Regular marked price: $15.95Discount Price: $11.65
Cost Savings: $4.30 (27%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 011.7
EAN num: 9780062720733
ISBN number: 0062720732
Label: Collins
Manufacturer: Collins
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: July 01, 1999
Publishing house: Collins
Release Date: June 02, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 81308
Studio: Collins
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Now in print for the very first time in almost 40 years, The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Bront%, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many others.
This fourth edition also features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century), making them easier to look up than ever before. It deserves a place in the libraries of all lovers of literature.
Amazon.com Review:
In print for almost 40 years, The Lifetime Reading Plan has long been a worthy addition to any serious reader's bookshelf, providing entertaining and informative introductions to the great works of Western civilization. Now, this 'classic about classics' has been updated to reflect more diverse traditions. The New Lifetime Reading Plan recommends great literature from around the globe, including writers and works from Confucius to Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez to the Koran. Also new is an appendix profiling books by 100 important 20th-century authors--or 'temporary classics,' as coauthor John S. Major calls them.
Readers may argue with some of the selections (or, more likely, the omissions). Others may quarrel with the editors' opinions; they routinely analyze artists' 'characters,'with occasionally prissy or patronizing results. (Of Walt Whitman, for instance, coauthor Clifton Fadiman declares that 'He had an original temperament, a certain peasant shrewdness, but only a moderate amount of brains.') But no one can argue with the book's mission: promoting the classics as 'life companions.' 'Once part of you, they work in and on and with you until you die,' Fadiman writes in the introduction. Anyone seeking a guide to the vast riches of world literature need look no further than the The New Lifetime Reading Plan; it provides a gateway to the greatest achievements of the human mind.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
I haven't reviewed a book in a long time because customer reviews so often annoy me. Now I'm writing this one because another one has.
Another reveiwer here criticizes The New Lifetime Reading Plan and its predecessors for not including the Bible. That would be a good criticism indeed if not for this sentence from the preface to the book, " We assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; and there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous."
And for those who find the listing and others like it 'dogmatic', it is a list of the books that people who have read widely and deeply over many years have found lasting value in. The earlier works in the list were an influence on the later works. The later works have been appreciated by the contemporary authors influenced by the earlier ones. The list is a suggestion. These are the books I and people like me have enjoyed. Try them if they sound interesting to you. If they don't, then read something else. If you want to write a book suggesting your own favorites, knock yourself out.
And as for political correctness, while that is indeed a problem in modern scholarship, it is not a problem in this book. Hippies may very well have played at Buddhism, but it is a religion older than Christianity that is still practiced by many sincere followers in Eastern countries. Hinduism is also older than Christianity and still practiced by many people. The works of those religions and cultures have not had much influence on the literature of the West because they were not well known until relatively recently. The later Eastern novels included in The New Lifetime Reading Plan show the influence both of the great Western works and of those such as The Ramayana, The Bhagavad Gita, and The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.
I have several books of this type, but this is the one I like best. The two to four page introductions to authors and their major works are interesting and informative. I used the book in particular to get more familiar with classical Greek drama and Asian literature. I have very much enjoyed several of the books I learned of through it.
Rated by buyers 
-
Even Clifton Fadiman has caved, to the hippies, the yuppies, the politically correct, the Eastern mystics. It is beyond comprehension that a once-tenacious guardian of the gates has sold out. Make no mistake, the heavy-handed liberals hold sway over the contemporary lit scene, and they are not ever going to let go. The great tragedy of it, and what mainstream America doesn't understand (having, in their lust for money and material things, so willingly ceded the cultural and spiritual high ground to the leftists) is that we have given over our most precious birthright to those who neither understand nor value it at all.
Rated by buyers -
I have the "Old" Lifetime Reading Plan (circa 1960), Hemingway and Faulkner are listed under " Some Contemporaries" in mine, and I will NEVER part with it. The older volume is one of the most well rounded reading lists one can find, this one is BETTER. In this case, Revised and Expanded DOES NOT imply Dummed Down and Politicaly Corrected. This new list is one-third longer than my edition and each new entry has merit equal to what has come before. We can debate the merits of the selections themselves ad-nauseum, but The Plan itself is beyond reproach.
Rated by buyers -
I purchased this book during my senior year in high school (2003-2004). Being a voracious read since my youth, I was always trying to find lists of "great" books to read. I would peruse Amazon, Google, and whatever else in an endeavor to find good advice on what to read. That fateful day, I stumbled across this book while browsing Amazon. It doesn't take a literary genius to know to read the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I would never have stumbled across Voltaire, Sophocles, Marcus Aurelius, Huxley, or Dante while in high school were it not for this book. It was invaluable to my reading until I could get to college and be guided by intelligent English professors. I plan to use this book to continue my literary education when I graduate this May. Furthermore, the book itself is very well written. Fadiman and Major are excellent writers who are informative and amusing. The information they give on each of the authors and their works is excellent. The reason I am writing this review is that I saw The New Lifetime Reading Plan sitting on my desk in my dorm room; I honestly love it. I have used it as a reference for when I stumble across a literary name I do not know, and I occasionally browse through it for sheer enjoyment. I imagine that when I'm old and gray, this book will still be sitting on my desk: guiding, directing, and amusing.
Rated by buyers -
I was "sick that day" in high school when we covered great books. I was the kid that spent more time skateboarding, t.v. watching, class-clowning, and playing hookie, then I did reading or paying attention. The ol' "You are only cheating yourself" I found out is true. I missed out on great stories and storytellers that can put a needle point on the human condition. It wasn't until after college that I thought learning, especially reading great fiction, was important. Now that I have a little bit of perspective and understand why we love stories and why there are books that last generations and centuries I want to get into them. These stories tap into that aspect of our humanity that is "universal".
If you were like me - "sick that day" they read Twain, Steinbeck, Homer, Augustine, Machiavelli, and on and on - then you want to pick up this book to help steer you in the right direction for a life time of reading. Since I am a neophyte to literature I am sure other reviewers can say, "He left that book off" or "He should not have included that book." I cannot do that, but I can appreciate the very easy to read and helpful resource that is at my fingertips. Fadiman and Major, aside from a few obscurities, point out books that we should all be familiar with and that I believe are regularly referenced in the broader culture. They are books that tell stories that have influenced the story of western civilization. We are who we are in part because of these books. For that reason, I am appreciative of a work that helps me understand what books are important to read and why.
Is there a better source? Maybe. But if you are looking to whet your appetite and looking to get your feet wet in great literature, then you cannot go wrong by beginning here.
Find other books like this one:
