The World According to Cosmos

Cosmos’s Reading List 2025

books read

Written by

Jake Cosmos Aller

in

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Cosmos’s Reading List 2025

https://wp.me/p7NAzO-3L5

Books Read 2024
Cosmos Books Read 2021 Update
1001 Books to Read Before You Die List

Cosmos Books Read 2020

Books read 2019

books read during 2018

Reading the Clasics Updated

Cosmos Reading List 2022 Final Updates
Reading TS Elliot
Reading G Keith Chesterton

 

2025 Reading Goals:

200 books, 2,000 poems, etc total 3,000 to 4,000 books/poems/stories listed numerically and chronologically by month

Read Classics finish reading books. You Must read series

One Thriller Per Month

One history/politics book per month

Read A Lot More Poetry

Read At Least One Book A Year in Spanish.

Read At Least One Book A Year in Korean

While in the States, get books from Little River Turnpike library,DC Library and from the Medford library using the following criteria

One classic book

One poetry book

One Sci-fi book

One history/politics book

One current event book

One thriller

 

Buy the 2024 best SciFi read in the fall

Buy the 2024 Best Poetry read in the fall

 

Re-do Mod Po following Mod Po plus poems

Start a different poetry course on Coursea

Start and complete All poetry poetry courses

 

Alternate between reading Kindle classics, poetry and other books

I will try to finish reading classic books.  I have a collection from Kindle of 50 books to read before you die, in three volumes – 15O books in total. See the list below.  I have read many of them already which I have noted by bolding.  As I read them, I will add them to the chronological listing below, and also have the Harvard classic.  I had a hard copy set, but donated it, I have to read it on Kindle.  I will also continue to read lots of poetry from the Mod Po class, will do the slo-mo courses then re-do it in September, focusing on reading the additional poems I did not last time in Mod Po Plus.

Numerical Listing

Note: after reading each book, write a review for Bach’s Reading List and for Goodreads copy to my blog entry and cc Substack, Medium, Wattpad, Fan Story, and Writing.com.

Then save under Review when posting on the blog post, Zamzar audio clip into the blog piece, and do Spotify and Substack podcasts, later Threads and YouTube vblog starting in the fall

 Before reading ask Co-pilot the following questions

Please provide a synopsis, list of characters, author bio and list of books by the author, plus literary reputation.   please do not format to make it easier to cut and paste

The List

 

Fiction

 

Cather, Willa: My Ántonia From 50 Books Volume One

Chopin, Kate: The Awakening From 50 Books Volume One

Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room. From 50 Books Volume One

Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie  From 50 Books Volume One

Janet Evanovich Plum Lucky Camp H library In Progress

Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg,  the Job – Camp H Library

Bobby Palmer Isaac and the Egg

Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones TBC

Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

Gorky, Maxim: The Mother TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady TBC  From 50 Books Volume One

JM Baarre  Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

BM Bower – Cabin Fever  TBC   TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess  TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

-Robert William Chambers  The King in Yellow  TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Wilkie Collins  The Woman in White  TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Richard Connell The Most Dangerous Game  TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition. TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Margaret Deland The Iron Woman  TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Andrew Lang  The Arabian Nights  TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Michael Proust- Swann’s Way   TBC  TBC From 50 Books Volume Two

Emerson American Civilization (1862)

Upton Sinclair It Can’t Happen Here 

James Rollins Arkangel fairfax library

Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child The Wheel of Darkness fairfax library

Kaline Bradley the Ministry of Time fairfax library

Preston and Child Relic (1995)

Preston and Child Relic Reliquary (1997)

Preston and Child Relic The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002)

Preston and Child Relic The Book of the Dead (2006) 

Preston and Child Relic The Obsidian Chamber (2016)

Preston and Child Relic Riptide (1998)

James Rollins Map of Bones (2005)

James Rollins Black Order (2006)

James Rollins The Judas Strain (2007)

James Rollins The Last Oracle (2008)

James Rollins The Doomsday Key (2009)

James Rollins The Devil Colony (2010)

James Rollins The Eye of God (2013)

James Rollins The 6th Extinction (2014)

James Rollins The Bone Labyrinth (2015)

James Rollins The Seventh Plague (2016)

James Rollins The Demon Crown (2017)

James Rollins The Last Odyssey (2020)

James Rollins Kingdom of Bones (2022)

James Rollins Arkangel (2024)

James Rollins Subterranean (1999)

James Rollins Excavation (2000)

James Rollins Deep Fathom (2001)

James Rollins Amazonia (2002) 

James Rollins Riptide (1998)

John Connolly and Jenifer Ridyard Conquest Chronicles of the Invasion Medford Library

John Connolly and Jenifer Ridyard Empire Medford Library

John Connolly and Jenifer Ridyard  Dominon Medford Library

 

 

Harlan Corbin Books

 Think Twice (2024)

🔹 Tell No One (2001)]

Gone for Good (2002)

The Innocent (2005)

The Stranger (2015)

 

O Henry Stories Medford Library

                             

From the four Million

Gift Of The Magi

A Cosmopolitan In A Cafe.

The Skylight Room.

Man About Town.

The Love Philtre Of Ikey Schoenstein

Mammon And The Archer 

Springtime Ala Carte.

From The Cabbie Seat.  

An Unfinished Story.

The Romance Of A Busy Broker.

After 20 Years.

The Furnished Room.

From Heart of the West

Hearts And Crosses.

The Ransom Of Mack.

Telemachus, Friend .

Handbook Of Hymen.

Hygeia At The Solito.

From the Gentle Grafter

The Hand That Riles  The World.

The Exact Science Of Matrimony

Conscience In Art.

From Cabbages and Kings

The Lotus and the bottle.

Shoes.

Ships.

Masters of Arts.

From Options

The Rose of Dixie.

A poor rule.

On the Sixes and Sevens

 

The Last Troubadours.

Makes The Whole World Kin

Jimmy Hayes And Muriel

The Adventures Of Shamrock Jolnes.

From Rolling Stones.

 

The Friendly Call.

Sound and fury.

From the Whirlgigs

The Theory And The Hound.

The Ransom Of Red Chief 

The Whirligig Of Life.

Have Back Blackjack Order.

$1.00 Worth

From the Voice of the City

 

A Lickpenny Lover.

Doughtery’ eye Opener.

The Defeat Of The City.

The Shocks Of Doom.

Squaring The Circle.

The Momento.

From the Trimmed Lamp

From the trimmed lamp.

The Trimmed Lamp 

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen.

The Making Of A New Yorker.

A Harlem Tragedy.

The Last Leaf.

The Count And The Wedding Guest

From Strictly Business

.The Robe of Peace.

A Ramble in Aphasia

A Night In New Arabia.

Proof Of The Pudding.

From Waifes and Strays

 

Hearts and Hands

 

Non-Fiction

 

Declaration of Independence

Judge Luttridge 27 Principles from the Declaration of Independence

 

DC Library December 10, 2025

 

George Stewart Earth Abides

Joseph Finder The Oligarch’s Daughter

Ward Larsen Deep Fake

Robert Charles Wilson Julian Comstock A Story of 20th Century America

 

Poetry

Anne Frank

  1. Anne Frank’s Tree
  2. Anne Frank’s Tree

Entou

  1. Thunder and Lightning
  2. Almost Dead

Lawrencealot

  1. Throw Away Jay’s Way

Linda Varsell Smith

  1. Pathway

Robert Brewer Writers Digest

  1. Robert Lee Brewer – Give Me a Reason Zejel
  2. An Old Hymn Still Singing Zejel

Elegy

  1. David Romano’s “When Tomorrow Starts With Me”
  2. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
  3. John Milton’s “Lycidas”
  4. Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods”
  5. Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”
  6. Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain”

Haiku

  1. Gypsy Blue Rose – Cows Wander at Night
  2. Zebras Zeal Gallop

Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry

  1. Edward Lee Masters – The Hill
  2. Fiddler Jones
  3. Petite The Poet

Edwin Arlington Robinson

  1. Edwin Arlington Robinson
  2. Miniver Cheevy
  3. Flood’s Party

James Weldon Johnson

  1. James Weldon Johnson
  2. The Creation

Paul Laurence Dunbar

  1. The Poet
  2. Life
  3. Life’s Tragedy

Robert Frost – Mod Po Selection

  1. The Death of the Hired Man
  2. Mending Wall
  3. Birches
  4. Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening
  5. Tree in My Window
  6. Directive

Amy Lowell

  1. Patterns

Gertrude Stein – Mod Po Selections

  1. Susie Asado
  2. From Tender Buttons – A Box
  3. From Tender Buttons – A Plate

Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson

  1. I Sit and Sew

Carl Sandburg

  1. Grass
  2. Cahoots

Wallace Stevens – Mod Po Selections

  1. Peter Quince at the Clavier
  2. Disillusionment of 10:00
  3. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
  4. The Emperor of Ice Cream
  5. A Mere Being

Angelina Weld Grimke

  1. Angelina Weld Grimke
  2. Fragment

William Carlos Williams – Mod Po Selections

  1. Tact
  2. Dance Ruse
  3. The Yachts
  4. From Apostle that Greeny Flower Book 1, Lines 1 to 92

Sara Teasdale

  1. Moonlight
  2. There Will Come Soft Rains

Ezra Pound

  1. The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance
  2. The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
  3. In a Station of the Metro
  4. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
  5. From Cantos: 56 Libretto – Yet Ere This Season Died A Cold

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) – Mod Po Selections

  1. Sea Rose
  2. Helen
  3. From The Walls Do Not Fall – An Incident Here and There
  4. From Hermeneutic Definition Red Rose and A Beggar – Why Did You Come?
  5. Take Me Anywhere
  6. Venus

Robinson Jeffers

  1. Gala in April
  2. Shine, Perishing Republic
  3. Clouds at Evening
  4. Credo

Marianne Moore

  1. Fish
  2. Poetry

T.S. Eliot

  1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
  2. The Wasteland

Claude McKay

  1. If We Must Die
  2. The Harlem Dancer

Archibald MacLeish

  1. Ars Poetica

Edna St. Vincent Millay

  1. First Fig
  2. Recuerdo
  3. E. Cummings
  4. In Just-
  5. Buffalo Bill
  6. The Cambridge Ladies Who Lived in Furnished Souls
  7. Next to, Of Course, God, America
  8. Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond
  9. Rpophessagr

Jean Toomer

  1. Reapers
  2. November Cotton Flower
  3. Portrait in Georgia

Louise Bogan

  1. Medusa
  2. New Moon

Melvin B. Tolson

  1. Dark Symphony
  2. From Harlem Gallery: Psi – Black Boys, Let Me Get Up From The White Man’s Table

Hart Crane

  1. From The Bridge
  2. Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge
  3. From The Bridge – Section XI: Powhatan’s Daughter – The River

Robert Francis

  1. Silent Poem

Langston Hughes

  1. The Negro Speaks of Rivers
  2. I, Too, Sing America
  3. Dream Boogie
  4. Harlem

Countee Cullen

  1. Incident
  2. To John Keats, Poet, At Spring Time
  3. Yet Do I Marvel
  4. From The Dark Tower

Stanley Kunitz

  1. Father and Son
  2. The Portrait
  3. Touch Me
  4. H. Auden
  5. Musée des Beaux arts
  6. Epitaph on a Tyrant

Theodore Roethke

  1. My Papa’s Waltz
  2. The Waking
  3. In a Dark Time

Charles Olson

  1. From The Maximus Poems: One – Maximus of Gloucester, To You
  2. The Distances

Elizabeth Bishop

  1. The Fish
  2. Sestina
  3. First Death in Nova Scotia
  4. Visit to St. Elizabeths
  5. One Art

Robert Hayden

  1. Middle Passage
  2. Those Winter Sundays
  3. Frederick Douglass

Muriel Rukeyser

  1. Effort at Speech Between Two People
  2. Then I Saw What the Calling Was
  3. The Poem as Mask

Delmore Schwartz

  1. The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

John Berryman

  1. From The Dream Songs
  2. Feeling Your Compact and Delicious Body
  3. Life, Friends, Is Boring. We Must Not Say So
  4. There Shut Down Once
  5. This World is Gradually Becoming a Place
  6. Henry’s Understanding

Randall Jarrell

  1. 90 North
  2. The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
  3. The Woman at the Washington Zoo
  4. Next Day

Weldon Kees

  1. To My Daughter

Dudley Randall

  1. A Different Image

William Stafford

  1. Traveling through the Dark
  2. At the Bomb Testing Site

Ruth Stone

  1. Scars

Margaret Walker

  1. For My People

Gwendolyn Brooks – Mod Po Selection

  1. The Mother
  2. A Song in the Front Yard
  3. The Bean Eaters
  4. The Lovers of the Poor
  5. We Real Cool
  6. The Blackstone Rangers

Robert Lowell

  1. To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage
  2. Skunk Hour
  3. For the Union Dead

Robert Duncan

  1. Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
  2. My Mother Would Be a Falconress

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  1. Populist Manifesto

William Meredith

  1. Parents

Howard Nemerov

  1. Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Hayden Carruth

  1. The Hyacinth Gardens in Brooklyn
  2. August 1945

Richard Wilbur

  1. Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
  2. Cottage Street
  3. The Writer

James Dickey

  1. The Sheep Child

Allen Ginsberg

  1. Howl

Richard Hugo

  1. Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg
  2. The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field
  3. The Poem Unwritten
  4. Cademon
  5. Swan in Falling Snow
  6. Who Is Simpson?
  7. American Poetry

Carolyn Kizer

  1. A Muse of Water

Kenneth Koch

  1. Fresh Air

Maxine Kumin

  1. Morning Swim

Gerald Stern

  1. Behaving Like a Jew
  2. The Dancing
  3. Another Insane Devotion
  4. R. Ammons
  5. The City Limits
  6. Corsons Inlet

Robert Bly

  1. Snowfall in the Afternoon
  2. Driving into Town to Mail a Letter
  3. Walking from Sleep

Robert Creeley

  1. The Flower
  2. I Know a Man
  3. The Language
  4. The Rain
  5. Bresson’s Movies

John Merrill

  1. Victor Dog
  2. Steps

Frank O’Hara – New York School

  1. Lana Turner Has Collapsed
  2. The Day Lady Died

John Ashbery – New York School

  1. Some Trees
  2. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
  3. What Is Poetry?

Galway Kinnell

  1. The Bear
  2. After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
  3. Saint Francis and the Sow
  4. S. Merwin
  5. Air
  6. For the Anniversary of My Death
  7. Yesterday
  8. Chord

James Wright

  1. A Blessing
  2. Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
  3. Lying in a Hammock at

Wes Merwin

  1. Air
  2. For the Anniversary of My Death

 

  1. Yesterday
  2. Chord
  3. A Blessing

 

  1. Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, OH
  2. Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, MN
  3. In Response to the Rumor That Otis Warehouse in Wheeling, WV Has Been Condemned
  4. My Son, My Executioner
  5. Digging
  6. Rowing

 

  1. Orion Planetarium
  2. A Valedictorian Forbidding Mourning
  3. From 21 Love Poems 13 The Rules of Break Like a Thermometer

Gregory Corsa

  1. Marriage

Gary Snyder

  1. Hay for the Horses
  2. Riprap
  3. Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Derek Walcott

  1. A Far Cry from Africa
  2. Sea Grapes
  3. Find the Schooner Flight Part 11 After the Storm. There’s a Fresh Light That Follows
  4. The Light of the World
  5. From Omeros Book. 7. 44 I Sing of Quiet, Achilles, Afrolabe’s Son

Miller Williams

  1. Let Me Tell You

Etheridge Knight

  1. Idea of Ancestry

Amira Baraka, Leroy Jones

  1. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
  2. Agony As Now
  3. SOS
  4. Black Art

Ted Berrigan

  1. Wrong Rain
  2. A Final Sonnet

Audre Lorde

  1. Power

Sonia Sanchez

  1. Poetry at 30

Mark Strand

  1. The Prediction
  2. The Night, The Porch

Russell Edson

  1. A Stone Is Nobody’s

Mary Oliver

  1. Singapore
  2. The Summer Day

Charles Wright

  1. Reunion
  2. Dead Color
  3. California Dreaming

Lucille Clifton

  1. Homage to My Hips
  2. At Least at Last We Killed the Roaches
  3. The Death of Fry, Alfred Clifton

June Jordan

  1. Home About My Rights

Frederick Seidel

  1. 1968
  2. K. Williams
  3. Find My Window
  4. Blades

Tony Hoagland

  1. The Mechanic

Michael S. Harper

  1. Dear John, Dear Coltrane
  2. Last Affair. Bessie’s Blues Song
  3. Grandfather
  4. Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Charles Simic

  1. Stone
  2. Fork
  3. Classic Ballroom Dances

Paula Gunn Allen

  1. Grandmother

Frank Bidart

  1. Ellen West

Carl Dennis

  1. Spring Letter
  2. Two or Three Wishes

Stephen Dunn

  1. Allegory of the Cave
  2. Tucson

Robert Pinsky

  1. History of My Heart
  2. The Questions
  3. Samurai Song

James Welch

  1. Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat

Billy Collins

  1. Introduction to Poetry
  2. The Dead

Toi Derricotte

  1. The Weakness

Stephen Dobyns

  1. How to Like It?
  2. Lullaby

Robert Hass

  1. Song
  2. That Photographer?
  3. Return of Robinson Jeffers

Lyn Hejinian

  1. From My Life: Trim with Colored Ribbons
  2. H. Fairchild
  3. The Machinist Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano

Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)

