Monday, September 26, 2011

Check out The New Statesman's '50 Books That Will Change Your Life'

I ran across an interesting recommended reading list earlier today called “Fifty Books That Will Change Your Life,” and I’m passing it along to you tonight for your enjoyment.

Originally compiled and published by The New Statesman magazine in August 2009, this list consists of more than a few classic (and controversial) books. The New Statesman is a British magazine, so you’ll notice that the list has somewhat of a British flavor.

Books that made the list include the following titles, listed in alphabetical order:

1. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
2. Areopagitica And Other Political Writings Of John Milton by John Alvis
3. The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
4. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
5. The Cannery Boat and Other Japanese Short Stories by Takiji Kobayashi
6. Catch-22: A Novel by Joseph Heller
7. The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels
8. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
9. Consciencism by Kwame Nkrumah
10. Culture and Society 1780-1950 by Raymond Williams

11. Equality (The Halley Stewart Lectures for 1929) by R.H. Tawney
12. Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
14. Germinal by Émile Zola
15. God's Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane
16. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
17. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
18. Henrik Ibsen - An Enemy Of The People
19. How We Should Rule Ourselves by Alasdair Gray
20. In a World I Never Made by Barbara Wootton

21. The Iron Heel by Jack London
22. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
23. Let Us Face the Future--: The 1945 Anniversary Lecture by Tony Blair
24. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius by George Orwell
25. Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood
26. Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson
27. Mi Revalueshanary Fren by Linton Kwesi Johnson
28. News from Nowhere and Other Writings by William Morris
29. The New Testament
30. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein

31. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
32. The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington
33. Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley
34. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
35. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
36. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
37. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
38. Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
39. Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
40. The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose by Oscar Wilde

41. South Riding by Winifred Holtby
42. There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack by Paul Gilroy
43. Tom & Clem by Stephen Churchett
44. To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson
45. V. by Tony Harrison
46. The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley
47. What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
48. Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein
49. The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill
50. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

For more information about these books and to read the original article about the list, visit http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/08/wing-reads-rights-sex-susie.

In the end, how many of these books have you had the chance to read? Which did you like or dislike and why? Let us know in the comments section below.

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