more Bellow (I think I will tackle Herzog next, if they ever bring out an electronic edition) but with long breaks between novels.

The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton): Extremely good. Hard-to-put-down good. And a real insight into not just a vanished way of life, but a vanished way of seeing the world. All about the blinders that people wore in that time and place (the book is set in the 1870s, but was written in 1920, after those particular blinders had come off) and a real inspiration to think about what new blinders have taken their place.

The Ambassadors (Henry James): Quit after a couple of pages; it was failing to grab me. I should come back and try again.

American Pastoral (Philip Roth): I am currently 1/3 of the way into this, but I am already sure it is a great book. I will now read everything Philip Roth ever wrote.

Anthem (Ayn Rand): The first Ayn Rand I’ve ever read. Less tendentious and a better read than I’d expected.

Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope): Terrific fun! To paraphrase one of the Amazon reviewers—I’d never have believed you if you’d tried to tell me that I’d be utterly gripped by a story about who was going to get which of the various positions in the heirarchy of the Church of England that I have never heard of. This is the second in a six-part series. After I’d read it, I read the earlier and much shorter The Warden, which is sort of like going back to read The Hobbit after you’ve already read Lord of the Rings. The Warden was okay, but if I’d read it first, I’d probably have stopped there. I’m glad I started with this one, after Trollope had hit his stride. I remain most eager to get to the remaining four in the series, and then everything else he ever wrote, which should take me a while, since he wrote at least 50 books.

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) (for the fourth time!). Arguably the greatest novel ever. The issue with the Brothers K is always the choice of a translation. The last time around (maybe ten years ago or so), I went with Pevear and Volokhonsky, and pronounced it by far the best. This time I went back to the classic Constance Garnett translation that I last read at age 16 — and reminded myself that this one is also great.

Man and Superman (George Bernard Shaw): Another re-read; more tedious more often than I’d remembered. I once saw the third act performed by Agnes Moorehead and the great Ricardo Montalban; even with Montalban, it seemed clear that this was a play that worked better on the page than in the theater. But even on the page, it still kind of drags.

The Man Who Changed His Skin (Harry Stephen Keeler): It was definitely weird. I’ll give it that.

Nightmare Abbey (Thomas Love Peacock): The only Peacock I’d never read before, and probably the best of them. More of a long short story than a novel, very funny in places, I was glad to be reading it, but also glad it was short. (That is, it was fun, but the kind of fun that’s best in small doses — which, since it comes in a small dose, is just fine.)

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen): Surprisingly tedious. I was glad when it ended. The only Jane Austen I’ve ever read is Northanger Abbey, which seems considerably spritelier.

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson): It depresses me that there’s a market for a book this bad. I slogged through the whole thing, but oh my God it was painful. What kept me going was the sprinkling of brilliant passages, and the occasional brilliant chapter — and when they were brilliant, they were very very brilliant. (Also, the vision of future technology, though dated, was clever and insightful.) But there was precious little of that, compared to the endless passages that made me feel like I was trapped in a theater, watching a really really bad movie directed by a no-talent hack who thought he could make me care about the heroine trapped in the basement by dragging the scene out for twenty minutes.

The Sunlight Dialogues (John Gardner): In my 20s, John Gardner was my favorite author and the Sunlight Dialogues was one of my favorite books. I decided to read it again, and gave up a quarter of the way through. Part of what drove me crazy was my inability to distinguish among the various characters named “Hodge”; there would be long passages about what “Hodge” was up to, and I could never figure out whether this was Hodge the father, Hodge the son, Hodge the brother, or (for all I know) Hodge the Holy Ghost. I do not remember having this problem back in my 20s, so I suspect the fault lies not in the book but in the aging brain of the reader.

Tom Jones (Henry Fielding): Loads of fun.

Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (James T. Farrell): The first two books in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. The tone is as unlike Edith Wharton as you can get, but there’s the same sense of looking back on a time when people wore different blinders than they do today (in Wharton’s case, the upper crust WASPs in 1870’s New York; in this case the working class Irish in early 20th century Chicago). Farrell made me want desperately to jump into the action and guide these people toward a better way to be. Good enough to make me want to read the third part of the trilogy, but not good enough to make me want to read it immediately. The (clearly deliberate) choppiness of the writing kept taking me aback; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Still on my iPhone waiting to be read (I am too lazy to insert links for these):
Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner)
An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
A Bend in the River (VS Naipaul)
The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)
Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
Cannery Row (John Steinbeck)
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)
The Ginger Man (JP Donleavy)
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell (Susanna Clark)
Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Booth Tarkington)
Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem)
Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (James Cain)
Sons and Lovers (DH Lawrence)
Spooner (Pete Dexter)
Stone’s Fall (Iain Pears)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)
The Way of All Flesh (Samuel Butler)
Winesburg Ohio (Sherwood Anderson)

— and, recently added, a whole bunch of Edith Wharton, Anthony Trollope and Philip Roth.

It might take me a while to get through these.

And finally: There are a lot of very old books on this list, partly because old books are cheap (or often free) in electronic formats. In the not-so-distant past before I got my first Kindle, I leaned more toward the contemporary. The last two dead-tree books I read were The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield) (reading hint for this one: keep a list of all the little unexplained mysteries, and cross them off as they get explained) and Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen), both of which were so good and so gripping and so memorable that I couldn’t resist mentioning them even though they’re slightly off topic for this post.

What else should I read?

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If Dylan Thomas hadn’t drunk himself to death in 1953, he might be celebrating his ninety-sixth birthday today, perhaps with a successor to the grand and glorious poem he wrote to celebrate his thirtieth.

He left us with a small number of poems so heart-wrenching that I cannot read them, even for the two hundredth time, without all of the symptoms of an emotional crisis. Take In Country Sleep, where a father reassures his daughter that she has nothing to fear from fairy tale villains—but only from the Thief who comes in multiple guises to take her faith and ultimately to leave her “naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come”. In Country Sleep was a standard bedtime poem in our house, and my daughter soon learned to anticipate “the part where Daddy cries”.

Then there’s the prose. Nobody is better at nostalgia and grief for time’s relentlessness:

The lane was always the place to tell your secrets; if you did not have any, you invented them. Occassionally now I dream that I am turning out of school into the lane of confidences when I say to the boys of my class ‘At last, I have a real secret!’

“What is it? What is it?”

“I can fly!”

And when they do not believe me, I flap my arms and slowly leave the ground, only a few inches at first, then gaining air until I fly waving my cap, level with the upper windows of the school, peering in until the mistress at the piano screams, and the metronome falls to the ground and stops, and there is no more time.

And finally there’s the voice, the great booming melliflous irresistible voice lovingly preserved by Caedmon on about a dozen CDs that you will thank yourself for buying. The Caedmon collection includes a performance of the haunting “play for voices” Under Milk Wood narrated by Thomas himself (free e-book here); for an even greater treat, get the BBC Radio version with Richard Burton (Warning: Do not rent the highly regrettable movie version with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.)

For a brief 39 years, as Time held him green and dying, Dylan Thomas spun words and images of surpassing beauty that will live as long as the English language. He sang in his chains like the sea.

(First written and posted six years ago today; this is a slightly updated version.)

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Herewith I offer a list of 25 of my top candidates, with links to brief audio clips. For this purpose, I am defining a “folk song” to be something that would likely be filed in the “folk” section of a Barnes and Noble music department.

Note that the criterion is “most beautiful”, not “favorite”, though of course there’s quite a large overlap between the two.

I am aware that my choices might be colored by the circumstances in which I first heard these songs as well as by their intrinsic merit. I also acknowledge, without a shred of embarrassment, that some might consider the overall tenor of this list to be shockingly lowbrow. Nevertheless, I believe every song on this list to be stunningly beautiful in its way.

Do tell me what I’ve overlooked.

Changes, written and performed by Phil Ochs.

Dona Dona, by Aaron Zeitlin and Sholom Secunda. The version linked to here is sung by Joan Baez, who spells it “Donna Donna”.