  1. But He Was Cool or Even Stopped for Green Lights
  2. Upon To Compliment Other Poems

William Matthews

  1. In Memory of the Utah Stars
  2. The Accompanist

Sharon Olds

  1. The Language of the Brag
  2. The Lifting

Henry Taylor

  1. Barbed Wire

Tess Gallagher

  1. Black, Silver
  2. Under Stars

Michael Palmer

  1. I Do Not

James Tate

  1. The Lost Pilot

Norman Dubie

  1. Elizabeth’s War with the Christmas Bear
  2. The Funeral

Carol Muske Dukes

  1. August, Los Angeles Lullaby

Kay Ryan

  1. Turtle
  2. Bestiary

Larry Levis

  1. Childhood Ideogram
  2. Winter Stars

Adrian C. Louis

  1. Looking for Judas
  2. How Much Lux?
  3. The People of the Other Village

Marilyn Nelson

  1. The Ballad of Aunt Geneva
  2. Star Fix

Ai

  1. Cuba 1963
  2. The Kid
  3. Finished

Yusef Komunyakaa

  1. Thanks
  2. To Do Street
  3. Facing It
  4. Nude Interrogation

Nathaniel Mackey

  1. Song of the Andoumboulou

Gregory Orr

  1. Gathering the Bones Together
  2. Two Lines from the Brother Grimm
  3. Origin of the Marble Forest

Robert Hill Long

  1. Reaching Yellow River

Albert Goldbarth

  1. Away

Heather McHugh

  1. Language Lesson 1976
  2. What He Thought

Leslie Marmon Silko

  1. In Cold Storm Light

Olga Broumas

  1. Calypso

Victor Hernández Cruz

  1. Latin & Soul

Jane Miller

  1. Miami Heart

David St. John

  1. Iris
  2. D. Wright
  3. Why Ralph Refuses to Dance
  4. Girlfriend Poem #3
  5. Crescent

Carolyn Forché

  1. Taking Off My Clothes

Jorie Graham

  1. San Sepolcro

Marie Howe

  1. What the Living Do

Joy Harjo

  1. She Had Some Horses
  2. My House Is the Red Earth

Garrett Hongo

  1. The Legend

Andrew Hudgins

  1. Begotten
  2. We Were Simply Talking

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

  1. Imaging Their Own Hymns
  2. Song

Paul Muldoon

  1. Meeting the British
  2. Errata
  3. The Throwback

Judith Ortiz Cofer

  1. Quinceanera

Rita Dove

  1. Parsley
  2. Daystar
  3. After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed

Alice Fulton

  1. Our Calling

Barbara Hamby

  1. Thinking of Galileo
  2. Hatred

Mark Jarman

  1. Unholy Sonnet

Naomi Shihab Nye

  1. The Traveling Onion
  2. Arabic
  3. Wedding Cake

Alberto Ríos

  1. Nani
  2. England Finally Like My Mother Always Said We Would

Laurie Sheck

  1. Nocturne Blue Waves
  2. The Unfinished

Gary Soto

  1. Field Poem
  2. Oranges
  3. Black Hair

Susan Stewart

  1. Yellow Star and Ice
  2. The Forest

Mark Doty

  1. Brilliance
  2. Esta Noche
  3. Bill’s Story

Harryette Mullen

  1. Black Nikes

Franz Wright

  1. Alcohol

Lorna Dee Cervantes

  1. To My Brother
  2. Love of My Flesh, Living Death

Sandra Cisneros

  1. My Wicked, Wicked Ways
  2. Little Clowns, My Heart

Cornelius Eady

  1. Jack Johnson Does the Eagle Rock
  2. Crows in a Strong Wind
  3. I’m a Fool to Love You

Louise Erdrich

  1. Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

David Mason

  1. Spooning

Marilyn Chin

  1. How I Got That Name
  2. Compose Near the Bay Bridge
  3. The Survivor

Cathy Song

  1. The Youngest Daughter

Annie Finch

  1. Another Reluctance
  2. Insert

Li-Young Lee

  1. The Gift
  2. Eating Together

Carl Phillips

  1. Our Lady
  2. As from a Quiver of Arrows

Nick Flynn

  1. Bag of Mice
  2. Cartoon Physics

Elizabeth Alexander

  1. The Venus Hottentot

Reetika Vazirani

  1. From White Elephants
  2. A Million Balconies
  3. Train Windows

Sherman Alexie

  1. What the Orphan Inherits
  2. The Powwow at the End of the World

Natasha Trethewey

  1. Hot Combs
  2. Amateur Fighter
  3. Flounder
  4. E. Stallings
  5. The Tantrum

Joana Klink

  1. Spare

Brenda Shaughnessy

  1. Postfeminism
  2. Your One Good Dress

Kevin Young

  1. Quivira City Limits
  2. Everywhere is Out of Town
  3. Whatever You Want

Terrance Hayes

  1. At Pegasus
  2. Lady Sings the Blues

Terrance Hayes

  1. At Pegasus
  2. Lady Sings the Blues

Pablo Neruda

  1. Viente Poemas De Amor Poems of Love 1924
  2. Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening
  3. Cuerpo De Mujer (Body of a Woman)
  4. Ah Vastness of Pines
  5. Leaning Into the Afternoon
  6. Every Day You Play
  7. Thinking, Tingling Shadows
  8. Tonight I Write
  9. Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”

Gypsy Blue Rose

  1. Gypsy Blue Rose Light of the Bright Moon
  2. Gypsy Blue Rose Love Birds
  3. Gypsy Blue Rose I see you dance across life’s stage
  4. Gypsy Blue Rose Adrift Cherita

Jejeu

  1. Gypsey Blue Rose Over Green Hills a limpid brook flows
  2. Pillow Woman
  3. Steady Breathing warms my Neck
  4. Brian Compton Might I Interject AHD

 

Judi Van Godner

Sioux

  1. Mask
429.               Angel’s Dilemma

430.               Where Frogs Are

431.               Garland Seox

Quin Jejeu Chinese Form

432.               Ishikawa Jozan Mount Fuji

433.               Cheng Hao Autumn Moon

434.               Gyspy Rose BLue

Waka

Gyspy Rose blue Geologist

435.

Free Verse

436.               Sierra Scribbler BLISS

437.               Crookston 2 Daffodil

438.               Noland Reflections

Bragi

439.               Judi Van Gorder Persimmon

440.               Linda Versa Smith The snowplow heaves snow banks so high

Lune

441.               Robert Brewster  Trees Never Wander Lune

Rondel

442.               Lady And Louis Two Silver Rings Rondel

443.               Mountainwriter49 Forever In My Heart Rondel

Abhanga

444.               Judi Can Gorder Incomplete Abhanga

445.               Judi Can Gorder  Magic Moment abhanga

446.               Rachael the Library is Wwhere Abhanga

447.               Astrologically Speaking Aghanga

448.               Tukaram, Words Are The Only Jewels I possess Ahanga

Writing Com reviews

449.               Dean Koontz Dragon Tears

450.                Harlan Ellison“A Boy And His Dog.”

451.               Fritz Leiber“Spacetime For Springers,”

452.               Matt Griffin “Schrodinger’s Cat”

453.                Larry Niven, Rescue Party,

454.               Azimuth R. Daneel Olivaw

455.               Roger Zelazny For A Breath I Tarry

456.                Genesis

457.                Goethe’s Faust

458.               E. Housman A Shropshire Lad

459.                     Keith Laumer“Combat Unit”

460.                                                           Eregon Proofreading Hell

461.                                                             Christine B Demonstration of Proof

462.               Allen Charles A Love Beyond Pain

463.               Professor Moriatty’s True Confession

464.               Bobby Lou Steveson Vanwolf

465.               Beholden Seven

466.               WD Wilcox Valkyrie

467.               Kare Enga Pasta Alfredo Please

468.               Gervic A Hawk’s Gift

469.               Sumojo Vexatious Valentine

470.               Cubby on the Road Again, Clinging Hearts

471.               Peris Throckmortorf Hearts and Darts

472.               Fye a Simple Blue Note Book

Manardina

473.                                                            Lawrencealot – Do All Deceive (Form: Manardina)

Free Verse

474.               Kafka The Metamorpousis

475.               John Gardner Grendel Old English Beowulf

476.               John Gardner, The Art Of Fiction

477.                Walt Whitman“Song of Myself.”

478.                William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”

479.                William Carlos Williams’“This Is Just to Say”

480.               Gwendoly Brooks’ “We Real Cool.”

481.               TS Elliot the Waste Land

482.               Sylvia Plath Daddy

483.               Wallace Stevens Disissluionment of Ten O Clock

484.               Allen Ginsberg America

485.               David Ryan Do Not Resuscitate

Etheree

486.               Judi Van Gorder Etheree

487.               Andrea Dietrich Your Wild Awakening

488.               Andrea Dietrich Anonymous Solitude

489.               Andrea Dietrich The Lair

490.               Marie Summer Red Poppy

491.               Marie Summer Blurred Vision (Double Reversed Etheree)

492.               Marie Summer Ashen Despair (Double Reversed Etheree)

Zen Haiku

493.                ]

494.               Gypsy Blue Rose at night zen haiku

495.                Gypsy Blue Rose at the Bay zen Haiku

Japanese Love Poems

 

496.                Gypsy Blue Rose When I am Gone Japanese Love Poem

knitelvers

497.               Judi Van Gorder How Many Times  Knitelvers

498.               Larencealot Riskless Investment (Knittelvers)

499.               EE Cummings 24 Xaipe One Day a Nigger Caught in his Hand

500.                EE Cummings 48 Xiaipe A kite is the Most Dangerous Machine

TH Palmer

501.               TH Palmer  Try Again

Clerihew

502.               E Clerihew Bentley Sir Humphrey Davy

503.               Dan, I Am Taylor Swift

504.               Alan Mc Alpine Douglas The Road Runner

505.               James Dean Chase Diana Dalton

506.               James Dean Chase Corporal Klinger

507.               Judi Van Gorder  The King Of Pop

508.               Judi Van Gorder Ms. Amber Heard

509.               Frank Gibbard  Royal

510.               Jay O Toole Clerihew Bob Denver

511.                     James And Marie Summers Garfield The Cat

512.                     Linda Varsell Smith Supreme Wordster

513.                   Linda Varsell Smith Electrifying Inventor

 

Tanka  

514.                   Princess Nukada I wait for you

515.                   Takuboku I Shut My Eyes

516.                   Judi Van Gordner Chill of Soundless Night

517.                   Dendrobia A cool wind blows in

518.                   Can Sonmez Subtle hints of spring

519.                   Cheri L. Ahner Peaceful solitude

520.                   Ono no Komachi (825-900) Tanka –

521.                   Ono No Komachi See how the blossoms

522.                    Tada Chimako

523.                A Spray of Water: Tanka

524.                 June Jordan On Time Tanka

525.                                                           Ono No Komachi The Ink Dark Moon Tanaka

526.                                                           Mrs. KT Early Spring Rains Thrum

Other famous poems

 

527.                John Donne, “The Sun Rising”

528.                 Emily Dickinson, “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain 

529.                 Richard Brautigan Gee You’r So Beautiful That is starting to rain

530.                 Chief Seattle Man Does not weave this web of life he is merely a strand of it What he does to the web, he does to himself

531.                   Anita Shreve A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.

532.                   Anita Shreve A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.

533.                   Benjamin Franklin You may delay, but time will not

534.                   Bill Keane Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present

535.                   Geoffrey Chaucer Time and tide wait for no man.

536.                   Horrace Mann Lost – yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

537.                     Nora Robert’s Three Fates The past is but a thread in the tapestry of our future

Mad Cow Pastoral Poem

538.                     Lawrencealot (December 18, 2014) Waiting for Us

539.                     John Keats’s Odes to a Nightingale

540.                     Joyce Kilmer Trees

541.               Anonymous They Learn What We Live

542.                Edward Lear’s the Owl and the Pussy Cat

TS Elliot

543.               T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  “   

Allen Ginsberg

544.               Allen Ginsberg Howl

Lune

545.               Robert Brewster Trees Never Wander Kelly Lune

546.               Robert Brewster  An Envelope Labeled Collum Lune

Pantoum

 

547.               John Ashberry Hotel Lautréamont

548.               Natalie Diaz My Brother At 3 A.M

549.               Denrobia Osprey

550.               Natalie E Illum Curious George Can’t Swim: A Pantoum

551.               Blass Falconer A Ride in the Rain

552.               Judi Van Gorder the Wanderer’s Return

553.               Judi Van Gorder Seamrog

554.               Judi Van Gorder Hello Goodbye

555.               Maria Hummel Station

556.               Kiandra Jimenez Halcyon Kitchen

557.               Donald Justice Pantoum of the Great Depression

558.               Chip Liningston Punta Del Este Pantoum

559.               Hailey Leithauser O, She Says

560.               Randal Mann Politics

561.               Randal Mann Pantoum

562.               Sally Ann Roberts It All Started with a Packet of Seeds

563.               Clinton Scollard In The Sultan’s Garden

564.               David Scheider Pins and Needles

565.               Evie Shockl

566.               ey Pantoum Landing, 1975

567.               Linda Vsrsell Smith Our Changing Cosmic Fabric

568.               Linda Varsell Smith Grandchildren are Rainbow-light

569.                   Linda Varsell Smith an Eccentric Grandma

570.                   Linda Varsell Smith Mole Hole Mode

571.                   Linda Varsell Smith When Saturn Returned

572.                   Linda Varsell Smith In Gardens of Earthly Delights

573.                      Linda Varsell Smith Pantoum: Western version of a Malaysian

574.                     E Stallings Another Lullaby For Insomniacs

575.                     Marie Summers Celestial Dreams

576.                     Marie Summers Seasonal Whispers

577.                     Sasha Steensen Pantoum

578.                   Chellie Wood Dance In The Rain

579.                   Robert Lukeman Life – A Marriane Poem

580.                   Gypsy Rose Blue Billowing Clouds Chain Haiku’

581.                     Yamanoue no Okura When I eat Mellons Choka

582.               anonymous They Learn What We Live

Acrostic 

583.               Gabriella 2 Masqueraders

584.               .Dportwood Rejoice in Life

585.                .Dportwood Boots and Spur

Funny Poems

586.               Anne Scott Missing

587.               Shel Silverstein Messy Room

588.               My One-Eyed Love” by Andrew Jefferson

589.               Larry Huggins Doggy Heaven

590.               Cynthia C. Naspinksi Our Imperfect Dog”

591.                    Shelby Greer “The Life of a Cupcake”

592.                    Joanna Fuchs Yes! No!”

593.                    Cecilia L. Goodbody “Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Car”

594.                   Robert Lewis Stevenson My Shadow”

595.                   “I Atte a Chili Pepper” by Barbara Vance

596.                   Snap, Crackle, Pop” by Catherine Pulsifer

597.                    Ogden Nash “The People Upstairs”

598.                   Spike Milligan “Granny”

599.                    Julie Hebert ” Dessert Last”

600.                     Richard Leavesley “Belly Button Magic”

601.                   Anonymous  “Have You Ever Seen”

602.                    Laura Elizabeth Richards “Ele telephony”

603.                    Anonymous “Do You Carrot All For Me?”

604.                     Darren Sardelli “My Doggy Ate My Essay”

605.                   Jack Prelutsky “Be Glad Your Nose is On Your Face”

606.                   Gelett Burgess “My Feet”

607.                     Inna Renko “Home Alone”

608.                     Nandita Shailesh Shanbhag Not Smart Enough For a Smart Phone”

 

LImericks

609.                   Edwar Lear Sit variorum megrim evacuation

610.                    Unknown There was a young lady of Niger

611.                   Judi Van Gorder The parrot was messy and loud.

612.                   Judi Van Gorder An Irishman came to my city

613.                   Judi Van Gorder In the flick of an eye she went down.

614.                   Judi Van Gorder There once was a poet called Tinker

615.                   Limericks I cannot compose,

616.                    There was a young woman named Bright,

617.                   There was an odd fellow named Gus,

618.                   There once was a fly on the wall

619.                   There once was a man from Tibet,

620.                   There was a young woman named Bright,

621.                   I need a front door for my hall,

622.                   There once was a boy named Dan,

623.                    A newspaperman named Fling,

624.                    I know an old owl named Boo,

625.                   I once fell in love with a blonde,

626.                   I’d rather have Fingers than Toes,

627.                   There was a Young Lady whose chin

628.                   Hickory Dickory Dock,

629.                   There was a faith healer of Deal

630.                   My dog is really quite hip,

631.                   A painter, who lived in Great Britain,

632.                   There is a young schoolboy named Mason,

633.                   There was a young schoolboy of Rye,

634.                   An elderly man called Keith

635.                   There was an old man of Peru,

636.                   The Incredible Wizard of Oz,

637.                    Once I visited France,

638.                   It goes quickly, you know,

639.                    Is it me or the nature of money,

640.                   There once was a farmer from Leeds

641.                   A fellow jumped off a high wall,

642.                   A man and his lady-love, Min,

643.                    There was a young lady of Cork,

644.                    There once was a Martian called Zed

645.                   There once was a girl named Sam

646.                   Said the man with a wink of his eye

647.                   A wonderful bird is the Pelican.

648.                   There was once a great man in Japan

649.                   There was a young man so benighted

650.                   There was an old man from Sudan,

651.                    A maiden at college, Miss Breeze,

652.                    A canner, exceedingly canny,

653.                    A mouse in her room woke Miss Dowd

654.                    There was a young woman named Kite,

655.                   A flea and a fly in a flue,

656.                    A major, with wonderful force,

657.                    A nifty young flapper named Jane

658.                    “There’s a train at 4:04,” said Miss Jenny.

659.                    A canny young fisher named Fisher

660.                    Here’s to the chigger,

661.                   A cheerful old bear at the Zoo

662.                    The bottle of perfume that Willie sent

663.                    I bought a new Hoover today,

664.                    A crossword compiler named Moss

665.                    I’m papering walls in the loo

666.                    There once was an old man of Esser,

667.                    To compose a sonata today,

668.                    There was a young lady named Perkins,

669.                    There was an old man of Nantucket

670.                   There was a young lady of Kent,

671.                   There was a young lady named Hannah

672.                    There was a dear lady of Eden,

673.                    A certain young fellow named Bee-Bee

674.                    Remember when nearly sixteen

675.                    There was an old person of Fratto

676.                    There was a young man from Dealing

677.                    As 007 walked by

678.                   A tutor who tooted the flute

679.                    No woodsman would cut a wood, would he

680.                    There once was a man from the sticks

681.                    A poet whose friends called him Steve

682.                    If you catch a chinchilla in Chile

683.                    There once was a man named Mauvette

684.                   There once was a beautiful nurse

685.                    There was a young girl from Flynn

686.                There once was a man from Gorem

687.                Dylan Thomas

688.               The Hand that Signed the Paper

689.

690.                W. H. Auden

691.

692.               2

866666

693.               8Political Poetry

 

 

Dylan Thomas, ‘The Hand That Signed the Paper’

W. H. Auden, ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’

Audre Lorde, ‘Power’

Maxine Kumin, ‘Woodchucks’

“Bloody Halos and Porcelain Chains”  from “The Lie Within The Line”   [18+] by Jeremy (704)
“Hidden Bruises”   [E] by Sumojo (759)

“Run From the Devil”   [18+] by Jayne (1,493)

“Death’s Spell”   [E] by DMCarroll (66)

“Light’s Labor Lost”   [E] by ChristineB (99)

“Motherhood, Lost ”   [13+] by Robin:TheRhymeMaven (211)

 

Monotetra

 

Linda Newman Paper Dreams

Michael Walker An Angel Spoke To Me Today

 

Allan J Wight A Poet On The Launching Pad

Robert Brewster No Chance

Robert Lee Brewer “Waiting for April Showers,”

 

Jan Turner Spring Eternal

The Senses of Spring   Jan Turner

SP Quill Magazine Spring 2006, Vol. #10

Andrea Ditrich A Summer Alouette

Judi Can Gorder Month of August

Linda Varsell Smith Future Possibilities

Linda Varsell Smith Fourth Dimensional Blueprint

 

Lune

 

Robert Brewster Trees Never Wander Kelly Lune

Robert Brewster  An Envelope Labeled Collum Lune
71. There once was a man from the city

694.                   72. There once was a gal from Decatur

695.                   73. What happens when you retire?

696.                   74. At times I’m so mad that I’m hopping.

