Tag Archives: required reading

Minnesota Roots and A List of Books

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images  Before Prince created the Minnesota Sound, Jason Diamond reminds us that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a native Minnesotan.  In his article for the travel section of the New York Times – Tracing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Minnesota Roots – Diamond reviews the Minnesota places haunting many of Fitzgerald’s work.

“He wrote The Beautiful and the Damned in the yellow Victorian home with the wide porch on Goodrich Avenue and took strolls along White Bear Lake, about 10 miles to the north, in his mid-20s, newly married and having just published his first book – it was the place where he was inspired to set and write Winter Dreams.  Minnesota, it seemed, was good to him.”

I had never read “Winter Dreams,” and found the short story free online -you can read it here –  Winter Dreams – full of Minnesota references.

Fitzgerald was a prolific writer but in 1936, as he was  convalescing in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina,  he offered his nurse a list of 22 books he thought were essential reading – none of his were on the list. 

These are books that F. Scott Fitzgerald thought should be required reading. Have you read any of them?

  1. Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
  2. The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan
  3. A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
  4. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
  5. The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
  6. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett
  7. The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
  8. The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, translated by Michael Monahan
  9. An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, edited by Gardner Murphy
  10. The Stories of Anton Chekhov, edited by Robert N. Linscott
  11. The Best American Humorous Short Stories, edited by Alexander Jessup
  12. Victory, by Joseph Conrad
  13. The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France
  14. The Plays of Oscar Wilde
  15. Sanctuary, by William Faulkner
  16. Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust
  17. The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
  18. Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
  19. South Wind, by Norman Douglas
  20. The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
  21. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
  22. John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works

Required Reading for Freshmen

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Remember the summer reading lists when you were in grade school?  And the book you read the day before school started?

By the time you got to college, you’d figured out how to read enough to get by.  The freshman year experience usually orients new students to college with a course around a book.  The book that was to catapult me to new vistas of understanding and an easy transition to college life was Siddhartha.  I don’t remember the discussion, but I do remember the book.

In the New York Times Book Review section, Jennifer Schuessler lists some of the books ivy-covered and brick-and-mortar institutions of higher learning are requiring for entering freshmen – Inside the List.  Have you read any of them?

  • Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer
  • Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference by Warren St. John
  • Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
  • Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston
  • Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age by William Powers
  • The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr
  • Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow

Wondering what other freshmen are reading?

Mount Holyoke’s required summer reading was Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.  Tufts freshmen are discussing Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat.  The National Association of Scholars has a recommended list of 37 books for discussion.   

One of my alma mater’s is requiring The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – have you read it yet?