Can I tell you how much I LOVE PaperBackSwap? I am currently building our library (again) by accumulating the books on Arthur Henry King’s “Reading List for a Lifetime.”

We check our mail only a couple times a week as the mailbox is 15 miles away. Today on the way home from church we opened the box to find a single solitary key. It was to open a larger box marked ‘C’. The kids were all excited, “That means we got a package!”

Nope, that means we got SEVEN packages all from PaperBackSwap.

And I have EIGHT more coming.

I always try to find the books in hardcover first. The older the version the better. See the Gulliver’s Travels there? It is from around 1950 and even has an old bookplate inside it! I am surprised not more people try to get their books in hardcover. I’ll search for a book thinking there’s no possible way I’ll find it and instead the search produces at least five different versions of hardcover books ready to order. Currently I’m waiting on Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Poems and Letters by John Keats, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce – all hardcover! As well as a leather bound edition of Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen. I am excited!

Here is the a copy of Mr. King’s reading list. It is found in the appendix of his book Arm the Children: Faith’s Response to a Violent World, which I highly recommend reading. Those with stars after them are on my reading list for the year. Those with two stars I have already read before. If there’s three stars that means I’ve read them but will read them again this year.

• The Standard Works (the scriptures) ***
• Homer, “The Iliad” (translator Richmond A. Lattimore), “The Odyssey” (translator Emile V. Rieu) **
• “The Bhagavad-Gita” (The Song of God) (translator Christopher Isherwood)
• Aeschylus, “Aeschylus I — Oresteia” (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
• Sophocles, “The Oedipus Cycle” (translators Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald)
• Plato, “Phaedo,” “The Republic” **
• Euripides, “Euripides One” (translator Richmond A. Lattimore)
• Herodotus, “The Persian Wars” (translator George Rawlinson)
• Virgil, “The Aeneid” (translator John Dryden or Robert Fitzgerald) **
• Livy, “The Early History of Rome”
• Josephus, “The Jewish War”
• Plutarch, “Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans” and “Lives of the Noble Romans” (editor Edmund Fuller)
• Eusebius, “The Essential Eusebius”
• Augustine, “The City of God”
• Bede, “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People”
• Dante, “The Divine Comedy” (translators John D. Sinclair or Dorothy L. Sayers)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales” (translator Nevill Coghill) *
• Niccole Machiavelli, “The Prince”
• William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “Measure for Measure,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Coriolanus,” “The Winter’s Tale,” “The Tempest” **
• Miguel de Cervantes, “Don Quixote” (translator Walter Starkie) **
• Rene Descartes, “Discourse on Method” (translator Wollaston)
• John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” “Paradise Regained,” “Samson Agonistes” *
• George Fox, “Journal” (editor Rufus M. Jones)
• John Bunyan, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” *
• Jean Baptiste Racine, “Athaliah,” “Phaedra”
• Moliere, “Tartuffe,” “The Would-Be Gentleman,” “The Precious Damsels,” “The Misanthrope” (translators Morris Bishop or Kenneth Muir)
• Jonathan Swift, “Gulliver’s Travels” *
• Antoine Prevost, “Manon Lescaut”
• Samuel Richardson, “Pamela” (Part I), “Clarissa”
• Montesquieu, “The Spirit of the Laws” (translator Thomas Nugent)
• Voltaire, “Candide”
• James Boswell, “Life of Samuel Johnson”
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Emile”
• Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”
• Edward Gibbon, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
• John Woolman, “Journal”
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust I, II” (translators Walter Kaufmann or Charles E. Passage), “Wilhelm Meister” *
• William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” (Books I and II)
• John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, “The Federalist Papers” (editor A. Hacker) **
• John Keats, “Letters” (editor Robert Gittings) *
• Jane Austen, “Persuasion,” “Emma” **
• Stendhal, “The Red and the Black” **
• Soren Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling,” “The Sickness Unto Death” (translator Walter Lowrie)
• Honore de Balzac, “Eugenie Grandet”
• Karl Marx, “Early Writings”
• Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” “Civil Disobedience” **
• Parley P. Pratt, “Autobiography”
• Charles Dickens, “Little Dorrit,” “Great Expectations” **
• George Eliot, “Middlemarch,” ** “Daniel Deronda” *
• Gustave Flaubert, “A Sentimental Education” (translator Robert Baldick)
• Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov” *
• Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace” (translator Rosemary Edmonds), “Anna Karenina” *
• Sarah Orne Jewett, “Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories” **
• William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience”
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (translator Walter, Kaufmann)
• Henrik Ibsen, “Peer Gynt” (translator Michael Meyer), “Rosmersholm,” “Ghosts,” “Hedda Gabler”
• Thomas Hardy, “The Mayor of Casterbridge”
• Henry James, “The Ambassadors,” “What Maisie Knew”
• Anton Chekhov, “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Seagull,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Three Sisters” (translator David Magarshack)
• Joseph Conrad, “Nostromo”
• James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” *
• Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (translator James Strachey)
• Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain,” “Joseph and His Brothers” *
• Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way” (translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
• John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”
• D.H. Lawrence, “Women in Love”
• E.M. Forster, “A Passage to India”
• Franz Kafka, “The Trial”
• Hermann Hesse, “Steppenwolf,” “The Glass Bead Game” (Chapter 7)
• George Santayana, “The Last Puritan”
• Montaigne, “Essays” (translator John Florio)

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