697.                   75. One Saturday morning at three,

 

Political Poetry

 

1.      Dylan Thomas, ‘The Hand That Signed the Paper 

2.      W. H. Auden, ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’

3.      Audre Lorde, ‘Power

4.      Maxine Kumin, ‘Woodchucks’

5.
“Bloody Halos and Porcelain Chains”  from “The Lie Within The Line”   [18+] by Jeremy (704)6.
“Hidden Bruises”   [E] by Sumojo (759)7.
“Run From the Devil”   [18+] by Jayne (1,493)8.
“Death’s Spell”   [E] by DMCarroll (66)9.
“Light’s Labor Lost”   [E] by ChristineB (99)

10.
“Motherhood, Lost ”   [13+] by Robin:TheRhymeMaven (211)

Monotetra

 

11. Linda Newman Paper Dreams

12. Michael Walker An Angel Spoke To Me Today

13. Allan J Wight A Poet On The Launching Pad

14. Robert Brewster No Chance

15. Robert Lee Brewer “Waiting for April Showers,”

Aloulette

 

16. Jan Turner Spring Eternal

17. The Senses of Spring   Jan Turner

18. SP Quill Magazine Spring 2006, Vol. #10

19. Andrea Ditrich A Summer Alouette

20. Judi Can Gorder Month of August

21. Linda Varsell Smith Future Possibilities

22. Linda Varsell Smith Fourth Dimensional Blueprint

Lune

23. Robert Brewster Trees Never Wander Kelly Lune

24. Robert Brewster  An Envelope Labeled Collum Lune

 

Writing com

 

Capuchine Safety Dance

Solang Bring Be Careful Out There

Solang Bring Bermudagrass

 

Robert Brewer “Semantically Speaking,”

Robert Brewer  Full Throated

Donald Justice“There is a gold light in certain old paintings,”

Edgar Allan Poe The Philosophy of Composition

Robert Lee Brewer Property

Robert Lee Brewer What I gained

 

Pantoum Poems

 

  1. Natalie E Illum Curious George Can’t Swim
  2. Kiandra Jimenez Halcyon Kitchen
  3. Chip Livingston Punta del Este Pantoum
  4. Donald Justice Pantoum
  5. Pantoum of the Great Depression
  6. Natlie Diaz Hotel Lautréamont
  7. Natlie Diaz My Brother at 3 A.M.
  8. Randall Mann Politics
  9. Randall Mann Pantoum Landing 1976
  10. Evie Shockley pantoum: landing, 1976
  11. Sasha Steensen Pantoum
  12. Hailey Leithauser O she Says Pantoum
  13. Randal Mann Politics Pantoum
  14. Blas Falconer Station Pantoum
  15. AE Stallings Another Lullaby for Insomnias
  16. Another Lullaby for Insomniacs
  17. Linda Varsell Smith Mole Hole Mode
  18. Kiandra Jimenez Halcyon Kitchen
  19. Chip Livingston Punta Del Este Pantoum
  20. Donald Justice Pantoum of the Great Depression
  21. Linda Varsell Smith Mole Hole Mode

 

John Donne, “The Sun Rising”   – Yelling at the sun to go away because his love is more important. Close the curtains, man.

Emily Dickinson, “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”   – Emotional distress is a funeral procession inside her head. A great poem worthy of an awkward “Can I, uh, get you a glass of water or something?”

Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”   – This one is a bit meta since he knows he’s being overwrought, claiming his love was so powerful that even the stars shivered in response.

Richard Brautigan, “Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain”   –

David Schnider The Art of Presumption  (E)

Lyrette Form

 

Anonymous lyrette meta poem

Gypsy Blue Rose  Sunrise and Sunset Lyrette Poem

Lawrencealot Our Store circa 1949 (Lyrette)-

 

Pantoum

Chain Haiku

 

Gypsy Rose Blue Billowing Clouds Chain Haiku

Choka

 

Yamanoue no Okura When I eat Mellons Choka

Other famous Poems

 

Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”   may seem like whimsical nonsense, but its playful rhymes and surreal imagery also gently mock the seriousness of courtship traditions. Plus, let’s be honest, it takes a bold poet to toss “runcible” around like it meant something.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”   flirts with the absurd by pairing profound existential musings with questions about eating peaches and rolling one’s trousers. A reasonable exploration if one is both profoundly sad and struggling with fruit logistics.

“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg   uses surreal and absurd imagery to critique societal norms, capitalism, and conformity. Moloch is especially absurd, depicting a monstrous deity that consumes individuality. “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!” Nothing like some Lovecraftian capitalism to keep my nightmares consistent

Richard Brautigan, “Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain”   –
John Donne, “The Sun Rising”

 Emily Dickinson, “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”   –

Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” 

T.S. Eliot Hollow Man

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Langston Hughes  I, Too

Langston Hughes Mother To Son  .

If

Rudyard Kipling  “Is You?” .
Rudyard Kipling  IF

 

Other

 

Eragon Proofreading Hell

Christine B Demonstration of Proof

Jay O Toole Quality Assurance Each Day

     

Mandarina Form

 

Lawrencealot – Do All Deceive? December 19, 2014 (Form: Mandarina)

Tanka

 

Ono No Komachi The Ink Dark Moon

David Smith ‘Night Pleasures’

Dave Scheider Snowflake

Mrs. Kt Early Spring Rains Thrum

Dendrobia A cool wind blows in Tanka

Can Sonmez Subtle hints of spring Tanka

Cheri Abner Peaceful solitude Tanka

Ono no Komachi (825-900) Tanka –

Tada Chikako A Spray of Water:

June Jordan On Time Tanka –

Princess Nakada I wait for you

Takatoku I Shut My Eyes

Judi Van Gordner Chill of Soundless Night

Dendrobia A cool wind blows in

Can Sonmez Subtle hints of spring

Cheri L. Ahner Peaceful solitude

Ono no Komachi (825-900) Tanka –

Ono No Komachi See how the blossoms

Tada Chikako

A Spray of Water: Tanka

June Jordan On Time Tanka

 

 

 

Marie Summers Celestial Dreams

Marie Summers Seasonal Whispers

Sasha Steensen Pantoum

Chellie Wood Dance In The Rain

 

Acrostic

 

Gabriella 2 Masqueraders

Dportwood Rejoice in Life

Dportwood Boots and Spurs

 

Other

 

Bandit’s Mama City Sorrow About 9-11

Dr Israel Newman, I Wish

 

Octain Refrain

Lawrencealot  Octain Refrain (Abb aca bA)
Showers Wash the Stars (A bba cab A)
New Year’s Eve (High Octain) (Abb aca bA Abb aca bA)

Octain

Lawrencelot  Octawhat?
PK Roy Feeling

 

 

David Schneider Adrift WC Poets Place

 

Herman Melville Art

Occhtfochlach

(Author Unknown) The Ochtfochlach
Fochlach It (Ochtfochlach)
© Lawrencealot – December 4, 2013
Pen Allen Of Allpoetry Sixteen Thirty-Four Door — Double Ochtfochlach

Alliteration Haiku

 

Be-Bopping Bluebirds In The Birdbath
A Banjo Busker’s Ballad Bobbing In The Breeze
Shooting Star
Rush Hour In The Rain –
Beachside Birds
Long Afternoon

Japan’s 2011 Shake-Up Octodil
Wake-Up Call Octodil

Epistle

 

 Epistles Of St. Paul

Note To Neighbor:

Robert Burns Epistle To A Young Friend,

Horace

Ovid’s Heroides,

Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays

Alexander Pope’s Epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot,

 Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter To N.Y.,”

 Langston Hughes’s “Letter,”

Mark Jarman’s  Epistles .

 Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires Of Mothers To Please Others In Letters

Laynie Browne’s  The Desires Of Letters

Elana Bell’s Epistolary Poems, Letter To Palestine,”

Read More Epistolary Poems

Samuel Daniel Letter From Octavia To Marcus Antonius (1599) In

 Certain Epistles (1601–1603). 

Ben Jonson The Forest (1616),

John Dryden Epistles To Congreve (1694)

Epistles Duchess Of Ormond (1700).

 Alexander Pope Eloisa To Abelard” (1717)

 And Adapted The Horatian Epistle In His Moral Essays (1731–1735) And

 An Epistle To Dr. Arbuhnot (1735).

  1. W. H. Auden/Louis Macneice’s Letters From Iceland (1937).

 Richard Hugo  31 Letters And 13 Dreams (1977). 

Robert Lowell Elizabeth Hardwick

Ezra Pound’s Li Po, “The River–Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915).

Auden’s “Letter To Lord Byron” (1937),

. Alexander Pope  “Epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot,”

Stepanie A Cephas  Angel Light (Rhyming) Mirror Sestat Shelley A. Cephas His Pristine Robes (Non-rhyming)

 

~ Emily Dickinson There is no Frigate like a Book
~ Emily Dickinson Because I could not stop for Death,
~ Emily Dickinson Fame is a bee.

 

 

Stepanie A Cephas  Angel Light (Rhyming) Mirror Sestat Shelley A. Cephas His Pristine Robes (Non-rhyming)

 

 

Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it’s easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience’s trust.
-Damon Lindelof

The more secrets and twists in a character, the better.
-Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what’s going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character’s choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.

-Neal Shusterman

 

 

 

Edgar Allen Poe The Raven

Samuel T Colleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel T. Coleridge
Louis Mac Niece ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’

Edgar Allen Poe ‘Lenore’

Thomas Hood ‘The Double Knock’

David Scheider Writer Stuff

David Scheider Footprints in Time

David Schenider “Snowflake” .

 

gogyohka

 

Gypsy Blue Rose Under the blooming Tree

Gypsy Blue Rose you come over me

 

2 D acrostic

 

 

Harambe GO

Harambe Cat

Haarambe DOG
Pookietoo Dog
Julie GI God

Harambe Test

Julie GI Aunt

Tempste Apes
Harambe diet by Tempeste hate
Harry T lead
Terry Riley love
Karen Cherry test
Cupa Tea time
Harambe PUTIN by Harambe:
Wils birth
Tid100 robin

Lana Marie sport
Julia Helms steam Terry Reily Trump

Harambe censor
gothic by Julie Helms **contest #2 winner**
Gloria Hamlet

Terry mother

Tresischel repose
Terry Riley scream
John Cranford spring
Nicki Nance tears
Wils Travel
Lisa May writer

Helvi 2 Flowers
Harambe gorilla
YM Roger magical
Hrambe weather
Karen Cherry winning

Harambe acrostic

Wils harmonic

Dragonskulls challenge
Harambe Democrats by Harambe

Harambe Republicans

 

Solage

 

 

  1. Kathryn Abel It’s so cold
  2. Kathryn Abel Don’t Understand Cricket
  3. Kathryn Abel A Man Without Care
  4. Kathryn Abel Wrote a Line
  5. Kathryn Abel Soaring Too High
  6. David Schenider October Charm

Silly Solage

September 5, 201518

I’m a little late with poetry Friday this week… but here ’tis. A quick-grab how-to on the fabulously fun solage. For those of you who like a joke – or know some kids who do.

 

Foodie one:

Soaring so high
my pie in the sky.
Plomp!

“October’s Charm”

 

 

Cherita [b. 22 June 1997]
Gembun [b. 12 June 1997]
Dua [b. 4 March 2022]

*

i get lost again
cherita 96
edited by ai li

*

blue sky
dua anthology 13
edited by ai li

*

updates on all forthcoming dua and gembun anthologies
and our exciting the cherita award

 

For those of you who missed reading ai li’s essay i, storyteller on Cherita, Gembun and Dua on Rhyvers and viewing her You Tube Cherita video interview for The Wise Owl by Neena Singh, for their special issue on Cherita, here are both links again below.

Here are ai li’s You Tube interview link : www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnGmkKKQvqo
and the link for her essay i, storyteller on Cherita, Gembun and Dua
rhyvers.com/hk22/

The full transcripts for both can be found on www.thecherita.com/lectures/ as well on the Rhyvers and The Wise Owl’s websites.

There are now over 4300 views for my Rhyvers essay on Cherita, Gembun and Dua, which appeared on 16 September 2023, with 2600 views the last time I looked, for my You Tube video Cherita interview, which appeared on 30 September 2023, and which The Wise Owl’s Editor Rachna Singh called ‘insightful’.

 

It is almost a year since I visited Thimphu, Punakha, Gantey, Bumthang and Paro in the Kingdom of Bhutan. I still feel that I left a part of me behind as residual energy, dancing with genius loci under a tall Indian silk tree.

How can I forget struggling to get out of bed at the unearthly hour of 2 am to catch our only flight of the day from New Delhi to Paro. Paro airport is one of the most dangerous airports of the world akin to Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport which closed in 1998. It is located between Himalayan peaks and deep valleys and rely on only a limited number of highly skilled pilots who are certified to land, particularly in atrocious weather, as they mainly rely on landmarks to land due to limited radar capabilities.

Our amazing Drukair pilots not only got us safely there and back, but gifted us with the jewel of a dawn, and our very first glimpse of Everest on our side of the aircraft. The early morning light was perfect and the flight turbulence free. Saying that it was a spiritual moment for me is an understatement.

my first view, from my window seat, of Sagarmartha [the peak of heaven], its Sanskrit name

Everest holds a special place in my consciousness. My younger nephew David led the very first Singapore expedition to Everest in 1998, and is the author of several motivational books. Shortly after his momentous expedition, he was in a coma for almost two years with Guillain-Barré syndrome. I remember him mentioning to me that he believed he had contracted GBS in Katmandu. His immune system attacked his peripheral nervous system which caused his paralysis and muscle weakness from this rare neurological disorder. If memory serves, he was only able to communicate with his parents with his eye movements.

After his long recovery, he returned to his love of mountaineering and led over 15 more expeditions though disabled in one lower leg from GBS. What he has been through, and the way he re-started both his personal and professional life still leaves me in awe of the indomitability of the human spirit.

One Bhutanese individual also came to mind as I’m writing this month’s newsletter.

In one of the major draughty Paro monasteries, a child monk was bent over his small desk repeating his sutras. I was fully cocooned in fleece from the cold when I saw him with just his prayer robe on. I felt his aloneness. I went over quietly and asked him what he missed most from, and, of home. He looked up at me, and in perfect English, replied that what he missed most was his grandmother cooking her homemade sausages for him every morning for breakfast. We then shared a moment of silent understanding before I apologised for disturbing him, thanked him for speaking with us, and left him to return to his prayers. On my way out of the monastery, I turned around briefly to mentally wish him a long life of learning, freedom from too much suffering, with a hope that his family, particularly his grandmother, would one day be even more proud of him when he emerges as a compassionate and adult Buddhist monk.

It was only when I returned to our lodge and sat by our clear pristine stream under an impossibly clear blue sky that I remembered I had forgotten to ask his name.

I have always believed that Hope finds us, when and if, we really need it most.

*

February 2025 sees the launch of i get lost again, cherita 96 and blue sky, dua Anthology 13.

There are now 96 anthologies of the cherita, and are available on Amazon in paperback and kindle, along with 17 Gembun Anthologies, and 13 Dua Anthologies, with more coming your way.

www.thecherita.com/bookshop/

*

i get lost again is our 96th book in the cherita series of storytelling books, with 90 virgin cherita of more timeless stories to hopefully inspire our readers and poets to join our caravanserai of storytellers.

i get lost again showcases 90 fine cherita and cherita terbalik from writers and poets who hail from UK, USA, Singapore, India, Canada and Germany.

i get lost again, currently 96th on the list, belongs to the ongoing the cherita series, as do my personal ongoing writing in one breath series of virgin Cherita, Cherita and Tanka, Cherita and Haiku, and Cherita, Tanka and Haiku books, and lastly my poems for inner rooms series with its 18 Tanka and Haiku books. All these books are available in paperback and kindle on Amazon.

Two of my own books of virgin Gembun, the weight of rain and blank screen, and my two books of Dua, the journey east and dancing shoes, and now arriving nowhere, my first cherita, gembun and dua book, have all been added to my writing in one breath series.

I have edited this book as I have all the other anthologies of the cherita, to be experienced two ways. It can be read as one storybook but also as an anthology of individual poems. Two reading experiences within one book, filled with stories of Life, Love, Loss and Renewal.

cherita terbalik continues to capture the imagination of poets and there are again fine examples in this edition.

Featured Poets as they appear in this anthology :-

ai li/ Joanna Ashwell/ Barun Saha/ Ceri Marriott/ Jan Stretch/ Neena Singh/ Partha Sarkar/ Biswajit Mishra/ C.X. Turner/ Barun Saha/ Daniel W. Brown/ Teri Messmer/ Vidya Premkumar/ Nolcha Mir Fox/ Lisa Ann Sparaco/ Taura Scott/ Ram Chandran/ john zheng/ Isabella Kramer/ Larry Kimmel/ Laughing waters/ Sigrid Saradunn/ Lee Hudspeth/

Six sample virgin Cherita from this anthology :-

young windows
paint the wall
with summer

an old ceiling
hanging
beyond sight

Barun Saha

*

from my deck chair
the softening
colours of the sky

the stillness of the air

the peace
I wish for all

Jan Stretch

*

fallen blossoms

I pause
to listen
for the echo

of familiar
footsteps

Neena Singh

*

my collection
of designer sunglasses

now retirees

trying
to remember
the sun

ai li

*

floating
like mist across the bridge

from her world
to mine
we touch

but only briefly

C.X. Turner

*

this morning
rain

on the field

breathe in, breathe out
the duet
of existence

Daniel W. Brown


the cherita lighthouse has been awarded to the following writers and poets in this anthology for their timeless Cherita :

Jan Stretch/ Neena Singh/ C.X. Turner/ Daniel W. Brown/ Teri Messmer/ Partha Sarkar/ Isabella Kramer/

*

blue sky is our dua anthology 13, and it appears alongside i get lost again this month.

https://www.thecherita.com/dua-bookshop/

blue sky, our 13th Dua Anthology with 90 virgin Dua poems, has attracted writers and poets from UK, USA, Singapore, Germany, India and Canada.

I would like to thank all the contributing poets and writers for their patience and hope they will find blue sky a worthy read.

Featured Poets as they appear in this edition:

Pitt Büerken/ Prashanth V/ Ceri Marriott/ ai li/ Richa Sharma/ Vidya Premkumar/ Bryan Rickert/ Jan Stretch/ Allison Douglas-Tourner/ Karina Klesko/ nivy/ Partha Sarkar/

 

A dua bella has been awarded to the following writers and poets in this edition :

Vidya Premkumar/ Pitt Büerken/ Partha Sarkar/ Allison Douglas-Tourner/ nivy/ Jan Stretch/

Six sample virgin dua from this anthology :-

dipped a toe in the river

now part of the sea

Jan Stretch

*

rainbow-coloured

the smallest umbrella

Richa Sharma

*

a lake

that autumn colours

ai li

*

a rendezvous

with his scent

Karina Klesko

nursery

a bud calls out

nivy

*

the writing on the wall,

was it always there?

Ceri Marriott

*

This is the March update on the cherita award :

Someone asked me the other day what a cherita lighthouse was.

