The Lifetime Reading Plan

Author and editor Clifton Fadiman published the first edition of his Lifetime Reading Plan in 1960; a collection of his short essays about and descriptions of recommended authors and their works. It was intended as a guide for readers to educate and entertain themselves with a wide range of books over a lifetime of reading. Most of the authors and books Fadiman initially described were part of the commonly acknowledged “Western canon,” arranged chronologically, but not all were fiction writers. Some are philosophers, some are poets, others historians and playwrights. It’s a list for polymaths rather than a restricted focus on fiction.

Over the next several decades, Fadiman would revise the book twice more (1978, 1986), adding to and updating it. Then, working with John S. Major before Fadiman’s death, they published the fourth and final edition as The New Lifetime Reading Plan. That last edition, published in 1997 by HarperCollins, had notes on 133 authors and their books, and an appendix titled Going Further, with brief notes about another 100 authors, reaching further with international writers. The main part of the book starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh (composed around 2000 BCE) and ends almost 300 pages later with Chinua Achebe, whose 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, is his most read.

Fadiman’s fourth edition lists a wide range of recommended authors, including Homer, Virgil, Niccolò Machiavelli, Lady Murasaki, William Shakespeare, René Descartes, Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, The Brontë Sisters, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Kawabata Yasunari, Albert Camus, and Gabriel García Márquez. Add to that the 100 authors listed in brief form in the “Going Further” appendix, including Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Mikhail Bulgakov, Rachel Carson, Albert Einstein, John Irving, Jack Kerouac, Lau Shaw, Wallace Stevens, JRR Tolkein, and others.

Of course, there are many authors in the three decades since the book was published who are not included, like Michael Chabon, Anne Cleeves, Hilary Mantel, and Haruki Murakami, all of whom deserve consideration. But even with all the authors mentioned combined, it’s still a parsimonious selection of all possible works written in the past four millennia.

In his introduction, Fadiman wrote,

The books discussed here may take you fifty years to finish. They can, of course, be read in a much shorter time. The point is that they are intended to occupy an important part of a whole life… it is not on the entertainment level that they are most profitably read. What they offer is of larger dimensions… a source of continuous internal growth… These books are life companions.

Then there’s the bibliography: 38 pages detailing various editions of the source material that the reader might be able to purchase and continue the journey. Like the main content, the bibliography is somewhat dated, especially where translations are involved. In the intervening decades, many new translations of classical and non-English works have been published (for example, Emily WIlson’s superb translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey or the three translations of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita since 1997: by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Michael Karpelson; and Hugh Aplin).

Of course, one can pick holes in the list, too, some rather obvious (at least to me). Horace, for example, is missing; an egregious oversight in my view, given he is arguably Rome’s most celebrated poet. Missing, too, are Giacomo Casanova, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, Xenophon, Vasily Grossman, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, Cicero, Seneca, Catullus, Alexandre Dumas, Mervyn Peake, Joseph Campbell, Federico García Lorca, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, the Brothers Grimm, Samuel Pepys, and Frank Herbert, just to name a few authors I can see on my shelves as I write this. Sure, they may not all fall within any particular definition of canonical authors, but each affected their times and their contemporaries.

Fadiman’s book of recommendations isn’t alone: in that period several such books saw print. Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon in 1994, focusing on 26 writers whom Bloom believed were essential, albeit with a somewhat narrow definition of “the West” and what he considered worthy. Italo Calvino wrote his essay, Why Read the Classics, in 1986, later published as a book that included some of his literary criticism. David Denby wrote Great Books in 1997, a “personal odyssey … of self-discovery, cultural commentary, reporting, criticism, and autobiography—an inspiration for anyone in love with the written word.”

All of these lists straddle a murky area between accepted standards (those widely considered the canon, or the classics) and subjective opinion as to what should be in any canon. Sure, it’s easy to claim Shakespeare is an essential entry, but why not include his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe? Why include James Boswell, but not Samuel Johnson, the subject of his famous biography? And for what reason would someone not include Horace in such a list? Sheesh… Students of Latin still learn to translate his works.

I find I cannot properly contribute to those online games that ask for a list of your top ten books, or the books you’d take to a desert island or some isolated vacation spot. I can’t seem to winnow my lists to such small numbers. There’s always more than I can cram into a single, short list (and certainly not into a mere backpack to travel with).

Still, I personally really enjoy perusing this sort of list of recommendations. I like to compare my own reading experience, built over the decades of my life, to those of such esteemed authors as Bloom and Fadiman. There is usually some overlap in titles or names, but I often find some writers in their lists who are either overlooked or unknown to me. This is always a good thing because it gives me new material to explore. I try to fill the gaps in my reading from those new-to-me authors. I don’t compare myself or my reading history — mostly autodidactic — with the more erudite list creators or authors, but yet I smile when we agree, and grimace when we don’t.

In his essay, mentioned above, Calvino wrote;

[R]eading a great work for the first time when one is fully adult is an extraordinary pleasure, one which is very different (though it is impossible to say whether more or less pleasurable) from reading it in one’s youth. Youth endows every reading, as it does every experience, with a unique flavour and significance, whereas at a mature age one appreciates (or should appreciate) many more details, levels and meanings.

I may be fooling myself, but in my dotage I believe I appreciate and understand literature more and books of all sorts more than I did when I was younger. Reading is, now, even more important to me than in the past because I have more time for it. I have often re-read books I first read in my youth or decades ago, and found them different from those first impressions. Often, but not always, appreciating them more than I did when I was young. Knowing more about history, about culture, about the lives of the authors, and about science can help create a different view of a previously read book or author. We should never stop learning.

The Lifetime Reading Plan is ambitious, perhaps to the point of being overly so. I suspect that, over the years, even focused readers are going to vary from it as they find other authors and other books, perhaps something a bit lighter and entertaining. What’s important, I believe, is that we continue to read books for the sheer joy of reading. All types of books, not just a single genre. That we continue to keep ourselves educated and informed by reading books.

I also believe fiction — aka storytelling — is vitally important to our cultural and psychological development, and our cultural shift from the written word to visual media is harming us — shades of Neil Postman — but that’s another post.

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