and Mystery Series Week
It's
great to read wonderful books, and it's fun to read mysteries,
because they are like puzzles for us readers. Librarians,
booksellers, book clubs, teachers, and authors sometimes start
holidays and honorary weeks celebrating books, and this week just
happens to be overlapping: Great Books and Mystery Book Series.
In
a mystery series, readers get to know and love a cop, a private
detective, or an amateur sleuth who solves the mystery at the end. My
favorite fictional detective is Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.
He's short and fastidiously fashionable (if a large upward-curling
mustache and patent leather shoes are fashionable!); he has retired
from the Belgian police force and moved to England to become a
celebrated private detective.
Agatha
Christie books are written for adults (although I read and loved them
as a young teen). Some fictional detectives especially for kids and
teens include Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, the
Boxcar Children, Nate the Great, and the gang in Scooby-Doo. But
there are a lot more! Check out this list from Amazon!
What
makes a book a “Great Book”?
Some
schools and universities are organized around reading what is called
“Great Books.” Just as there are different ideas about what makes
a book a “classic,” there are
different ideas about what books should be on a list of “Great
Books.” However, most people list books that they believe still
have impact in modern times because they speak to great issues and
offer great ideas. Some people mention that truly great books are
inexhaustible; they can be read again and again, and the reader will
still gain more insight into the human condition.
So
what makes the list?
(Or,
rather, what books make many
“Great Books” lists?)
Homer's
The Iliad and The
Odyssey- The Bible
- tragedies by Ancient Greeks Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
- writings by Ancient Greeks Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes
- writings by Ancient Romans Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ptolemy
- writings by early Christians Augustine and Thomas Aquinas
- writings by Leonardo da Vinci
- works of Chaucer
- works of Shakespeare
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe- Cervantes's Don Quixote
- works of John Milton
- Swift's Gulliver's Travels
- works of Charles Dickens
works by philosophers such as
Descartes, Machiavelli, Thomas More, Hobbes, Pascal, Locke,
Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Bertrand Russell, Sartre- works by scientists such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Boole, Freud, Einstein, Planck
- Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
- Austen's Pride and Prejudice
- Byron's Don Juan
- essays by Emerson and Thoreau
- works by Tolstoy
- works by Mark Twain
- works by James Joyce
- plays by George Bernard Shaw
Each list of “Great Books” is
going to have a different selection of books, but many will include
some or all of these classics from the last 25 centuries. Notice that
they are “Western” books – there is presumably a list of Great
Books from the Eastern tradition, somewhere—and that they are
written for adults.
What
about kids' books?
Some
people have tried to make lists of great kids' books, including me.
Here is one Amazon list of someone's top 50 kids' books.
His
top 10 are:
- Charlotte's Web
- The Velveteen Rabbit
- Where the Wild Things Are
His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, etc.)- Haroun and the Sea of Stories
- The Giver
- The Thief Lord
- Inkheart
- James and the Giant Peach
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Celebrate
books!
Pick
up a classic book you've never read before. Check out books from a
“Best Of” list. Investigate a new mystery author. Read an old
favorite.
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