 

These are timeless pieces of cherita that resonate with me, and hopefully with our readers as well, was my answer, and which are worthy of a special award which the cherita lighthouse, as well as a gem and dua bella are, for gembun and dua respectively. These are pieces that can be read in your mind or aloud.

Here are six beautiful virgin Cherita which I awarded the Lighthouse awards to from home for the wind, dream journal and wondering where, three titles from our cherita anthologies collection, to hopefully inspire and guide you to the many possibilities possible with my storytelling genre in 6 lines.

If anyone is seriously considering writing Cherita well, my advice is for you to get hold of a copy of either one or both of our Cherita Award books or any of my own books which will help as reference guides for widening the storytelling scope for creating timeless Cherita.

I hope this cherita will further inspire you, should you decide to submit your virgin cherita for the cherita award? We also now have Joanna Ashwell and Ceri Marriott, our first two Cherita Award recipients, with River Lanterns and soiree, their respective books. Who will be our next Cherita Award poet?

dandelion
wish
hides

in a spider web
waiting

to be blown away

Pat Geyer
from home for the wind
the cherita

*

unfettered

I let
myself go

a red kite’s wings
measure the width
of this loneliness

Debbie Strange
from home for the wind
the cherita

*


a way out

perhaps
or is this

another sliding door
where time jars
between a dream

Joanna Ashwell
from dream journal
the cherita

*

the butterfly

in me
in you

let’s see
where . . .
the breeze takes us

Caroline Skanne
from dream journal
the cherita

*

this time again

I prepare my mind
to study harder

but then
my eyes fell on the world outside,
playing with the wind

Muskaan Ahuja
from wondering where
the cherita

*

searching
for an apple

to curl up in

and
give birth
to the rain

Réka Nyitrai
from wondering where
the cherita

For all new entrants, please be aware that fewer words in your cherita are always more, and to not repeat a subject matter often, unless of course you are able to come to it from a very different angle or perspective, rendering it anew. You want your portfolio to be one of timelessness and wonder, and to avoid a sameyness of subject matter which would inevitably make your portfolio bland and yawn inducing.

*

Here’s March 2025’s update on the forthcoming Gembun Anthologies 18-20:

With a bit of luck, Anthology 18 should be the next anthology to appear soon.

Anthology 19 is very nearly there with just a few spots left to fill.

Meanwhile, Anthology 20 is filling up with your timeless gembun.

Do please keep sending in your wonderful gembun stories but be aware that I do not read simultaneous submissions. Please do not send in work you have submitted elsewhere.

The Gembun Anthologies 1 – 17 [snow clouds, evening, paper talisman, windswept rain, deepening night, the old, white flowers, coming home, bedtime story, rain song, ice storm, belonging, the water, dancing silhouette, empty bottles, i remember and just before dark] are now available on Amazon in paperback and kindle, thanks to all your amazing enthusiasm and strong faith for, and in this genre.

Careful collating and editing are crucial for each anthology, for it to be a timeless work of short stories in the gembun format.

Meanwhile, if you have written gembun that you consider to be special, please do not hesitate to send them in.

Full details on the link below if you have not, as yet, sent in your Gembun/Gembun Terbalik for consideration.

www.thecherita.com/gembun-anthos/

Fine examples by Larry Kimmel, Joanna Ashwell and myself can be found, along with Gembun’s original guidelines on my personal website www.aili.co.uk/gembun/

*

Here too, is March 2025’s update on the other forthcoming Dua Anthologies 14-16 :

Anthology 14 is now complete and wating for me to give it a  final proof reading.

Anthology 15 is very nearly there.

Meanwhile Anthology 16 is steadily filling up with more and more of with your timeless dua.

Writing good Dua requires a different mental discipline to Gembun and Cherita but it can be just as good a workout for our brain cells. Your storytelling skills are kept honed when you write all these three unique short form poetry genres. Seriously though, can we resist a challenge to tell our stories in a timeless fashion? I know I can’t. All these three genres challenge me to become a better storyteller in 6, 4 and 2 lines.

All Dua Anthologies 1 – 13 [remembering, I know the way, the light dying, the rain, something rare, all is dark, listening to the ocean, no longer sky, home in rain wildflowers were here, in the room, hammock afternoon and blue sky] are now available on Amazon in paperback and kindle, thanks to all your faith in Dua and your creative flair for telling stories even more minimally than Cherita and Gembun.

Tough editing is essential for each anthology, for it to be a strong and timeless book of minimal stories in the dua format.

You will find full info for this dua and its guidelines on www.thecherita.com/dua
and on www.aili.co.uk/dua

If you have written dua that you consider to be special, please do not hesitate to send them in stories but be aware that I do not read simultaneous submissions. Please do not send in work you have submitted elsewhere.

Full details on the link below if you have not, as yet, sent in your Dua for consideration.

www.thecherita.com/dua

Fine examples by ai li can be found, along with Dua’s original guidelines on my personal website www.aili.co.uk

*

NEW SUBMISSION GUIDELINES JANUARY 2025

Please can you now submit all of your submissions in Arial 11 font size, left justified with no italics, and also use our standard submission email for all our genres. This will be in effect as of now.

You will still be required to fill in your hometown/city and country with all submissions [this info is for our files] but only your country will be published in our books from this edition onwards. This will help speed up my proof reading.

There are also no longer any deadlines for submissions which are now on an ongoing basis.

Edition # 8.7 will be the last book numbered this way. From January 2025, all our books will be simply numbered, starting with Cherita 94, Cherita 95, Cherita 96 and so forth. This new numbering style will be incorporated in all the acceptance letters.

from sandalwood dreaming by ai li

 

rain
has come

to
my night
i step into

the mirror

 

ai li
from sandalwood dreaming by ai li

 

*

ai li

CHERITA [1 — 2 — 3]
[pronounced CHAIR-rita]

 

 

temple bell

through fog
dawn

is still
a
haunting away

from paper flowers by ai li

 

 

 

General Information on the Gembun and Dua Anthologies

All our anthologies have 90 poems within.

In the next few months or so, I will endeavour to launch the finished anthologies which I hope to launch alternating with the dua anthologies, where possible, as you have all been saints with your inspirational patience.

I would also like to profusely thank all the poets whose gembun and dua have been selected for the forthcoming anthologies for being so patient.

My wish, as I have indicated before, is for the both Anthologies to become a fluid and ongoing series for showcasing the best of the Gembun and Dua genres with the gems from your writing. That has not changed.

Gembun and Cherita share the same year of birth and hopefully they will continue to celebrate storytelling with Life, Love, Loss and Renewal into and beyond their third decade.

Dua may not have been around as long as Gembun and Cherita, but it is part and parcel of a storytelling trio which perpetuates the stories of Life, Love, Loss and Renewal.

 

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

Mother Teresa

 

Stephen King “The secret about writing, is sit down and write.”

 

Other

 

Robert Lee Brewer “Comfort Killers,”

Robert Lee Brewer “summer song,

 

Gypsy Blue Rose Today

 

Solage

 

 

  1. Kathryn Abel It’s so cold
  2. Kathryn Abel Don’t Understand Cricket
  3. Kathryn Abel A Man Without Care
  4. Kathryn Abel Wrote a Line
  5. Kathryn Abel Soaring Too High
  6. David Schenider October Charm

 

Oddquain

 

Cynthia Kay ArmstrongAutumn Cynthia Kay Armstrong Hope Cynthia Kay Armstrong Cards Cynthia Kay ArmstrongGlenda L. Hand Change of Seasons (Mirror Oddquain)Glenda L. Hand Celebration (Butterfly Oddquain)Glenda L. Hand At Last I’ve Let Go (Crown Oddquain)

Claire Litchfield  Glad
Linda Smith Tidbits Seen Through a Window

Linda Smith Nnibble Dove dark chocolate

JVG They Keep Coming

Gypsy Rose Blue A rose represents

Gypsy Rose Blue wilted rose bouquet

Gypsy Rose Blue roses stand erect

 

Gypsy Blue Rose under the blooming tree TWO GOGYOHKA EXAMPLE

Gypsy Blue Rose you come over me
Gypsy Blue Rose Roses stand erect

Lawrencealot A piaku
C.W. Bryan a piaku-

Gypsy Blue Rose Today

Stephanie Abney New Born La Pensee
Stephanie Abney Grandkids La pense

Stephanie Abney Freedom

Stephene Abney Ice Cream

 

Eric Golner Rick form creator’s example

Lawrencealot Captive Form Rick’s 32

 

John Barr the south China Sea

John Baar Gloria Visits the Fry House

John Baar Chant for a Hurricane

 

Lee-jae-Young From Blossoms

Rictameter

 

 

Jason Wilkins Beauty

Jason Wilkins Satin

Aubrey Steedman Childhood

Judi Van Gorder Listening

Judi Van Gorder Memo To Hotshot

 

Qoute  “The secret about writing, is sit down and write.” – Stephen King

Memento

 

Emily Romano Gardening The Rose*

Jan Turner  *Commemorating The Holiday Of Roses

Graduation By Judi Van Gorder
Holiday At Low Tide By Judi Van Gorder

 

Payar

 

Judi Van Gorder Temptation
Lawrencealot Non Pro Se (Form: Payar) –

 

7-7-7-7

 

Gypsy Blue Rose Love the Black Widow Spider

 

Gypsy Blue Rose Today I Wrote a Love Poem for You

Cinquin

 

Jeanne Cassir’s First Visit to the Ocean

Quotes

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.~~Robert Frost

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.~~John Keats

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.~~Carl Sandburg

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.~~Plutarch

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.~~Edgar Allan Poe

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.~~David Carradine

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.~~Octavio Paz

Stephen King “The secret about writing, is sit down and write.”

 

Nove Otto

 

Scott J. Alcorn Canebrake WhispersScott J. Alcorn Caribbean Nights

Tybun

 

Marion Gibson  Sowing tyburn

Japanese haiku:

 

Bachao Old pond

Gypsy Blue Rose Sunday morning light
Lawrencealot We Missed the Dance

 

Rictameter

Jason Wilkins Beauty

Jason Wilkins Satin

Aubrey Steedman Childhood

Judi Van Gorder Listening

Judi Van Gorder Memo To Hotshot

 

Robert Brewer

 

Robert Brewer Better yet

Robert Brewer AI Did Not Write This Poem

1.    Robert Lee Brewer The Last Thing

 

Anonymous She left the porch light on.
Maya Angelo Still I RiseRobert Frost ~ Fire and Ice Rudyard Kipling If

Lai

 

Mike Montreuil March 2026

Judi Van Gorder Aliens

 

The Perseids
Crowning a Fairy
Staying In

 

Trimeric Poem

 

Robert Lee Brewer About Superheroes,

Judi Van Gorder Customer Service

Alan J Wright Inkblock

Linda Versa Smith Crows and Ravens

 

1st Place ~ “Gone Things”  by

2nd Place ~ “Lost in One’s Own Mind”  by

3rd Place ~ “Crossing Sevens”  by

HM ~ “Pad Thai ผัดไทย”   by  (941)

HM ~ “Taps For Claire”   by  (3,180)

HM ~ “Hello Memories — Goodbye, Immutable ”  by

 

Acrostic monorhyme

 

Bianca More for the fun, than for the need

 

La Pensee

 

 Stephanie Abney New Born
Stephanie Abbey Grandkids

Stephanie Abbie Freedom

Stephanie Abbey Ice Cream

 

 

Fan Story Review

Tikok Poem: The Moon Rises Slowly Above The Still Sea

 

 

Epic Epitat

 

Merv Griffin: “I Will Not Be Right Back After This Message.”
John Yeast: “Here Lies Johnny Yeast. Pardon Me For Not Rising.”
Jane Doe: “Just Close Your Eyes And You Will See

 

Sparrowlet

 

Judi Van Gorder Lets Talk

Ron Rowland Facing The Storm

Katheen Sparrow Deer In Winter

 

 

 

Estonian Haiku

Jürgen Rooste Nordic Walk

 

Author unknown, In complete darkness we are all the same.

 

JD Gorder Dance with Wind

Linda Versa Smith new techno gizmos

 

 

 

Cascade

 

Judi Van Gorder Vote
Udit Bhatia  Cascade Poem

Cascade Anxious Inquiry

 

Quotes to Ponder

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.~~Neale Donald Walsh

If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.~~John C. Maxwell

You will never improve in life if you’re always living on easy street. Strength and progress can be gained if only you just step outside of your comfort zone.~~Dee Waldeck

Sometimes we have to step out of our comfort zones. We have to break the rules. And we have to discover the sensuality of fear. We need to face it, challenge it, dance with it.~~Kyra Davis

As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.~~Robin Sharma

If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.~~Thomas Jefferson

Quotes to Ponder

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.~~Neale Donald Walsh

If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.~~John C. Maxwell

You will never improve in life if you’re always living on easy street. Strength and progress can be gained if only you just step outside of your comfort zone.~~Dee Waldeck

Sometimes we have to step out of our comfort zones. We have to break the rules. And we have to discover the sensuality of fear. We need to face it, challenge it, dance with it.~~Kyra Davis

As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.~~Robin Sharma

If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.~~Thomas Jefferson

 

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

  1. At Christmas, all roads lead home.~~Marjorie Holmes“It’s not what’s under the Christmas tree that matters, it’s who’s around it.~~Charlie BrownChristmas will always be as long as we stand heart to heart and hand in hand.~~Dr. Seuss

 

 

Lotus Tasseri  Scribblings

Lancelot Backyard

Fan Story review

 

  1. Annoymous be here for a while
  2. Annoymous beautiful butterflies
  3. John Crawford My Wee Abode
  4. Pearl Edwards Nature’s Recycler’s
  5. Evelinne a Fan Story Halloween
  6. Cecilia A Heiskary Ghoul’s Night Out
  7. Rama Devi Meditation
  8. Cecilia Hesikary
  9. Private Face
  10. Debbie D’Arcy Mary Shelley
  11. Debbie D’Arcy Lord Bryon
  12. Debbie D’Arcy Volodymyr Zelensky
  13. Karen Cherry Common Sense for Seniors 337-348
  14. Rick Gardner Innocent of Guilty
  15. Harry Craft A Kangaroo from Baraboo
  16. Nicki B Robin Williams
  17. Harry Craft, the Cell Phone
  18. Estory In this Autumn Time
  19. Cecilia a Heiskary Watcher at the Window
  20. Cecilia A Heiskary Panda
  21. Janet Foor God’s Back Yard
  22. Mrs Anna Howard: Difficult Decisions
  23. Harambe iz ur Daddy rejected
  24. Sally Law, Blood Moon and Blood Rain
  25. Robert Lukeman Life – A Marriane Poem
  26. Pam Lonsdale Descent
  27. Kentucky Sweet Pea My Dogma
    Debbie Pick Marquette Thelma and Louise
  28. Debbie Pick Marquette Finding the Bright Side
  29. Debbie Pick Marquette March
  30. Debi Pick Marquette My Bedroom Window
  31. Debi Pick Marquette, Happy St Patrick’s Day
  32. Debbie Pick Marquette The Need to Share
  33. Nancy Jam Love in the w
  34. jacquelyn popp Mom’s Love
  35. Jaquelyn Poop Living the Dream, No Thank You
  36. Iraven Prayers for Eva
  37. Pam Respa Humanity
  38. Pam Respa, Renowned Violinist
  39. Pamusart I am Helpless
  40. Pamusart Colorful world
  41. Pamusart the Kidnapping
  42. Pamusart the Kidnapping Chapter Two
  43. Pamusart Sturdy Roots
  44. Pamusart Your Golden Aura
  45. Pamusart The Sword
  46. Pamusart The Planet Earth
  47. Barry Penfold Slow Dance with You
  48. Pam Respa Humanity
  49. Sanku the Woods
  50. Stacy MS Vanishing Points
  51. YM Roger Always For Now
  52. Fan Story Review
  53. Debbie D’ Arcy Bee Gees
  54. Debbie D’Arcy Shotgun Willie Nelson
  55. Janet Floor Daybreak
  56. Anna Howard How to Move On
  57. Nicki Nance Emotional Support
  58. Pamusart On Finding Peace
  59. Pamusart Jean Marie Lane
  60. Pamusart the Empty Notebook
  61. Winter Bard Ode to Night
  62. Rachael Allen Proud to Be His Daugther
  63. Rick Gardner Wishes to Have
  64. Cecilia A Heiskary Sumatran Orangutan
  65. Cecilia A Heiskary Guiana Red-Face Monkey
  66. Dolly’s Poems the Witching Hour
  67. Kapot Swimming in Pain
  68. Debbie Pick Marquette Men are From Mars, Women from Venus
  69. Miss Merrie This Love
  70. Nancyjam the meadow
  71. Gypsy Blue Rose Billowing Clouds
  72. Pamusart The Kidnapping Chapter 3
  73. Tea for Two It was the Shoes
  74. Tea for Two Wordsmiths with Big Faces
  75. Anonymous Today
  76. Anonymous Cougar on the Prowl
  77. Anonymous Cougar on the Prowl
  78. Debbie D’Arcy Mary Shelley
  79. Cecilia, a Heiskary Watcher at the Window
  80. Cecilia Heiskary Janguars
  81. Cecilia A Heiskary Insane
  82. Anonymous I am Fire
  83. Anonymous Ode to My Scrunchies
  84. Anonymous Wildfire Naani
  85. Anonymous – A Tick A Tock
  86. Anonymous – To Shelter Feathered Songs
  87. Anonymous Even the Odds contest Carl Sanberg
  88. Anonymous Nonesense
  89. Anonymous Female Strength in Nature
  90. Anonymous Loon
  91. Anonymous – Owl on the Hunt
  92. Anonymous the Wild Side
  93. Patrick Bernady Her Rage
  94. Jamison Brown Before the Wind Calls
  95. lJbutterfly Prayer for Debbie Pick Marquette
  96. Debbie D’Arcy Anne Frank
  97. Debie D’arcy James Baldwin
  98. Debbie D’Arcy – Jimmy Carter
  99. Harry Craft I Was a Spy
  100. Harry Craft What Happened to the Word Groovy
  101. Harry Craft What Does Freedom Mean to You?
  102. Harry Craft – Peace
  103. John Crawford Rudyard Kipling
  104. Donald Saacca Forever friends
  105. Donaldandvicki – Tender Trap
  106. Rick Gardner the Sun, the Desert, the One
  107. Douglas Goff – Perspective
  108. Dolly Poems Granite Island
  109. Elias Noor The Whispher of Time
  110. Finback Never
  111. Finback When Shadows Creep
  112. Gypsey Rose Blue Gardens of Delight
  113. Cecilia a Heikary Bobcat
  114. Cecila Heiskary – Brown Bear
  115. Cecilia A Hiskary Horses
  116. Ceclia A Heiskary The Magic
  117. Cecilia A Heiskary – Night Life
  118. Cecila Heiskary – Snow
  119. Christy 710 – Happy New Year from Aus
  120. Marylyn Hamilton Darkness Descends
  121. Marylyn Hamilton He Waits
  122. Marylyn Hamilton Winging It
  123. Tom Hormoz A Griever’s Prayer
  124. Tom Horonzy Rumpelstilskin Unleashed
  125. Kaput howling at Moon Haiku
  126. Kt Silent Dancers
  127. KT Shades of Blue –
  128. Mrs KTEnding Pain’s Servitude
  129. 5 fish JM Jenca
  130. Debbie Pick Marquette Believe in Miracles
  131. Debi Pick Marquette My Cornea Disease
  132. Debbie Pick Marquette – Keeping Gypsy in Prayers
  133. Debbie Pick Marquette – My Lifetime
  134. Debbie Pick Marquette Romance on the Beach
  135. Me and Erin G – Long Gone Away
  136. Lana Marie Hairy Nipple
  137. Paul McFarland January
  138. JUMBO 1 Shame
  139. Pam (respa) Black History Month
  140. Tea for Two Eclectic Wordsmiths
  141. Ean Black I Write
  142. Richard Frohm Dreams
  143. KiwiSteveh Sudden Tears
  144. Lana Marie The Dash Between
  145. Pamusart – The Kirby Part 1
  146. Pamusart – The Kirby Part 2
  147. Pamusart – The Kirby Part 3
  148. Pamusart – The Kirby Part 4
  149. Pamusart – The Kirby Case Part 5
  150. Pamusart – The Kirby Case Part 6
  151. Pamusart – The Kirby Case Part 7
  152. Pamusart – The Kirby Case Part 8
  153. Pamusart Rembering the Past
  154. Pamusart Old Man at the River
  155. Pamusart The Great Apes
  156. Pamusart cooing doves
  157. Pamusart Exploding Star
  158. Pamusart Purple Flowers Wake
  159. Pamusart the Search
  160. Pamusart On Finding Peace
  161. Pamusart Jean Marie Lane
  162. Pamusart the cavesweet
  163. Pamusart Independence
  164. Pamusart the Broken Man
  165. Lea Tonin – Famitree Flames
  166. Lea Tonin1 – Humiston
  167. Lea Toni1 – Mansion
  168. Lea Toni1 – The Meet
  169. Alexandra Trovato A Monster Schemes Under Your Bed
  170. Alexandra Trovato A Timely Trump Limerick
  171. Willie P Smith – Sleigh Ride
  172. Willie P Smith – Walk with Me
  173. Teafor2 – Last Night of the Year
  174. Jessica Wheller – Waking Daisy
  175. Jessica Wheller – January Wind
  176. Nicki Nance Emotional Support
  177. Cecilia A Heiskary Daffodils
  178. Cecila A Heiskary Jaguaurs
  179. Cecila A Heiskary Insane
  180. Cecilia A Heiskary Insane
  181. Cecilia Heiskary Daffodils
  182. Debbie D’arcy Rest
  183. Annonymous Golden Years
  184. Anonymous AI Future
  185. D’Arcy Rest
  186. Cecilia A Heiskary Jagaurs
  187. Cecilia A Heiskary Insane
  188. Gyspy Rose blue Geologist Waka
  189. Annoymous AI Future
  190. Annoymous Tiny Puppy
  191. Karen Cherry Common Sense for Seniors 337-348
  192. Rick Gardner Innocent of Guilty

