18 Books Ernest Hemingway wished he could read again for the first time

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

in Literature | September 6th, 2013 19 Comments

In the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway wrote a series of short pieces for Esquire magazine called the “Key West Letters.” One of those pieces, the 1935 “Remembering Shooting-Flying” has an interesting premise—Hemingway claims that remembering and writing about shooting are more pleasurable than shooting itself. Or at least that he’d rather remember shooting pheasant than actually shoot clay pigeons. In the next paragraph, this nostalgia for good shooting gets tied up with good books, such that the essay betrays its true desire—to be a meditation on reading. Before he catches himself and gets back on topic, Hemingway launches into a long parenthetical:

I would rather read again for the first time Anna Karenina, Far Away and Long Ago, Buddenbrooks, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sportsman’s Sketches, The Brothers Karamazov, Hail and Farewell, Huckleberry Finn, Winesburg, Ohio, La Reine Margot, La Maison Tellier, Le Rouge et le Noire, La Chartreuse de Parme, Dubliners, Yeat’s Autobiographies and a few others than have an assured income of a million dollars a year.

Is this hyperbole? Literary bluster? The genuine desire to encounter again “for the first time” the literature that transformed and widened his world? Maybe all of the above. Better to stay home and remember the greats—write about them and hope for a time when they’re new again—than to fill one’s time with mediocre and forgettable books. At least that seems to be his argument. And while I’m sure you have your own lists (feel free to add them to the comments section below!), some of you may wish to take a shot at Hemingway’s and savor those works that for him overshadowed nearly every other. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of the books he names, with links to online texts and audio, where available. Enjoy them for the first time, or read (and listen) to them once again. And remember that the texts are permanently housed in our collections of Free Book Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (eBook—Audio Book)
Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson (eBook—Audio Book)
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (eBook)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (eBook—Audio Book)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (eBook—Audio Book)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (eBook—Audio Book)
A Sportsman’s Sketches by Ivan Turgenev (eBook)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (eBook—Audio Book)
Hail and Farewell by George Moore (eBook)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (eBook—Audio Book)
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (eBook—Audio)
Queen Margot by Alexandre Dumas (eBook)
La Maison Tellier by Guy de Maupassant (eBook)
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (eBook—Audio Book)
La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal (eBook)
Dubliners by James Joyce (eBook—Audio Book)
Reveries over Childhood and Youth by William Butler Yeats (eBook)
The Trembling of the Veil by William Butler Yeats (eBook)

Original Link: http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/18-books-ernest-hemingway-wished-he-could-read-again-for-the-first-time.html

Tolstoy's favorite books

http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/leo-tolstoy-creates-a-list-of-the-50-books-that-influenced-him-most-1891.html

War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich — many of us have felt the influence, to the good or the ill of our own reading and writing, of Leo Tolstoy. But whose influence did Leo Tolstoy feel the most? As luck would have it, we can give you chapter and verse on this, since the novelist drew up just such a list in 1891, which would have put him at age 63. A Russian publisher had asked 2,000 professors, scholars, artists, and men of letters, public figures, and other luminaries to name the books important to them, and Tolstoy responded with this list divided into five ages of man, with their actual degree of influence (“enormous,” “v. great,” or merely “great”) noted. It comes as something of a rarity, up to now only available transcribed in a post at Northampton, Massachusetts’ Valley Advocate:

WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION

Childhood to the age of 14 or so

The story of Joseph from the Bible - Enormous

Tales from The Thousand and One Nights: the 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman - Great

The Little Black Hen by Pogorelsky - V. great

Russian byliny: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich. Folk Tales - Enormous

Puskin’s poems: Napoleon - Great

Age 14 to 20

Matthew’s Gospel: Sermon on the Mount – Enormous

Sterne’s Sentimental Journey – V. great

Rousseau Confessions - Enormous

Emile - Enormous

Nouvelle Héloise - V. great

Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin - V. great

Schiller’s Die Räuber - V. great

Gogol’s Overcoat, The Two Ivans, Nevsky Prospect - Great

“Viy” [a story by Gogol] – Enormous

Dead Souls - V. great

Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches - V. great

Druzhinin’s Polinka Sachs - V. great

Grigorovich’s The Hapless Anton - V. great

Dickens’ David Copperfield - Enormous

Lermontov’s A Hero for our Time, Taman - V. great

Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico - Great

Age 20 to 35

Goethe. Hermann and Dorothea - V. great

Victor Hugo. Notre Dame de Paris - V. great

Tyutchev’s poems – Great

Koltsov’s poems – Great

The Odyssey and The Iliad (read in Russian) – Great

Fet’s poems – Great

Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium (in Cousin’s translation) – Great

Age 35 to 50

The Odyssey and The Iliad (in Greek) – V. great

The byliny - V. great

Victor Hugo. Les Misérables - Enormous

Xenophon’s Anabasis - V. great

Mrs. [Henry] Wood. Novels – Great

George Eliot. Novels – Great

Trollope, Novels – Great

Age 50 to 63

All the Gospels in Greek – Enormous

Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) – V. great

Henry George. Progress and Poverty - V. great

[Theodore] Parker. Discourse on religious subject – Great

[Frederick William] Robertson’s sermons – Great

Feuerbach (I forget the title; work on Christianity) [“The Essence of Christianity”] – Great

Pascal’s Pensées - Enormous

Epictetus – Enormous

Confucius and Mencius – V. great

On the Buddha. Well-known Frenchman (I forget) [“Lalita Vistara”] – Enormous

Lao-Tzu. Julien [S. Julien, French translator] – Enormous

Thursday night meeting - Hedgehog

Even though it's summertime, let's go back to our cold-weather confines at Joe's Gourmet Grill. I have to make an appearance at a Church meeting so if you don't mind let's start at 8 p.m.

If I can "host" again in October, it would be great to go up in the canyon so I can cook a dutch oven meal for you guys. Just not in the cards this week for me to pull that off.