I Remember Loving You, by Luigi del Puppo and Tino Chumlovich, though often misattributed to Utah Phillips. Sung by Fred Holstein on this magnificent CD. (I am intentionally not linking to the highly inferior Tom Paxton cover.)

I Think It’s Going to Rain Today by Randy Newman. Sung by Judy Collins.

Jamaica Farewell by Lord Burgess, incorporating traditional melodies. Sung by Harry Belafonte.

Loch Lomond, traditional. Sung by Paul Robeson.

Danny Boy, traditional. Sung by Paul Robeson. There are of course many beautiful recordings of this song. The tune, called “Londonderry Air”, predates the lyrics. On the Robeson recording, the song is called “Londonderry Air”.

Moishele My Friend, an English translation of Moishele, Main Fraint, by Mordechai Gebirtig. There are many beautiful recordings of this song in Yiddish (the one linked to here is by Leo Fuld), but as far as I know this is the only recorded English translation. The performers are Eclectricity (Willy Schwarz, Miriam Sturm and Robert Lucas); I believe, but am not sure, that the translation is due to Schwarz.

My Father, written and performed by Judy Collins.

Nancy Spain, by Barney Rush. The link is to a lovely recording by Cu Chulainn, though there are many lovely recordings of this song, including Fred Holstein’s.

Nevada Jane, by Utah Phillips. I’m not sure which I love more, the Fred Holstein cover I’ve just linked to (from the Fred Holstein Collection) or the Bonnie Koloc cover (from the Remembering Fred CD). I’ve intentionally not linked to the original Utah Phillips recording, which is far less beautiful.

One For The Money. I have a vague sense that this was written by Woody Guthrie, though I’m not sure why I think this, and at least one web site says it was Travis Edmonson. Be that as it may, I was in love with this song decades before I’d ever heard of Fred Holstein, and when I was compiling this list, which is already quite Holstein-heavy, I was surprised to learn that he’d recorded it—and that like several other songs on this list it’s on the Holstein Collection CD. I’m not thrilled with this version (I’d really prefer to dispense with the singalong aspect) but can’t find a better one. The only alternative I’m aware of is a rather unfortunate effort by the Highwaymen, which Amazon seems to have mislabeled as “Chanson de Chagrin”.

Raisin Pie, written and performed by the magnificent Diane Taraz.

Rhymes and Reasons, written by John Denver and performed by Mary Travers.

Shoes That Fit Like Sand, written and performed by Diane Taraz. This is the title track from her first CD, which is a treasure from beginning to end.

Silver The Moon, another masterpiece written and performed by Diane Taraz.

Simple Gifts/Lord of the Dance. “Simple Gifts” is a Shaker hymn written by Elder Joseph Brackett. “Lord of the Dance” is a much later hymn written by Sydney Carter, to a very similar tune. This recording by Bill Crofut and Benjamin Luxon interweaves both songs. (Follow the link and skip down to the last track. Though all the other tracks are good too.)

Spanish Is The Loving Tongue, by Charles Badger Clark, performed by Judy Collins.

Streets of London, written and performed by Ralph McTell—though the Fred Holstein cover is even better.

The Dutchman, by Michael Smith. I never make it through this one without an emotional crisis. There have been many beautiful recordings of this heart-wrenching song, by Anne Hills, Liam Clancy and others. The one I’ve linked to here is by Steve Goodman, who recorded this song several times. This is the good one.

The Garden Song, by David Mallett. Performed by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy.

The Last Thing On My Mind, by Tom Paxton. Performed by Joan Baez.

There But for Fortune, by Phil Ochs. Performed by Joan Baez. I like the original Phil Ochs recording too.

The Rose by Amanda McBroom. Performed by Bette Midler.

Today by Randy Sparks. This version is performed by John Denver. Why did Peter, Paul and Mary never cover this one? The most beautiful version I’ve ever heard was by (of all people) Dick Smothers, but I can’t seem to track down a copy.