 

  1. Harry Craft A Kangaroo from Baraboo
  2. Nancyjam Love in the winter
  3. Debbie Pick Marquette Finding the Bright Side
  4. Debbie Pick Marquette March
  5. Pamusart The Sword
  6. Pamusart The Planet Earth
  7. Barry Penfold Slow Dance with You
  8. YM Roger Always For Now
  9. Arabellesom Mom Truest Love Ever Known
  10. Debbie D’Arcy Lord Bryon
  11. Nicki B Robin Williams
  12. Harry Craft the Cell Phone
  13. Estory in this Autumn Time
  14. Mrs Anna Howard Difficult Decisions
  15. Debbie Pick Marquette Thelma and Louise
  16. Pamusart Your Golden Aura
  17. Rachell Allen Public Face/Private Face
  18. Anonymous Today
  19. Rachael Allen Exceptional Teacher
  20. Debbie D’Arcy Voldymyr Zelensky
  21. Kentucky Sweet Pea My Dogma
  22. Pamusart The Kidnapping
  23. Pamusart the Kidnapping Chapter Two
  24. Pam Respa Rennoved Violinst
  25. Rachael Allen Proud to Be His Daugther
  26. Rick Gardner Wishes to Have
  27. Cecilia A Heiskary Sumatran Orangutan
  28. Cecilia A Heiskary Guiana Red-Face Monkey
  29. Dolly’s Poems the Witching Hour
  30. Kapot Swimming in Pain
  31. Debbie Pick Marquette Men are from Mars, Women from Venus
  32. Miss Merrie This Love
  33. Nancyjam the Meadow
  34. Gypsy Blue Rose Billowing Clouds
  35. Pamusart the Kidnapping Chapter 3
  36. Pamusart Colorful world
  37. Pamusart the World Around Lavenders
  38. Annoymous Maladorous
  39. Tea for Two It Was the Shoes
  40. Tea for Two Wordsmith with Big Faces
  41. Iraven Prayers for Eva
  42. Sally Law Blood Moon and Blood Rain
  43. Jaquelyn Poop Living the Dream, No Thank You
  44. Debi Pick Marquette My Bedroom Window
  45. Debi Pick Marquette Happy St Patrick’s Birthday
  46. Debi Pick Marquette My Bedroom Window
  47. Debi Pick Marquette Happy St Patrick’s Birthday
  48. Rven Prayers for Eva
  49. Jennifer Secret Rendezvous
  50. Sally Law’s Blood Moon and Blood Rain
  51. Jaquelyn Poop Living the Dream, No Thank You
  52. Sanku A New Day
  53. Aiona I Am Photine
  54. Annyomous Too Many Boyfriends For This Is Serious
  55. Annyomous Cary Hope
  56. Annyomous Cicada Watch
  57. Annyomous Ned the Postman
  58. Brad Bennett I Saw A Man Walking Crying
  59. Carasdreams Betrayal
  60. Cullen Bob I Just Want To Leave Things Be
  61. Chris Davies Irish
  62. Iza Dealeanu The Wandering Queen
  63. Dolly’s Poems Graveyard Shift
  64. Cecilia A Heiskary Fun Time
  65. Rick Gardner April Is Today And The Next Day
  66. Brenda Strauser Early Signs Of Spring
  67. Alexandra Trovato Real Love
  68. Rachell Allen’s Perception Of Time
  69. Dolly’s Poems Speak Up: A Sonnet
  70. Jim Vechio   The House Of The Raison Bun
  71. Stu Harrel Columbus Calls To Me
  72. Pam Respa Delicate Blossoms
  73. Gypsy Blue Rose The The Treasure Inside
  74. Rsport Daunting Chasm
  75. Debbie Pick Marquette Regina’s Birthday
  76. Jessizero In Memoriam
  77. Roy Owen Love’s Measure
  78. JLR DO Over
  79. Ricahrd E Parkison Life in an Hourglass
  80. Jamison Brown The Declaration Then and Now
  81. Rama Devi writing rhymes
  82. Rama Devi Extinction
  83. Stoncosos1 Sunset Sleeps
  84. Richard E Parkison Life In an Hourglass
  85. Lancellot An Old Man’s Folly
  86. Clockwise Grief in Gray
  87. Cecillia A Heiskary The Forest
  88. Miss Merri Out of the Winter
  89. Jim Wille Streaming Woe
  90. Jim Wille Trolling the Bureaucrats
  91. Anonymous My Guiding Light
  92. Anonymous Shingles
  93. Beth Shelby Spring Sonnet
  94. Harry Croft A Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer
  95. Dolly’s Poem Bee Business
  96. Dolly’s Poem: Life is Short
  97. Dolly’s Poems Contemp of Youth
  98. Dolly’s Poem: The Arabian Sea
  99. Dolly’s Poem: Shadows Lurk Sonnet
  100. Dolly’s Poems: He Changed
  101. Pearl Edwards Lavender Mist
  102. Pearl Edwards I Remember When
  103. Evilynne, Do You Remember Me
  104. Gypsy Rose Blue When I Look At You
  105. Marylyn Hamilton Monday Mona Lisa
  106. Harmony 13 Before You Speak
  107. Kahpot Misplace Bravery
  108. Kahpot Rain
  109. Cecilia A Heiskary
  110. Shelly Kaye The Forest is Watching
  111. Pookietoo, I Felt Lost
  112. Penofire Dreams
  113. Poem Lover Story Time
  114. Mrs Kt, When Faith is Tested
  115. Samandlancelot Unexpected Outcome
  116. Jessica Wheller Called
  117. Lo Anne Beery, Finally I See Her
  118. Dazed and Confused The Witch’s Jar
  119. Phil Doran Andalusia A Lachesis Poem
  120. Debbie Pick Marquette A Butterfly’s Birthday
  121. Richard Frohm’s Out Last Flight
  122. Jessizero My Lost Love
  123. Beth Shelby Desire for Life’s Best
  124. Zanya Searching
  125. Anonymous Grandkid’s Treasure Chest
  126. Anonymous Aging
  127. Carol Clark First Look
  128. Harambe iz ur Daddy Go Pro
  129. Marlyn Hamilton Dreaming
  130. Ceilia Heiskarry Sneer
  131. Ceilia Heiskarry Harpy Eagle
  132. Debi Pick Marquette
  133. Mintybee Our Silence is Full
  134. Rami Devi Forest Songs and Dances
  135. Brenda Strauser Scavenger Hunt
  136. Alexandra Trovato: Emotions and Writing
  137. Jessica Wheller Witness
  138. Yardier No Reason Why
  139. Anonymous the Serpent’s Kiss
  140. Lo Ann Berry About Me
  141. Blossom Chime Mondays Should be Illegal
  142. Cecilia A Heiskary My Angel Dog
  143. Cecilia A Heiskary Fall’s Coming
  144. Cecilia A Heiskary Venus Fly Trap
  145. Mrs Anna Howard Longing
  146. Dazed and Confused Blooming in the Night
  147. Hitcher Whisphered Words
  148. Rama Devi Book Mirrors
  149. Brenda Straser Tricky Squirell
  150. Jim Wile Goat Yoga
  151. Lo Ann Berry Answers
  152. Jumbo Internal Examination
  153. Mrs KT along the lakeshore
  154. Debbie Pick Marquette Auto-immune Family reunion
  155. Dragon poet feeding faith

349.               Alexandra Trovato, Answers

  1. Jamison Brown changes
  2. Anonymous A Season In Love
  3. Anonymous If You Cut Us, Do We Not Bleed?
  4. Amy Lynn Child, Mom, and Young Grandmother
  5. Amy Lynn Her Wish
  6. Karenina Emilyn’s Dream
  7. Debbie Pick Marquette Patch and Ruby Become Famous
  8. Debbie Pick Marquette, I see a Dove
  9. Pam Respa Nature’s harmony
  10. Hitcher Queen of the Damn
  11. Debbie Pick Marquette Assassinate
  12. Reso22 Paint Pour
  13. Resso Writer’s Right
  14. Teafor2 Unforgettable and Unforgivable
  15. Annyomous the dead
  16. Christmas candy. (found on Google – author unknown)

366.            Philip Doran Sepia

  1. Gypsy Blue Rose the Monster Among US
  2. Pearl Edwards Peace in the Mase minute poem
  3. Evilyne, that Magic Moment
  4. Ready to Fly, Hilda the Name
  5. Marlyn Hamilton Fan Story
  6. Cecilia A. Hesikary Halloween Crew
  7. Cecilia A. Hesikary, the Maze
  8. Kahlani Where Serenity Lives
  9. Kahlani, a Harvest Moon
  10. Khapot Acrostic
  11. Debbie Pick Marquette Happy Birthday, Bill
  12. Tea for the Last two
  13. Alexandra Trovato, the Porch Swing
  14. Alexandra Trovato Peace On Earth
  15. Debbie Pick Marquette A Birthday for Debora Dey
  16. Lancelot Inside Her Room
  17. Harmony 13 Getting Through This Life
  18. Iyenocka True Loyalty
  19. Tea for Two Individually and Collectively
  20. Cedar A birthday Tribute to Cedar
  21. Janet Floor Melancholy Day
  22. Mrs Kt To Dance Among the Maple Tees
  23. Sally Law Just the Way You Are
  24. Debbie Pick Marquette My Life in Rhyme
  25. Sammielwf Life on a Potao Farm In Main
  26. Anonymous Never Again
  27. Mrs KT On a Winter’s Morning
  28. Nommi 1331 Ebenezer’s Awakening
  29. Sammielwf the Forgotten
  30. Anonymous Asleep
  31. Anonymous Supergirl
  32. Walt Brown Water, Friend Or Foe
  33. Debbie Pick Marquette Sally And Jack’s 50th
  34. Mrs Anna Howar American Moon
  35. Sammielwf My Aunt Angelina
  36. Alexandra Trovato Animal Court
  37. Themarfbard_Michael Hospice Heroine
  38. L Raven Merry Christmas All
  39. Cogiator Touched By Angel
  40. Cecilia A Heiskrary Angel Dog
  41. Cecilia A Heiskrary Happy Birthday Eean
  42. Debbie Pick Marquette Happy Birthday Kylie

 

 

David Scheider

 

David Schnider Footprints in Time

Did Schinder Soldiers

David Schinder Together Forever

David Schinder The all Mighty Threasher Pantoum

 

Sonnet

  1. Starkafi Romantic Interlude
  2. Shakespear Sonnet for a Poet Grieving

 

 

Torque Poems

  1. ,Lawrencealot Anxious (Torque)
  2.  Michael Romani September 11, 2018 Big and Vicious

Tea Cup  Poems

  1. Sheley Keyes ILLUMINATION (5 syllables)
  2. Sheley Keyes Chatoyant (3
  3. Sheley Keyes Poetry (3
  4. Sheley Keyes Fuddy-duddy (4)
  5. Christmas Angel

 

The White Book Poems by Han Kang

 

Spring

Door

Swadlling Bands

Newborn Gown

Moon Shape Rice Cake

Fog

White City

Certain Objects

The Direction of the Light

Breast Milk

She

Candle

She

Rime

Frost

Wings

Fist

Snow

Snow Flakes

Perpetual Snow

Wave

Sleet

White Dog

Blizzard

Ashes

Salt

Moon

Lace Curtain

Breath Cloud

White Bird

Hankerchief

Milky Wave

Laughing Whitely

Yulan

Small White Pills

Sugar Cubes

Lights

A Thousand Points of Silver

Glittering

White Pebble

White Bone

Sand

White Hair

Clouds

Incandescent Bulb

White Nights

Island of Light

Black Writing Through White paper

Scattering

TO the Stillness

Bondary

Reedbed

White Butterfly

Spirit

Rice Raw and Cook

All Whiteness

Your Eyes

Shroud

Onni

Like a Clutch of Words Strewn Over White Petals

Morning robes

Smoke

Silence

Lower Teeth

Parting

All Whiteness

 

Korean Literature of Washington

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

End Poetry

 

 

 

 

Begin Harvard Classics

 

Harvard Classics

 

The volumes are:

Bolded read

 

 (1) Franklin, Woolman, Penn

 (2) Plato, Epictetus,

 Marcus, Aurelius Meditations

(3) Bacon,

Milton’s Prose,

Thomas Browne

(4) Complete Poems in English: Milton

(5) Essays and English Traits: Emerson (

6) Poems and Songs: Burns (7)

Confessions of St. Augustine. Imitation of Christ

(8) Nine Greek Dramas (9)

Letters and Treatises of Cicero

Pliny

(10) Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith

(11) Origin of Species: Darwin

(12) Plutarch’s Lives (13)

 Aeneid Virgil (14)

Don Quixote Part 1: Cervantes

(15) Pilgrim’s Progress. Donne

Herbert. Bunyan, Walton

(16) The Thousand and One Night

(17) Folk-Lore and Fable. Aesop, Grimm,

Andersen

Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales

(18) Modern English Drama

(19) Faust,

Egmont Etc.

Doctor Faustus,

Goethe,

Marlowe

(20) The Divine Comedy: Dante

(21) I Promessi

Sposi,

Manzoni

(22) The Odyssey: Homer

(23) Two Years Before Mast. Dana

(24) On the Sublime French Revolution Etc. Burke

(25) Autobiography Etc. Essays and Addresses: J.S. Mill,

  1. Carlyle

(26) Continental Drama

(27) English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay

(28) Essays. English and American

(29) Voyage of the Beagle: Darwin (

30) Faraday,

Helmholtz,

Kelvin,

Newcomb,

Geikie

(31) Autobiography: Benvenuto, Cellini

(32) Literary and Philosophical Essays:

Montaigne,

Sainte Beuve,

Renan,

Lessing,

Schiller,

Kant,

Mazzini

(33) Voyages and Travels

(34) Descartes,

Voltaire,

Rousseau,

Hobbes

(35) Chronicle and Romance:

Froissart,

Malory,

Holinshed (36)

Machiavelli, the Prince

More,

Luther

(37) Locke,

Berkeley,

Hume

(38) Harvey,

Jenner,

Lister,

Pasteur

(39) Famous Prefaces

(40) English Poetry 1: Chaucer to Gray

(41) English Poetry 2: Collins to Fitzgerald

(42) English Poetry 3: Tennyson to Whitman

(43) American Historical Documents

Federalist Papers

Constitution

Bill of Rights

Declaration of Indepedence

(44) Sacred Writings 1

(45) Sacred Writings 2

The Bible

The Quaran

The Analect of Confucius

Mencius

Buddist Writing

Bhaga Vita

Lao Tzo The Tao

 

(46) Elizabethan Drama 1

(47) Elizabethan Drama 2

(48) Thoughts and Minor Works: Pascal

(49) Epic and Saga (

50) Introduction, Readers Guide,

 

50 Books to Read Before You Die

Vol 1 starts with Volume One


Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Jane: Emma
Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot
Barbusse, Henri: The Inferno
Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill
Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Forster, E. M.: Howard End
Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls
Gorky, Maxim: The Mother
Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady

 

Volume 2


– Little Women [Louisa May Alcott]
– Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen]
– Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) [J.M. Barrie]
– Cabin Fever [ B. M. Bower]
– The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– A Little Princess [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll]
– The King in Yellow [Robert William Chambers]
– The Man Who Knew Too Much [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]
– The Most Dangerous Game [Richard Connell]
– Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition [Charles Darwin]
– The Iron Woman [Margaret Deland]
– David Copperfield [Charles Dickens]
– Oliver Twist [Charles Dickens]
– A Tale of Two Cities [Charles Dickens]
– The Double [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– A Room with a View [E. M. Forster]
– Dream Psychology [Sigmund Freud]
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles [Thomas Hardy]
– Siddhartha [Hermann Hesse]
– Dubliners [James Joyce]
– The Fall of the House of Usher [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Arabian Nights [Andrew Lang]
– The Sea Wolf [Jack London]
– The Call of Cthulhu [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– Anne of Green Gables [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– Beyond Good and Evil [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Black Cat [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Raven [Edgar Allan Poe]
– Swann’s Way [Marcel Proust]
– Romeo and Juliet [William Shakespeare]
– Treasure Island [Robert Louis Stevenson]
– The Elements of Style [William Strunk Jr.

