A Lifetime Reading Plan (Upgrade Version)

Author: Clifton
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-10-19
Features: "To hear the way at dawn is enough to die by evening." — Confucius
Books are the nourishment of the world. Without books, life is like a sunless day; without books, wisdom is like a bird without wings. — Shakespeare
To read a good book is to converse with many noble souls. — Goethe
The ideal book is the key to wisdom. — Tolstoy
Books have made me a happy man, turning my life into a light and comfortable poem. — Gorky
To live with books, one will never sigh. — Rolland
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. — Edison
Books are friends, though they have no feelings, but I find them very loyal. — Hugo
"Classic works," as Karl Van Doren believed, "are those that do not need to be rewritten." Yet The Lifetime Reading Plan (the upgraded edition), this classic introduction to classic works, is an exception to that statement. Over forty years, Clifton Fadiman's The Lifetime Reading Plan has been revised three times. This new edition introduces readers to over 130 classic works from around the world, concise in content and clear in narrative, both informative and entertaining. Like previous editions, this book covers all the great works of Western civilization, from Homer to Hawthorne, from Plato to Pascal, from Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, including epics, novels, dramas, as well as various genres such as philosophy, psychology, political science, poetry, history, and biographies.
However, unlike previous editions, The Lifetime Reading Plan goes beyond traditional Western literary habits, focusing on and including numerous works by Eastern writers. This book includes both Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu; Lu Xun stands shoulder to shoulder with Tolstoy, and Sima Qian shares the same volume with Thucydides. Therefore, the "new" in the "upgraded" edition not only refers to the revision of the book itself but also to significant changes in its content—such as the inclusion of Asian culture, the acceptance of new classics, and the removal of works from the previous edition that did not stand the test of time.