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I’m late to the party, but here’s my list:

1. Clown Town, by Dixie Willson The book I fell in love with before I could read.
2. Space and Time in Special Relativity, by N. David Mermin. As I said in the introduction to The Big Questions, this is the book that taught me, at age 16, that it is possible to think.
3. Topics in Algebra, by I.N. Herstein. The book that taught me algebra.
4. The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T.S. Eliot.
5. Exchange and Production by Armen Alchian and William Allen. The book that taught me to think like an economist.
6. The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes, by David Mumford. The book that taught me geometry, before it was a book. I still have my tattered copy of Mumford’s manuscript, which circulated unpublished for many years.
7. Collected Poems, by Dylan Thomas
8. Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas
9. A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas
10. Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
11. Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert. This survey, aimed at the “physics for poets” crowd, inspired me to start working through textbooks, culminating in entry number 16 below.
12. Collected Poems, by W.B. Yeats
13. Recoltes et Semailles, by Alexandre Grothendieck. I am inspired above all by Grothendieck’s vision of geometry, but I got my first taste of that vision from Mumford’s red book, not from the primary sources, which I have therefore not listed here. This gripping and intensely personal and memoir is inspiring and saddening in a thousand different ways.
14. Joe Gould’s Secret, by Joseph Mitchell
15. Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett
16. Quantum Mechanics and the Particles of Nature, by Anthony Sudbery

Notably absent from this list is Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which I have somehow never read front-to-back though it’s been fifteen years since Tyler told me it’s a must-read. I haven’t done a careful count, but I believe that Parfit is the most frequently mentioned book on the lists cited above. I really must get to it.

Do share your own lists.

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Archimedes	William Shakespeare	John Donne
Rene Descartes	Galileo Galilei	Pierre de Fermat
Isaac Newton	Benjamin Franklin	Leonhard Euler
David Hume	Thomas Jefferson	David Ricardo
Carl Friedrich Gauss	Frederic Bastiat	Abraham Lincoln
Harriet Tubman	Arthur Cayley	Fyodor Dostoevsky
James Clerk Maxwell	Gerard Manley Hopkins	David Hilbert
William Butler Yeats	Albert Einstein	Emmy Noether
Neils Bohr	The Marx Brothers	Erwin Schrodinger
T.S. Eliot	Cole Porter	Winston Churchill
Werner Heisenberg	Paul Dirac	Henri Cartan
Andre Weil	Saunders MacLane	Johnny Mercer
Ronald Reagan	Milton Friedman	Chuck Jones
Sammy Eilenberg	Dylan Thomas	Frank Sinatra
Robert Preston	Margaret Thatcher	Jean-Pierre Serre
Alexandre Grothendieck	Sergio Leone	Clint Eastwood
Stephen Sondheim	John Gardner	Robert Lucas
Daniel Quillen	Richard Dawkins	Daniel Dennett
Jerry Garcia	Martin Scorsese	James Heckman
Lou and Peter Berryman	Steven Pinker	David Simon

1) Mathematicians, pre-1900: Archimedes, Fermat, Newton, Euler, and Gauss are the giants. (If I could only hang one portrait on my wall, it would surely be Newton’s.) I also included Descartes, Cayley and Hilbert. You could well argue that, say, Riemann ranks higher than Cayley by some reasonably objective criterion, but this is a subjective list. Galois might have belonged here too.

2) Mathematicians, post-1900: Grothendieck is, I think, the single greatest mathematician of all time; the other mid-century titans are Serre, Weil and Henri Cartan. Emmy Noether, the mother of modern algebra and the prophet who was first to perceive and harness the full power of abstraction, was born in 1882 but goes in the post-1900 category because she was decades ahead of her time. I did not hesitate to include MacLane, Eilenberg and Quillen, though I might equally well have included Leray, Milnor, Weyl or Godel.

3) Physicists: The three titans are Newton, Maxwell and Einstein. Close behind are Galileo and the pioneers of quantum mechanics: Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Dirac. Emmy Noether made a little avocational foray into physics that could arguably have qualified her here even without counting her major life’s work.