 

Vol 3  finished keeping for the historical record

 

This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names.

Starting with volume 3 then will go back and do volumes one, two, and the Harvard classics. The goal is to finish all of these by the end of next year.  I almost finished Volume One.  Will do some of the WC reading books as well.

– What’s Bred in the Bone [Grant Allen]
– The Golden Ass [Lucius Apuleius]
– Meditations [Marcus Aurelius]
– Northanger Abbey [Jane Austen]
– Lady Susan [Jane Austen]
– The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [Lyman Frank Baum]
– The Art of Public Speaking [Dale Breckenridge Carnegie]
– The Blazing World [Margaret Cavendish]
– The Wisdom of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Heretics [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Donnington Affair [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Innocence of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [John Cleland]
– The Moonstone [Wilkie Collins]
– Lord Jim [Joseph Conrad]
– The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– The Pickwick Papers [Charles Dickens]
– A Christmas Carol [Charles Dickens]
– Notes From The Underground [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Gambler par Fyodor [Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Lost World [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Hound of the Baskervilles [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Sign of the Four [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Man in the Iron Mask [Alexandre Dumas]
– The Three Musketeers [Alexandre Dumas]
– This Side of Paradise [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– Curious, If True: Strange Tales [Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell]
– King Solomon’s Mines [Henry Rider Haggard]
– The Hunchback of Notre Dame [Victor Hugo]
– Kim [Rudyard Kipling]
– Captain Courageous [Rudyard Kipling]
– The Jungle Book [Rudyard Kipling]
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover [David Herbert Lawrence]
– The Son of the Wolf [Jack London]
– The Einstein Theory of Relativity [Hendrik Antoon Lorentz]
– The Dunwich Horror [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– At the Mountains of Madness [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– The Prince [Niccolò Machiavelli]
– The Story Girl [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– The Antichrist [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Republic [Plato]
– The Last Man [Mary Shelley]
– Life On The Mississippi [Mark Twain]
– The Kama Sutra [Vatsyayana]
– In the Year 2889 [Jules Verne]
– Around the World in Eighty Days [Jules Verne]
– Four Just Men [Edgar Wallace]
– Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ [Lewis Wallace]
– Jacob’s Room [Virginia Woolf]

 

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025

 

Caroline M Yanchen We Would Teach You How To Read.

Rachale Swirsky The Cat

Olivia Blake, The Audit.

Keji Johnson. Country Birds.

Tatiya Oberb Flock Them Kids.

SI Huaag, The River Judge

.Charlie. Saint George. The Weight Of Your Own Ashes.

Xavier Garcia An Ode To The.Minor Arcana in a Tripple Flow

Kathryin Ross. The Forgotten Room.

Dominique Dickey, Look At The Moon.

Isabel Kim, Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid?

Jennifer Hudock, The Witch Trap.

Susan Palwick Yarns.

Pemmie Aguda The Wonders Of The World

TJ Klune Reduce, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Tannarive Due  A Stranger Knocks?

Thomas Hardy, The Sort.

Russell Nichols What Happened To The Crooners? Adam Troy Castro, The 3420 Third Laws Of Robotics.

Joe Hill Ushers.

 

Sci-Fi short stories

 

The Big Book of Science Fiction is a massive anthology of science fiction stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It covers the history and evolution of the genre from the early 20th century to the end of the millennium, featuring works from over 30 countries and many languages. The book contains 105 stories, ranging from classics by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to lesser-known gems by W.E.B. Du Bois, David R. Bunch, and Liu Cixin. The book also includes comments from the editors and the authors, offering insights into their creative process and vision. The book is divided into 11 sections, each with a thematic focus and chronological order.

Here is the table of contents for the book1:

Goal read one to five per week alternating with Kindle classics and reading poetry collections finish by end of the year

 

Introduction: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The Lens of Time: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing

H.G. Wells: “The Star” (1897)

Lu Xun: “The New Overworld” (1902)

Sultana’s Dream: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905)

Albert Robida: “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1908)

Miguel de Unamuno: “Mechanopolis” (1913)

W.E.B. Du Bois: “The Comet” (1920)

Claude Farrère: “The Fate of the Poseidonia” (1923)

Edmond Hamilton: “The Star Stealers” (1929)

David H. Keller: “The Lost Language” (1934)

Stanislaw Lem: “Solaris” (1961) excerpt

Jorge Luis Borges: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)

Cixin Liu: “The Poetry Cloud” (1997)

Invasions

Edgar Rice Burroughs: “A Princess of Mars” (1912) excerpt

Leslie F. Stone: “The Conquest of Gola” (1931)

Stanley G. Weinbaum: “A Martian Odyssey” (1934)

John W. Campbell Jr.: “Who Goes There?” (1938)

Ray Bradbury: “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” (1949)

Katherine MacLean: “Pictures Don’t Lie” (1951)

William Tenn: “The Liberation of Earth” (1953)

J.G. Ballard: “The Voices of Time” (1960)

Dino Buzzati: “Catastrophe” (1966)

James Tiptree Jr.: “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972)

Joanna Russ: “When It Changed” (1972)

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: “The Spontaneous Reflex” (1973) excerpt

Octavia Butler: “Bloodchild” (1984)

James Patrick Kelly: “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995)

Monsters

H.P. Lovecraft: “The Dunwich Horror” (1929)

Ray Bradbury: “The Foghorn” (1951)

Jerome Bixby: “It’s a Good Life” (1953)

Julio Cortázar: “Axolotl” (1956)

J.G. Ballard: “The Drowned Giant” (1964)

R.A. Lafferty: “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966)

Terry Carr: “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” (1968)

Harlan Ellison®: “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

Lisa Tuttle & George R.R. Martin: “The Storms of Windhaven” (1975)

John Varley: “Air Raid” (1977)

William Gibson: “New Rose Hotel” (1984)

Ted Chiang: “Story of Your Life” (1998)

Experiments

Alfred Jarry: “Elements of Pataphysics” (1911)

Karel Čapek: “R.U.R.” (1920) excerpt

Stanisław Lem: “How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface” (1955)

William S. Burroughs: “Excerpt from Naked Lunch” (1959)

J.G. Ballard: “Chronopolis” (1960)

Philip K. Dick: “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

Boris Vian: “Froth on the Daydream” (1947) excerpt

Joanna Russ: “Useful Phrases for the Tourist” (1970)

George Alec Effinger: “Two Sadnesses” (1973)

John Sladek: “Solar Shoe Salesman” (1974)

Dafydd ab Hugh: “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk” (1986)

Generation Ships

Don Wilcox: “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940)

Judith Merril: “Daughters of Earth” (1952)

Brian W. Aldiss: “Non-Stop” (1958) excerpt

Robert Silverberg: “Sundance” (1969)

Pamela Zoline: “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967)

Gene Wolfe: “A Cabin on the Coast” (1984)

Bruce Sterling: “Swarm” (1982)

Geoff Ryman: “The Unconquered Country” (1984)

New Worlds

Cordwainer Smith: “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” (1961)

Samuel R. Delany: “Aye, and Gomorrah …” (1967)

Ursula K. Le Guin: “Vaster Than Empires and Slower” (1971)

James Tiptree Jr.: “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976)

Frederik Pohl: “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” (1972)

Angélica Gorodischer: “Of Navigators and Traitors” (1973) excerpt

John Crowley: “Snow” (1985)

Iain M. Banks: “A Gift from the Culture” (1987)

Greg Egan: “Learning to Be Me” (1990)

Future War

Jack London: “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “The Coming Race” (1871) excerpt

George Griffith: “The War of the Viruses” (1895)

Philip Francis Nowlan: “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” (1928)

E.E. “Doc” Smith: “The Skylark of Space” (1928) excerpt

Olaf Stapledon: “Star Maker” (1937) excerpt

Robert A. Heinlein: “Solution Unsatisfactory” (1941)

C.M. Kornbluth: “Two Dooms” (1958)

Joe Haldeman: “Hero” (1972)

Harry Harrison: “The Streets of Ashkelon” (1962)

David R. Bunch: “Moderan” (1967)

Harlan Ellison®: “A Boy and His Dog” (1969)

James S.A. Corey: “Rates of Change” (2011)

Virtual Reality

Stanisław Lem: “The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good” (1965)

Philip K. Dick: “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966)

John Brunner: “The Vitanuls” (1967)

Roger Zelazny: “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966)

Robert Silverberg: “Passengers” (1968)

Rudy Rucker: “Software” (1982) excerpt

William Gibson: “Burning Chrome” (1982)

Pat Cadigan: “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986)

Neal Stephenson: “Snow Crash” (1992) excerpt

Humanity 2.0

Olaf Stapledon: “Odd John” (1935) excerpt

C.L. Moore: “No Woman Born” (1944)

Cordwainer Smith: “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950)

Algis Budrys: “Who?” (1955)

James Blish: “Surface Tension” (1952)

Gregory Benford: “Blood Music” (1983)

Bruce Sterling: “Mozart in Mirrorshades” (1985)

Vernor Vinge: “True Names” (1981)

Ted Chiang: “Understand” (1991)

Alien Minds

Arthur C. Clarke: “The Sentinel” (1951)

Isaac Asimov: “The Last Question” (1956)

Clifford D. Simak: “Desertion” (1944)

James H. Schmitz: “Grandpa” (1955)

Frank Herbert: “Try to Remember!” (1961)

Philip José Farmer: “Sail On! Sail On!” (1952)

Stanisław Lem: “Solaris” (1961) excerpt

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: “Roadside Picnic” (1972) excerpt

Karen Joy Fowler & Pat Murphy: “Rachel in Love” (1987)

Ian McDonald: “The Tear” (2008)

Walter M Miller, Jr After the End

Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry

 

BOLD read

 

Edward Lee Masters.

The Hil

Fiddler. Jones,

Petite the Poet

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Miniver Cheevy

Mr. Flood’s Party.

 

James Weldon Johnson

The Creation

Paul Laurence  Dunbar.

 

The Poet

Life

Life’s Trajedy

 

Robert Frost.

The Death Of The Hired Man.

Mending Wall.

Birches

          Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening.

          Tree In My Window.

Directive.

Amy Lowell

Patterns.

 

Getrude Stein

Susie Asado.

From Tender Buttons A Box.

 From Tender Buttons, A Plate.

 

Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson

I sit and sew .

Carl Sandburg.

Grass.

Cahoots.

 

Wallace Stevens.

Peter Quince at the Clavier.

Disillusionment of 10:00.

13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird.

          Emperor Of Ice Cream.

A Mere  Being.

Angelina Weld Grimke

Fragment.

William Carlos Williams.

Tact.

           Dance Ruse

The Yachts.

From Apostlethat Greeny  Flower Book 1, Lines 1 To 92.

 

Sarah Teasdale.

Moonlight.

There Will Come Soft Rains.

 

Erza Pound

The Jewel Stairs Grievance.

The River Merchants Wife Letter.

In A Station At The Metro.

Hugh  Selwyn Mulberry.

From Conto. 56 Libretto Yet Ere This Season Died A Cold

 

Hilda Doolittle, HD.

Sea Rose.

The Helen.

From The Walls Do Not Fall An Incident Here And There.

From Hermeneutic Definition Red Rose And A Beggar. Why Did You Come?

Take Me Anywhere.

Venicc. Venus.

 

Robinson, Jeffers.

Gala in April.

Shine, Perishing Republic.

Cloudss at Evening.

Credo

Mararane Moore

Fish.

Poetry.

Poetry.

 

TS, Elliott.

Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

 The Wasteland.

 

Claude McKay.

          If We Must Die.

Harlem Dancer.

 

Archibald MacLeash,

          Arts Poetica 

Edna, Saint Vincent Millay.

First Fig

Recuerdo

E E Cummings.

In Just.

Buffalo Bill

The Cambridge Ladies Have Lived In Furnished Souls.

Next To, Of Course, God, America.

Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled Gladly Beyond.

Rpophessagr

Gene Toomor.

Reapers.

November Cotton Flowers.

Portrait in Georgia.

Louise Bogan

Medusa.

New moon.

Melvin B Tolson

Dark Symphony.

From Harlem Gallery PSI Black Boys, Let Me Get Up From The White Man’s Table.

 

Hart Crane

From the Bridge

Poem to Brooklyn Bridge

From 11  Powhatan’s Daughter the River.

 

Robert Francis.

Silent Poem

Langston Hughes

Nego speaks of rivers.

I, Too.

Dreams Boogie.

Harlem

Countee Cullan

Incident

To John Keats Poet at Springtime

Yes I Do Marvel

From the Dark Tower

Stanley Kutitz

Father and Son

The Protrait

Touch Me

WH Auden

Mussee Des Beaux Arts

Epitah on a Tryant

Theordore Roethke

My Papa’s Waltz

The Waking

In a Dark Time

 

Charles Olson.

From The Maximum Poems One Maximum Of Gloucester To You.

The Distances.

Elizabeth Bishop.

The Fish

Sestina

First Death In Nova Scotia.

Visit  To Saint Elizabeths.

One Art.

Robert Hayden.

Morning Poem For The Queen Of Sunday.

Those Winter Sundays.

Frederick Douglass.

Middle Passage.

Muriel  Rukeyser?

Effort At Speech Between Two People.         ‘

Then I Saw What The Calling  Was.

The Poem as Mask

Delmore  Swartz.

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.

John Barryman.

From Dream Songs.

Feeling Your Compact And Delicious Body. ‘

Life, Friends, Is Boring. We Must Not Say So.

There Shut Down Once.  ‘

This World Is Gradually Becoming A Place.

Henry’sUnderstanding

 

Randall, Jarell.

90 North.

The Death Of The Bell Turret Gunner.

The Woman At The Washington Zoo.

Next Day.

Weldon Kees.

To My Daughter?

 

Dudley Randall

A Different Image

William Stafford.

Traveling Through The Dark.

At The Bomb Testing Site.

 

Ruth Stone.

Scars.

Margaret Walker.

For My People

Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Mother.

A Song In The Front Yard.         ‘

The Bean Eaters

The Lovers Of The Poor.

We  Real Cool.      ‘

The Blackstone Rangers.

 

Robert Lowell.

To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage.

Skunk Hour .

For The Union Dead.

Robert Duncan.

Often I’m Permitted To Return To A Medow.

My Mother Would Be A Falconress

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Populist Manifesto.

William Meredith.

Parents. Howard Nemeroff.

Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry.

Hayden Caruth.

The  Hyacinth Gardens In Brooklyn.

August 1945.

Richard Wilber

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Cottage Street

The Writer

James Dickey

The Sheep Child

Alan Duncan.

Love song I And Thou

Anthony Act.

More light, More light.

Richard Hugo.

The Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg.

The Freaks at Spring General Rd. Field.

Dennis Levertov.

The Unwritten Poem

Cademon.

Swan in Falling snow.

Who is Simpson?

American Poetry.

Carolyn Kaiser.

A Muse of water.

Kenneth Koch.

Fresh air.

Permanently.

Maxine Coleman.

Morning Swim.

How Is It?

Gerald Stern.

Behaving Like A Jew.

The Dancing.

Another Insane Devotion.

AR Ammons.

The City Limits.

Corson Inlet.

Robert Blye.

Snowfall In The Afternoon.

Driving Into Town Late To Mail A Letter.

Walking From Sleep.

Robert Creeley.

The Flower.

I Know A Man.

The Language.

The Rain.

Bresson’s Movies.

James Merrill.

Victor Dog.

Frank O’Hara New York School.

Steps.

Poem Lana Turner Has Collapsed.

The Day Lady Died.

John Ashberry. New York School

Some Trees.

Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.

What Is Poetry?

Galway, Kennel.

The Bear.`

After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps.

Saint Francis And The Soul.

Ws Merwin.

Air.

For The Anniversary Of My Death.

Yesterday.

Chord .

James Wright.

A Blessing.

Autumn  Begins In Martins Ferry, Oh.

Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy’s Farm In Pine Island, Mn.

In Response To The Rumor That Otis Warehouse In Wheeling, Wv Has Been Condemned.

Donald Hall.

My Son, My Executioner.

Digging.

Philip Levine.

Animals Are Passing From Our Lives.

They Feed They Lion.

You Can Have It.

The  Simple Truth.

 

Anne Sexton.

Her Kind

Adoption.

Waiting To Die.

In Celebration Of My Uterus.

Rowing

Adrienne Rich.

Orion

Planetarium.

A Valedictorian Forbidding Mourning.

From 21 Love Poems 13 The Rules Of Break Like A Thermometer.

Gregory Corso.

Marriage

Gary Snyder.

Hay, For The Horses.

Riprap.

Mid August As Sourdough Mountain Lookout.

Dereck  Walcott.

A Far Cry From Africa.

Sea Grapes.

Find The Schooner Flight Part 11 After The Storm. There’s A Fresh Light That Follows.

The Light Of The World.

From Omeros Book. 7. 44 I Sing Of Quiet,Achiles, Afrolabe’s Son.

Miller Williams.

Let Me tell you.

Etheridge Knight

Idea Of Ancestry.

Amira Baraka, Leroy Jones.

Preface To A 20 Volume Suicide Note.

Agony As Now.

SOS.

Black Art.

Ted Berrigon .

Wrong Rain.

A Final Sonnet

Andre Lorde.

Power.

Sonia Sanchez.

Poetry at 30.

Mark Strand.

The Prediction.

The Night, The Porch.

Russell Edson.

A Stone Is Nobody’s.

 

Mary Oliver.

Singapore.

The Summer’s Day.

Charles Wright.

Reunion.

Dead Color.

California Dreaming.

Lucile  Clifton.

Homage To My Hips.

At Least At Last We Killed The Roaches.

The Death Of Fry, Alfred Clifton.

To My Last.

June, Jordan.

Home About My Rights.

Frederick Seidel.

1968.

CK Williams.

Find My Window.

Blades

Tynan Wilkowski.’

The Mechanic.

Michael S Harper.

Dear John. Dear Coltrane.

Last Affair. Bessies Blues Song.

Grandfather.

Nightmare Begins Responsibility.

Charles Simik .

Stone.

Fork.

Classic Ballroom Dances.

Paula Gunn Allen.

 

Grandmother.

Frank Bidart.

Ellen West.

Carl Dennis.

Spring Letter.

Two Or Three Wishes.

Stephen Dunn.

Allegory Of The Cave.

Tucson.

Robert Pensky.

History Of My Heart.

The Questions.

Samurai Song.

James Welch.

Christmas Comes To Moccasin Flat.

Billy Collins.

Introduction To Poetry.

The Dead.

Toi Derricote .

Allen Ginsberg.

The Weakness.

Stephen Dobyns.

How To Like It?

Lullaby.

Robert Hass.

Song.

That Photographer?

Return Of Robinson Jeffers.

Lyn Hejinian

From My Life trim With Colored Ribbons.

BH  Fairchild.

The Machinist Teaching His Daughter To Play The Piano.

Haik R Madhubuti Don L Lee.

But He Was Cool Or Even Stopped For Green Lights.

Upon To Compliment Other Poems.

William Matthews.

In Memory Of The Utah Stars.

The  Accompanist

. Sharon Olds

The Language Of The Brag.

The Lifting.

Henry Taylor.

Barbed Wire.

Tess Gallagher.

Black, Silver.

Under Stars.

Michael Palmer.

I Do Not.

James Tate.

The Lost  Pilot.

Norman Dubie.

Elizabeth War With The Christmas Bear.

The Funeral.

Carol Muske Dukes,.

August, Los Angeles Lullaby.

Kay Ryan.

Turtle

Bestiary

Larry Levis.

Childhood Ideogram

Winter Stars

Adrian C Lousis

Looking For Judas

How much lux?

The People of the Other  Village.

Marilyn Nelson.

The Ballad of Aunt Geneva.

Star Fix.

Run Stilleman

Albany

AI

Cuba 1963

The Kid

Finished

Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks

To Do Street

Facing It

Nude Interogation

Nathaniel Mc Kay

Song of the Aduumboulou

Gregory Orr

Gathering the Bones Together

Two Lines From the Brother Grimm

Origin of the Marble Forrest

Robert Hill Whiteman

Reaching Yellow River

Albert Goldbarth

Away

Heather Mc Hugh

Language Lesson 1976

What He Thought

Leslie Marmon Silko

In  Cold Storm Light

Olga Boumas

Calypso

Victor Hernadez Soul

Latin and Soul

Jane Miller

Miami Heart

David St. James

Iris

CD Wright

Why Ralph Refuses to Dance

Girl Friend Poe # 3

Crescent

Carolyn Forche

Taking Off My Clothes

Jorie Graham

San Sepolcro

Marie Howe

What the Living Do

Joy Harjo

She Had Some Horses

My House is Red Earth

Garret Honjo

The Legend

Andrew  Hugins

Beggoten

We Were Simply Talking

Brigit Peggen Kelly

Imaging Their Own Hyms

Song

Paul Muldoon

Meeting the British

Errata

The Throwback

Judith Orez Coffer

Quinceanera

Rita Dove

Parsley

Day Star

After Reading Mikey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed

Alice Fulton

Our Calling

Barbara Hamby

Thinking of Galileo

Hatred

Mark Jarman

Unholy Sonnet

Naomi Shihab Nye

The Traveling Onion

Arabic

Wedding Cake

Alberto Rios

Nani

England Finally like My Mother Always Said We Would

Laurie Sheck

Nocturne Blue Waves

The Unfinished

Gary Sotto

Field Poem

Oranges

Black Hair

Susan Stewart

Yellow Star and Ice

The Forrest

Mark Dotty

Brillance

Esta Noche

Bill’s Story

Harryette Mullen

Black Nikes

Franz Wright

Alcohol

Lorna Dee Cervantes

To My Brother

Love of My Flesh, Living Death

Sandra Cisneros.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways.

Little Clowns, My Heart.

Cornelius, Eady.

Jack Johnson Does The Eagle Rock.

Crows In A Strong Wind.

I’m A Fool To Love You.

 

Louise Eldritch

.         Indian Boarding School. The Runaways.

David Mason.

Spooning.

Marilyn Chin.

How I Got That Name?

Compose Near The Bay Bridge

The Survivor

Cathy Song .

The Youngest Daughter.

Ann Finch.

Another Reluctance.

Insert

Lee Young Lee.

The Gift

Eating Together.

Carl Phillips

Our Lady

As From a Quiver of Arrows

Nick Flynn

Bag of Mice

Cartoon Physics

Elizabeth Alexander

The Viena Hott not

Reetika Vazirani

From White Elephants

A million Balconies

Train Windows

Sherman Alexie

What the Orphan Inherits

The Pow Wow at the End of the World

Natasha Trethewey

Hot Combs

Amateur Fighter

Flounder

A E Stallings

The Tantrum

Joana Klink

Spare

Brenda Shaughnessy

Post feminism

Your One Good Dress

Kevin Young

Quivira City Limits

Everywhere is Out of Town

Whatever You Want

Terrance Hayes

At Pegasus

Lady Sings the Blues

Sci-Fi short stories

 

The Big Book of Science Fiction is a massive anthology of science fiction stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It covers the history and evolution of the genre from the early 20th century to the end of the millennium, featuring works from over 30 countries and many languages. The book contains 105 stories, ranging from classics by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to lesser-known gems by W.E.B. Du Bois, David R. Bunch, and Liu Cixin. The book also includes comments from the editors and the authors, offering insights into their creative process and vision. The book is divided into 11 sections, each with a thematic focus and a chronological order.

Here is the table of contents for the book1:

Introduction: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The Lens of Time: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing

H.G. Wells: “The Star” (1897)

Lu Xun: “The New Overworld” (1902)

Sultana’s Dream: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905)

Albert Robida: “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1908)

Miguel de Unamuno: “Mechanopolis” (1913)

W.E.B. Du Bois: “The Comet” (1920)

Claude Farrère: “The Fate of the Poseidonia” (1923)

Edmond Hamilton: “The Star Stealers” (1929)

David H. Keller: “The Lost Language” (1934)

Stanislaw Lem: “Solaris” (1961) excerpt

Jorge Luis Borges: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)

Cixin Liu: “The Poetry Cloud” (1997)

Invasions

Edgar Rice Burroughs: “A Princess of Mars” (1912) excerpt

Leslie F. Stone: “The Conquest of Gola” (1931)

Stanley G. Weinbaum: “A Martian Odyssey” (1934)

John W. Campbell Jr.: “Who Goes There?” (1938)

Ray Bradbury: “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” (1949)

Katherine MacLean: “Pictures Don’t Lie” (1951)

William Tenn: “The Liberation of Earth” (1953)

J.G. Ballard: “The Voices of Time” (1960)

Dino Buzzati: “Catastrophe” (1966)

James Tiptree Jr.: “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972)

Joanna Russ: “When It Changed” (1972)

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: “The Spontaneous Reflex” (1973) excerpt

Octavia Butler: “Bloodchild” (1984)

James Patrick Kelly: “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995)

Monsters

H.P. Lovecraft: “The Dunwich Horror” (1929)

Ray Bradbury: “The Foghorn” (1951)

Jerome Bixby: “It’s a Good Life” (1953)

Julio Cortázar: “Axolotl” (1956)

J.G. Ballard: “The Drowned Giant” (1964)

R.A. Lafferty: “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966)

Terry Carr: “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” (1968)

Harlan Ellison®: “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

Lisa Tuttle & George R.R. Martin: “The Storms of Windhaven” (1975)

John Varley: “Air Raid” (1977)

William Gibson: “New Rose Hotel” (1984)

Ted Chiang: “Story of Your Life” (1998)

Experiments

Alfred Jarry: “Elements of Pataphysics” (1911)

Karel Čapek: “R.U.R.” (1920) excerpt

Stanisław Lem: “How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface” (1955)

William S. Burroughs: “Excerpt from Naked Lunch” (1959)

J.G. Ballard: “Chronopolis” (1960)

Philip K. Dick: “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

Boris Vian: “Froth on the Daydream” (1947) excerpt

Joanna Russ: “Useful Phrases for the Tourist” (1970)

George Alec Effinger: “Two Sadnesses” (1973)

John Sladek: “Solar Shoe Salesman” (1974)

Dafydd ab Hugh: “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk” (1986)

Generation Ships

Don Wilcox: “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940)

Judith Merril: “Daughters of Earth” (1952)

Brian W. Aldiss: “Non-Stop” (1958) excerpt

Robert Silverberg: “Sundance” (1969)

Pamela Zoline: “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967)

Gene Wolfe: “A Cabin on the Coast” (1984)

Bruce Sterling: “Swarm” (1982)

Geoff Ryman: “The Unconquered Country” (1984)

New Worlds

Cordwainer Smith: “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” (1961)

Samuel R. Delany: “Aye, and Gomorrah …” (1967)

Ursula K. Le Guin: “Vaster Than Empires and Slower” (1971)

James Tiptree Jr.: “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976)

Frederik Pohl: “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” (1972)

Angélica Gorodischer: “Of Navigators and Traitors” (1973) excerpt

John Crowley: “Snow” (1985)

Iain M. Banks: “A Gift from the Culture” (1987)

Greg Egan: “Learning to Be Me” (1990)

Future War

Jack London: “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “The Coming Race” (1871) excerpt

George Griffith: “The War of the Viruses” (1895)

Philip Francis Nowlan: “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” (1928)

E.E. “Doc” Smith: “The Skylark of Space” (1928) excerpt

Olaf Stapledon: “Star Maker” (1937) excerpt

Robert A. Heinlein: “Solution Unsatisfactory” (1941)

C.M. Kornbluth: “Two Dooms” (1958)

Joe Haldeman: “Hero” (1972)

Harry Harrison: “The Streets of Ashkelon” (1962)

David R. Bunch: “Moderan” (1967)

Harlan Ellison®: “A Boy and His Dog” (1969)

James S.A. Corey: “Rates of Change” (2011)

Virtual Reality

Stanisław Lem: “The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good” (1965)

Philip K. Dick: “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966)

John Brunner: “The Vitanuls” (1967)

Roger Zelazny: “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966)

Robert Silverberg: “Passengers” (1968)

Rudy Rucker: “Software” (1982) excerpt

William Gibson: “Burning Chrome” (1982)

Pat Cadigan: “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986)

Neal Stephenson: “Snow Crash” (1992) excerpt

Humanity 2.0

Olaf Stapledon: “Odd John” (1935) excerpt

C.L. Moore: “No Woman Born” (1944)

Cordwainer Smith: “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950)

Algis Budrys: “Who?” (1955)

James Blish: “Surface Tension” (1952)

Gregory Benford: “Blood Music” (1983)

Bruce Sterling: “Mozart in Mirrorshades” (1985)

Vernor Vinge: “True Names” (1981)

Ted Chiang: “Understand” (1991)

Alien Minds

Arthur C. Clarke: “The Sentinel” (1951)

Isaac Asimov: “The Last Question” (1956)

Clifford D. Simak: “Desertion” (1944)

James H. Schmitz: “Grandpa” (1955)

Frank Herbert: “Try to Remember!” (1961)

Philip José Farmer: “Sail On! Sail On!” (1952)

Stanisław Lem: “Solaris” (1961) excerpt

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: “Roadside Picnic” (1972) excerpt

Karen Joy Fowler & Pat Murphy: “Rachel in Love” (1987)

Ian McDonald: “The Tear” (2008)

After the End

Walter M. Miller Jr.: “The Darfsteller” (1955) J.G. Ballard: “The Terminal Beach” (1964) John Wyndham: ”

Sci-Fi short stories

 

The Big Book of Science Fiction is a massive anthology of science fiction stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It covers the history and evolution of the genre from the early 20th century to the end of the millennium, featuring works from over 30 countries and many languages. The book contains 105 stories, ranging from classics by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to lesser-known gems by W.E.B. Du Bois, David R. Bunch, and Liu Cixin. The book also includes comments from the editors and the authors, offering insights into their creative process and vision. The book is divided into 11 sections, each with a thematic focus and a chronological order.

Here is the table of contents for the book1:

Introduction: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The Lens of Time: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing

H.G. Wells: “The Star” (1897)

Lu Xun: “The New Overworld” (1902)

Sultana’s Dream: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905)

Albert Robida: “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1908)

Miguel de Unamuno: “Mechanopolis” (1913)

W.E.B. Du Bois: “The Comet” (1920)

Claude Farrère: “The Fate of the Poseidonia” (1923)

Edmond Hamilton: “The Star Stealers” (1929)

David H. Keller: “The Lost Language” (1934)

Stanislaw Lem: “Solaris” (1961) excerpt

Jorge Luis Borges: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)

Cixin Liu: “The Poetry Cloud” (1997)

Invasions

Edgar Rice Burroughs: “A Princess of Mars” (1912) excerpt

Leslie F. Stone: “The Conquest of Gola” (1931)

Stanley G. Weinbaum: “A Martian Odyssey” (1934)

John W. Campbell Jr.: “Who Goes There?” (1938)

Ray Bradbury: “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” (1949)

Katherine MacLean: “Pictures Don’t Lie” (1951)

William Tenn: “The Liberation of Earth” (1953)

J.G. Ballard: “The Voices of Time” (1960)

Dino Buzzati: “Catastrophe” (1966)

James Tiptree Jr.: “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972)

Joanna Russ: “When It Changed” (1972)

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: “The Spontaneous Reflex” (1973) excerpt

Octavia Butler: “Bloodchild” (1984)

James Patrick Kelly: “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995)

Monsters

H.P. Lovecraft: “The Dunwich Horror” (1929)

Ray Bradbury: “The Foghorn” (1951)

Jerome Bixby: “It’s a Good Life” (1953)

Julio Cortázar: “Axolotl” (1956)

J.G. Ballard: “The Drowned Giant” (1964)

R.A. Lafferty: “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966)

Terry Carr: “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” (1968)

Harlan Ellison®: “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

Lisa Tuttle & George R.R. Martin: “The Storms of Windhaven” (1975)

John Varley: “Air Raid” (1977)

William Gibson: “New Rose Hotel” (1984)

Ted Chiang: “Story of Your Life” (1998)

Experiments

Alfred Jarry: “Elements of Pataphysics” (1911)

Karel Čapek: “R.U.R.” (1920) excerpt

Stanisław Lem: “How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface” (1955)

William S. Burroughs: “Excerpt from Naked Lunch” (1959)

J.G. Ballard: “Chronopolis” (1960)

Philip K. Dick: “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

Boris Vian: “Froth on the Daydream” (1947) excerpt

Joanna Russ: “Useful Phrases for the Tourist” (1970)

George Alec Effinger: “Two Sadnesses” (1973)

John Sladek: “Solar Shoe Salesman” (1974)

Dafydd ab Hugh: “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk” (1986)

Generation Ships

Don Wilcox: “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940)

Judith Merril: “Daughters of Earth” (1952)

Brian W. Aldiss: “Non-Stop” (1958) excerpt

Robert Silverberg: “Sundance” (1969)

Pamela Zoline: “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967)

Gene Wolfe: “A Cabin on the Coast” (1984)

Bruce Sterling: “Swarm” (1982)

Geoff Ryman: “The Unconquered Country” (1984)

New Worlds

Cordwainer Smith: “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” (1961)

Samuel R. Delany: “Aye, and Gomorrah …” (1967)

Ursula K. Le Guin: “Vaster Than Empires and Slower” (1971)

James Tiptree Jr.: “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976)

Frederik Pohl: “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” (1972)

Angélica Gorodischer: “Of Navigators and Traitors” (1973) excerpt

John Crowley: “Snow” (1985)

Iain M. Banks: “A Gift from the Culture” (1987)

Greg Egan: “Learning to Be Me” (1990)

Future War

Jack London: “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “The Coming Race” (1871) excerpt

George Griffith: “The War of the Viruses” (1895)

Philip Francis Nowlan: “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” (1928)

E.E. “Doc” Smith: “The Skylark of Space” (1928) excerpt

Olaf Stapledon: “Star Maker” (1937) excerpt

Robert A. Heinlein: “Solution Unsatisfactory” (1941)

C.M. Kornbluth: “Two Dooms” (1958)

Joe Haldeman: “Hero” (1972)

Harry Harrison: “The Streets of Ashkelon” (1962)

David R. Bunch: “Moderan” (1967)

Harlan Ellison®: “A Boy and His Dog” (1969)

James S.A. Corey: “Rates of Change” (2011)

Virtual Reality

Stanisław Lem: “The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good” (1965)

Philip K. Dick: “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966)

John Brunner: “The Vitanuls” (1967)

Roger Zelazny: “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966)

Robert Silverberg: “Passengers” (1968)

Rudy Rucker: “Software” (1982) excerpt

William Gibson: “Burning Chrome” (1982)

Pat Cadigan: “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986)

Neal Stephenson: “Snow Crash” (1992) excerpt

Humanity 2.0

Olaf Stapledon: “Odd John” (1935) excerpt

C.L. Moore: “No Woman Born” (1944)

Cordwainer Smith: “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950)

Algis Budrys: “Who?” (1955)

James Blish: “Surface Tension” (1952)

Gregory Benford: “Blood Music” (1983)

Bruce Sterling: “Mozart in Mirrorshades” (1985)

Vernor Vinge: “True Names” (1981)

Ted Chiang: “Understand” (1991)

Alien Minds

Arthur C. Clarke: “The Sentinel” (1951)

Isaac Asimov: “The Last Question” (1956)

Clifford D. Simak: “Desertion” (1944)

James H. Schmitz: “Grandpa” (1955)

Frank Herbert: “Try to Remember!” (1961)

Philip José Farmer: “Sail On! Sail On!” (1952)

Stanisław Lem: “Solaris” (1961) excerpt

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: “Roadside Picnic” (1972) excerpt

Karen Joy Fowler & Pat Murphy: “Rachel in Love” (1987)

Ian McDonald: “The Tear” (2008)

After the End

Walter M. Miller Jr.: “The Darfsteller” (1955) J.G. Ballard: “The Terminal Beach” (1964) John Wyndham: ”

 

Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry

BOLD read

Edward Lee Masters.

The Hil

Fiddler. Jones,

Petite the Poet

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Miniver Cheevy

Mr. Flood’s Party.

 

James Weldon Johnson

The Creation

Paul Laurence  Dunbar.

 

The Poet

Life

Life’s Trajedy

 

Robert Frost.

The Death Of The Hired Man.

Mending Wall.

Birches

          Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening.

          Tree In My Window.

Directive.

Amy Lowell

Patterns.

 

Getrude Stein

Susie Asado.

From Tender Buttons A Box.

 From Tender Buttons, A Plate.

 

Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson

I sit and sew .

Carl Sandburg.

Grass.

Cahoots.

 

Wallace Stevens.

Peter Quince at the Clavier.

Disillusionment of 10:00.

13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird.

          Emperor Of Ice Cream.

A Mere  Being.

Angelina Weld Grimke

Fragment.

William Carlos Williams.

Tact.

Dance Ruse

The Yachts.

From Apostlethat Greeny  Flower Book 1, Lines 1 To 92.

 

Sarah Teasdale.

Moonlight.

There Will Come Soft Rains.

 

Erza Pound

The Jewel Stairs Grievance.

The River Merchants Wife Letter.

In A Station At The Metro.     

          Hugh  Selwyn Mulberry.

From Conto. 56 Libretto Yet Ere This Season Died A Cold

 

Hilda Doolittle, HD.

Sea Rose.

The Helen.

From The Walls Do Not Fall An Incident Here And There.

From Hermeneutic Definition Red Rose And A Beggar. Why Did You Come?

Take Me Anywhere.

Venicc. Venus.