4) Poets: Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas are the modern poets who move me above all others. Going back to the classics we have Shakespeare and Donne. E.E. Cummings (not included) was a contender.

5) Statesmen: Franklin was extraordinary in an astonishing variety of ways; so was Jefferson. These were probably not hard to recognize; neither, I suppose was Lincoln or the three modern leaders: Reagan, Thatcher and Churchill. I might have included Ataturk if I knew more of the relevant history.

6) Philosophers: Descartes, Hume (here for philosophy more than for economics) and Dennett. I considered Bertrand Russell.

7) Economists: I omitted the two greatest economists of the 20th century (Arrow and Samuelson) because this is a personal list and I am more inspired by Ricardo, Friedman, Lucas and Heckman.

8) Popularizers: Bastiat, Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker and again Friedman.

9) Activists: The awesome Harriet Tubman is the only one here, though there were other contenders. Arguably Friedman counts in this category too.

10) Historians: Friedman, Hume, Churchill and Weil, though all were here for other reasons. I could conceivably have included Herodotus, Macaulay or Gibbon.

11) Novelists: Dostoevesky and John Gardner.

12) Entertainers: The Marx Brothers, Johnny Mercer, Frank Sinatra, Robert Preston, and the Berrymans. (Jerry Garcia is in the next category.)

13) Cultural phenomena: Jerry Garcia

14) Lyricists: Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Stephen Sondheim and Peter Berryman.

15) Composers: Sondheim makes the list for his lyrics alone and then he makes it again for his music alone.

16) Directors: Chuck Jones, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, David Simon

And now I ask once again: Who is on your list?

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Over the next couple of weeks, I will try to tell you a little bit more about some of these 60 people. Meanwhile, here are the thirteen mystery men/women. I’ve retained the numbering from yesterday’s post. Who can you identify?

3	6	17	34	36
39	45	46	47	49
50	52	58

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A short time ago, it dawned on me that I actually have an infinite amount of wall space! My wall space is called the World Wide Web. And the World Wide Web is better than a physical wall, because the images are readily available (as opposed to hiding away in antique shops), and it’s easy to put things up and take things down, and you can share it with people you might not want to invite to your house.

So now I am prepared to unveil my World Wide Wall, or at least a first draft. I am well aware that many of these heroes are deeply flawed. I did not disqualify anyone for slaveholding, Louisiana purchases, Nazi sympathies or the imposition of protective tariffs. Not all of them are at the very top of their professions. The only criterion for inclusion was to make my heart go pit-a-pat.

My wall. Let me show you it. How many of these do you recognize? (No fair answering if you’re a personal friend who’s already seen an early draft of this.) And who would be on your wall?

1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9
10	11	12
13	14	15
16	17	18
19	20	21
22	23	24
25	26	27
28	29	30
31	32	33
34	35	36
37	38	39
40	41	42
43	44	45
46	47	48
49	50	51
52	53	54
55	56	57
58	59	60

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• The laser game.
• Paradoxion Express
• The many excellent puzzles at logicmazes.com
• The planarity game (Not exactly a logic puzzle, but close enough in spirit.)

Warning: These are majorly addictive. Enjoy, but resolve not to let them take over your life. You have a blog to get back to.

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The guy was a phenomenon. He wrote the lyrics for over 1500 songs, and the music for at least a few hundred. And he was a singer-songwriter decades before the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joni Mitchell allegedly invented the genre. God, he was smooth. By and large, I’d rather hear Johnny Mercer sing his own songs than any of the myriad covers that have become American classics—and that’s saying something for a guy who was covered repeatedly by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.

If you’re looking for a treat and your music collection is not yet Mercerized, start with the Capitol Collectors Series disk. But be careful where you listen to it, because you will get up to dance. Or, if you can find a copy, settle down with a tall cool drink and bask in An Evening with Johnny Mercer. (My rare and valuable copy got left behind at the Boston Park Plaza a couple of years ago; fortunately I’d already ripped it to MP3.)

Johnny Mercer would be celebrating his hundredth birthday with a song if he were alive today. Which, dammit, he should be.

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