 

Robinson, Jeffers.

Gala in April.

Shine, Perishing Republic.

Cloudss at Evening.

Credo

Mararane Moore

Fish.

Poetry.

 

TS, Elliott.

Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

          The Wasteland.

 

Claude McKay.

If We Must Die.

Harlem Dancer.

 

Archibald MacLeash,

Arts Poetica

Edna, Saint Vincent Millay.

First Fig

Recuerdo

E E Cummings.

In Just.

Buffalo Bill

The Cambridge Ladies Have Lived In Furnished Souls.

Next To, Of Course, God, America.

Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled Gladly Beyond.

Rpophessagr

Gene Toomor.

Reapers.

November Cotton Flowers.

Portrait in Georgia.

Louise Bogan

Medusa.

New moon.

Melvin B Tolson

Dark Symphony.

From Harlem Gallery PSI Black Boys, Let Me Get Up From The White Man’s Table.

 

Hart Crane

From the Bridge

Poem to Brooklyn Bridge

From 11  Powhatan’s Daughter the River.

 

Robert Francis.

Silent Poem

Langston Hughes

Nego speaks of rivers.

I, Too.

Dreams Boogie.

Harlem

Countee Cullan

Incident

To John Keats Poet at Spring Time

Yes I Do Marvel

From the Dark Tower

Stanley Kutitz

Father and Son

The Protrait

Touch Me

WH Auden

Mussee Des Beaux Arts

Epitah on a Tryant

Theordore Roethke

My Papa’s Waltz

The Waking

In a Dark Time

 

Charles Olson.

From The Maximum Poems One Maximum Of Gloucester To You.

The Distances.

Elizabeth Bishop.

The Fish

Sestina

First Death In Nova Scotia.

Visit  To Saint Elizabeths.

One Art.

Robert Hayden.

Morning Poem For The Queen Of Sunday.

Those Winter Sundays.

Frederick Douglass.

Middle Passage.

Muriel  Rukeyser?

Effort At Speech Between Two People.         ‘

Then I Saw What The Calling  Was.

The Poem as Mask

Delmore  Swartz.

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.

John Barryman.

From The Dream Songs.

Feeling Your Compact And Delicious Body. ‘

Life, Friends, Is Boring. We Must Not Say So.

There Shut Down Once.  ‘

This World Is Gradually Becoming A Place.

Henry’sUnderstanding

 

Randall, Jarell.

90 North.

The Death Of The Bell Turret Gunner.

The Woman At The Washington Zoo.

Next Day.

Weldon Kees.

To My Daughter?

 

Dudley Randall

A Different Image

William Stafford.

Traveling Through The Dark.

At The Bomb Testing Site.

 

Ruth Stone.

Scars.

Margaret Walker.

For My People

Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Mother.

A Song In The Front Yard.         ‘

The Bean Eaters

The Lovers Of The Poor.

          We  Real Cool.      ‘

The Blackstone Rangers.

 

Robert Lowell.

To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage.

Skunk Hour .

For The Union Dead.

Robert Duncan.

Often I’m Permitted To Return To A Medow.

My Mother Would Be A Falconress

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Populist Manifesto.

William Meredith.

Parents. Howard Nemeroff.

Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry.

Hayden Caruth.

The  Hyacinth Gardens In Brooklyn.

August 1945.

Richard Wilber

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

Cottage Street

The Writer

James Dickey

The Sheep Child

Alan Duncan.

Love song I And Thou

Anthony Act.

More light, More light.

Richard Hugo.

The Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg.

The Freaks at Spring General Rd. Field.

Dennis Levertov.

The Poem Unwritten

Cademon.

Swan in Falling snow.

Who is Simpson?

American Poetry.

Carolyn Kaiser.

A Muse of water.

Kenneth Koch.

Fresh air.

Permanently.

Maxine Coleman.

Morning Swim.

How It Is?

Gerald Stern.

Behaving Like A Jew.

The Dancing.

Another Insane Devotion.

AR Ammons.

The City Limits.

Corson Inlet.

Robert Blye.

Snowfall In The Afternoon.

Driving Into Town Late To Mail A Letter.

Walking From Sleep.

Robert Creeley.

The Flower.

I Know A Man.

The Language.

The Rain.

Bresson’s Movies.

James Merrill.

Victor Dog.

Frank O’Hara New York School.

Steps.

Poem Lana Turner Has Collapsed.

The Day Lady Died.

John Ashberry. New York School

Some Trees.

Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.

What Is Poetry?

Galway, Kennel.

The Bear.`

After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps.

Saint Francis And The Soul.

Ws Merwin.

Air.

For The Anniversary Of My Death.

Yesterday.

Chord .

James Wright.

A Blessing.

Autumn  Begins In Martins Ferry, Oh.

Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy’s Farm In Pine Island, Mn.

In Response To The Rumor That Otis Warehouse In Wheeling, Wv Has Been Condemned.

Donald Hall.

My Son, My Executioner.

Digging.

Philip Levine.

Animals Are Passing From Our Lives.

They Feed They Lion.

You Can Have It.

The  Simple Truth.

 

Anne Sexton.

Her Kind

Adoption.

Waiting To Die.

In Celebration Of My Uterus.

Rowing

Adrienne Rich.

Orion

Planetarium.

A Valedictorian Forbidding Mourning.

From 21 Love Poems 13 The Rules Of Break Like A Thermometer.

Gregory Corso.

Marriage

Gary Snyder.

Hay, For The Horses.

Riprap.

Mid August As Sourdough Mountain Lookout.

Dereck  Walcott.

A Far Cry From Africa.

Sea Grapes.

Find The Schooner Flight Part 11 After The Storm. There’s A Fresh Light That Follows.

The Light Of The World.

From Omeros Book. 7. 44 I Sing Of Quiet,Achiles, Afrolabe’s Son.

Miller Williams.

Let Me tell you.

Etheridge Knight

Idea Of Ancestry.

Amira Baraka, Leroy Jones.

Preface To A 20 Volume Suicide Note.

Agony As Now.

SOS.

Black Art.

Ted Berrigon .

Wrong Rain.

A Final Sonnet

Andre Lorde.

Power.

Sonia Sanchez.

Poetry at 30.

Mark Strand.

The Prediction.

The Night, The Porch.

Russell Edson.

A Stone Is Nobody’s.

 

Mary Oliver.

Singapore.

The Summer’s Day.

Charles Wright.

Reunion.

Dead Color.

California Dreaming.

Lucile  Clifton.

Homage To My Hips.

At Least At Last We Killed The Roaches.

The Death Of Fry, Alfred Clifton.

To My Last.

June, Jordan.

Home About My Rights.

Frederick Seidel.

1968.

CK Williams.

Find My Window.

Blades

Tynan Wilkowski.’

The Mechanic.

Michael S Harper.

Dear John. Dear Coltrane.

Last Affair. Bessies Blues Song.

Grandfather.

Nightmare Begins Responsibility.

Charles Simik .

Stone.

Fork.

Classic Ballroom Dances.

Paula Gunn Allen.

 

Grandmother.

Frank Bidart.

Ellen West.

Carl Dennis.

Spring Letter.

Two Or Three Wishes.

Stephen Dunn.

Allegory Of The Cave.

Tucson.

Robert Pensky.

History Of My Heart.

The Questions.

Samurai Song.

James Welch.

Christmas Comes To Moccasin Flat.

Billy Collins.

Introduction To Poetry.

The Dead.

Toi Derricote .

Allen Ginsberg.

The Weakness.

Stephen Dobyns.

How To Like It?

Lullaby.

Robert Hass.

Song.

That Photographer?

Return Of Robinson Jeffers.

Lyn Hejinian

From My Life trim With Colored Ribbons.

BH  Fairchild.

The Machinist Teaching His Daughter To Play The Piano.

Haki  R Madhubuti Don L Lee.

But He Was Cool Or Even Stopped For Green Lights.

Upon To Compliment Other Poems.

William Matthews.

In Memory Of The Utah Stars.

The  Accompanist

. Sharon Olds

The Language Of The Brag.

The Lifting.

Henry Taylor.

Barbed Wire.

Tess Gallagher.

Black, Silver.

Under Stars.

Michael Palmer.

I Do Not.

James Tate.

The Lost  Pilot.

Norman Dubie.

Elizabeth War With The Christmas Bear.

The Funeral.

Carol Muske Dukes,.

August, Los Angeles Lullaby.

Kay Ryan.

Turtle

Bestiary

Larry Levis.

Childhood Ideogram

Winter Stars

Adrian C Lousis

Looking For Judas

How much lux?

The People of the Other  Village.

Marilyn Nelson.

The Ballad of Aunt Geneva.

Star Fix.

Run Stilleman

Albany

AI

Cuba 1963

The Kid

Finished

Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks

To Do Street

Facing It

Nude Interogation

Nathaniel Mc Kay

Song of the Aduumboulou

Gregory Orr

Gathering the Bones Together

Two Lines From the Brother Grimm

Origin of the Marble Forrest

Robert Hill Whiteman

Reaching Yellow River

Albert Goldbarth

Away

Heather Mc Hugh

Language Lesson 1976

What He Thought

Leslie Marmon Silko

In  Cold Storm Light

Olga Boumas

Calypso

Victor Hernadez Soul

Latin and Soul

Jane Miller

Miami Heart

David St. James

Iris

CD Wright

Why Ralph Refuses to Dance

Girl Friend Poe # 3

Crescent

Carolyn Forche

Taking Off My Clothes

Jorie Graham

San Sepolcro

Marie Howe

What the Living Do

Joy Harjo

She Had Some Horses

My House is the Red Earth

Garret Honjo

The Legend

Andrew  Hugins

Beggoten

We Were Simply Talking

Brigit Peggen Kelly

Imaging Their Own Hyms

Song

Paul Muldoon

Meeting the British

Errata

The Throwback

Judith Orez Coffer

Quinceanera

Rita Dove

Parsely

Day Star

After Reading Mikey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed

Alice Fulton

Our Calling

Brbar Hamby

Thinking of Galieo

Hatred

Mark Jarman

Unholly Sonnet

Naomi Shibab Nye

The Traveling Onion

Arabic

Wedding Cake

Alberto Rios

Nani

Enland Finally like My Mother Always Said We Would

Laurie Sheck

Nocturne Blue Waves

The Unfinished

Gary Sotto

Field Poem

Oranges

Black Hair

Susan Stewart

Yellow Star and Ice

The Forrest

Mark Dotty

Brillance

Esta Noche

Bill’s Story

Harryette Mullen

Black Nikes

Franz Wright

Alcohol

Lorna Dee Cervantes

To My Brother

Love of My Flesh, Living Death

Sandra Cisneros.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways.

Little Clowns, My Heart.

Cornelius, Eady.

Jack Johnson Does The Eagle Rock.

Crows In A Strong Wind.

I’m A Fool To Love You.

 

Louise Eldritch

.         Indian Boarding School. The Runaways.

David Mason.

Spooning.

Marilyn Chin.

How I Got That Name?

Compose Near The Bay Bridge

The Survivor

Cathysong .

The Youngest Daughter.

Ann Finch.

Another Reluctance.

Insert

Lee Young Lee.

The Gift

Eating Together.

Carl Philiphs

Our Lady

As From a Quiver of Arrows

Nick Flynn

Bag of Mice

Cartoon Physics

Elizabeth Alexander

The Viena Hottenot

Reetivka Vazisrani

From White Elephants

A million Balconies

Train Windows

Sherman Alexie

What the Orphan Inherits

The Pow Wow at the End of the World

Natasha Trethevey

Hot Combs

Amateur Fighter

Flounder

A E Stallings

The Tantrum

Joana Klink

Spare

Brenda Shaughnessy

Postfeminism

Your One Good Dress

Kevin Young

Quivra City Limits

Everywhere is Out of Town

Whaatever You Want

Terrance Hayes

At Pegasus

          Lady Sings the Blues

 

 

 

 

Monthly Themes enter one review per month

January

Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening

 

Part two reading recommendations until July 15, 2025

 

Part three Reading recommendations July to August

 

July 1, 2025

5 Timeless Classics That Every Thinking Person Should Read

15 Masterpieces of American Literature to Read at Least Once in Your Life

 

July 5

 

15 Songs That Were Inspired by American Literature

The 17 Most Thought-Provoking Books of the Last 100 Years

 

Goodreads lists top 100 books released every year in the last century

Good reads  top book of last hundred years

1957 – On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

1958 – Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

1959 – The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

1960 – To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

1961 – Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

1962 – A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L’Engle.

1963 – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

1964 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.

1965 – Dune by Frank Herbert.

1966 – Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

1967 – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

1968 – A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

1969 – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

1970 – The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison.

1971 – The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.

1972 – The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin.

1973 – The Princess Bride by William Goldman.

1974 – If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin.

1975 – Shogun by James Clavell.

1976 – Roots by Alex Haley.

 

Rest of the List

1925 – Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

1926 – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

1927 – Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

1928 – All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

1929 – Passing by Nella Larsen.

1930 – As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

1931 – The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

1932 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

1933 – Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.

1934 – Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

1935 – Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.

1936 – Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

1937 – Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

1938 – Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.

1939 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

1940 – Native Son by Richard Wright.

1941 – The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges.

1942 – The Stranger by Albert Camus.

1943 – The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry.

1944 – No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre.

1945 – The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

1946 – The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers.

1947 – The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.

1948 – I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

1949 – 1984 by George Orwell.

1950 – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

1951 – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.

1952 – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

1953 – Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

1954 – The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien.

1955 – Lolita by Vladimr Nabokov.

1956 – Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.

1977 – The Shining by Stephen King.

1978 – The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin.

1979 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

1980 – The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

1981 – Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

1982 – The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.

1983 – The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett.

1984 – The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

1985 – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

1986 – Maus by Art Spiegelman.

1987 – Beloved by Tony Morrison.

1988 – The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushtie.

1989 – The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.

1990 – V for Vendetta by Alan Moore.

1991 – Possession by A. S. Byatt.

1992 – The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

1993 – Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.

1994 – The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.

1995 – Wicked by Gregory Maguire.

1996 – A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.

1997 – Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

1998 – A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

1999 – all about love by bell hooks.

2000 – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

2001 – Atonement by Ian McEwan.

2002 – Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides.

2003 – The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

2004 – Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

2005 – Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

2006 – The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

2007 – In The Woods by Tana French.

2008 – The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

2009 – Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

2010 – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

2011 – The Martian by Andy Weir.

2012 – Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

2013 – Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan.

2014 – Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

2015 – The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin.

2016 – The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

2017 – Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

2018 – Circe by Madeline Miller.

2019 – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.

2020 – The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.

2021 – Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.

2022 – Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsoliver.

2023 – Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

2024 – James by Percival Everett.

 

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📺 Series Overview: Gone for Good (2021)

Premise:
Guillaume Lucchesi thought he had moved past the tragedy that claimed his brother Fred and first love Sonia. But ten years later, his girlfriend Judith vanishes during his mother’s funeral, triggering a desperate search that unearths buried secrets and forces him to confront the past he tried to forget.

Format:

  • 5 episodes
  • Released on Netflix
  • French title: Disparu à jamais
  • Created by David Elkaïm and Vincent Poymori
  • Executive Producer: Harlan Coben

📽️ Episode Synopses

Episode Title Summary
1️⃣ Guillaume Guillaume’s life is upended when Judith disappears. Flashbacks reveal the trauma of losing Fred and Sonia.
2️⃣ Inès Guillaume investigates his mother’s finances and uncovers clues about Judith’s past. Inès hides a key piece of evidence.
3️⃣ Daco Daco’s neo-Nazi past resurfaces as he helps Guillaume track Judith’s daughter Alice. A funeral reveals a shocking twist.
4️⃣ Nora Judith’s real identity as Nora is revealed. Flashbacks to Italy show her escape from an abusive husband and Fred’s involvement.
5️⃣ Fred Fred returns, seeking revenge and redemption. Guillaume learns the truth about Sonia’s death and confronts his brother in a deadly showdown.

🎭 Cast List

Actor Character
Finnegan Oldfield Guillaume Lucchesi
Nicolas Duvauchelle Fred Lucchesi
Nailia Harzoune Judith Conti / Nora
Garance Marillier Sonia & Inès Kasmi
Guillaume Gouix Daco
Tómas Lemarquis Ostertag
Grégoire Colin Kesler
Jacques Bonnaffé Mr. Lucchesi
Mila Ayache Alice
Sonia Bonny Awa

🗣️ Notable Quotes from the Book

“You want the good guys on one side, the bad on the other. It doesn’t work that way, does it? It is never that simple.”
— Gone for Good, Harlan Coben

“The mind does that. It tries to find a way out. It makes deals with God. It makes promises.”
— Gone for Good

These quotes reflect the novel’s central theme: the murky moral terrain of love, loss, and redemption.

📚 Literary Reputation

Harlan Coben is widely regarded as one of the most successful thriller writers of his generation. His novels are known for:

  • Twist-heavy plots
  • Ordinary people in extraordinary danger
  • Themes of buried secrets and family trauma

Gone for Good was praised for its emotional depth and suspense, and its adaptation continues Coben’s streak of successful international Netflix series.

👤 Author Bio: Harlan Coben

  • Born: January 4, 1962, Newark, NJ
  • Education: Amherst College (Political Science)
  • Awards: Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony — the only author to win all three
  • Books in print: Over 90 million
  • Known for: Myron Bolitar series, standalone thrillers, and Netflix adaptations
  • Lives in: Ridgewood, NJ with his wife and four children

📖 Book List (Selected)

🔹 Myron Bolitar Series

  • Deal Breaker (1995)
  • Fade Away (1996)
  • Darkest Fear (2000)
  • Home (2016)
  • Think Twice (2024)

🔹 Mickey Bolitar Series (YA)

  • Shelter (2011)
  • Seconds Away (2012)
  • Found (2014)

🔹 Standalone Novels

  • Tell No One (2001)
  • Gone for Good (2002)
  • The Innocent (2005)
  • The Stranger (2015)
  • I Will Find You (2023)

🎬 Movie & TV Adaptations

Title Country Year Notes
Tell No One France 2006 Acclaimed film adaptation
Safe UK 2018 Netflix original
The Stranger UK 2020 Netflix original
The Innocent Spain 2021

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20 Books That Predicted the Future – And Got It Scarily Right

  1. “1984” by George Orwell (1949)
  2. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (1932)
  3. “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953)
  4. “Neuromancer” by William Gibson (1984)
  5. “Stand on Zanzibar” by John Brunner (1968)
  6. “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster (1909)
  7. “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy (1888)
  8. “The Shockwave Rider” by John Brunner (1975)
  9. “Earth” by David Brin (1990)
  10. “The Space Merchants” by Pohl & Kornbluth (1953)
  11. “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler (1970)
  12. “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
  13. “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson (1992)
  14. “The World Set Free” by H.G. Wells (1914)15. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood (1985)
  15. “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson (1962).
  16. “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand (1957)
  17. “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson (1999)©wikimed
  18. “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson (1995)©wiki
  19. “Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992)

 

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Top 10 Most Read Books of All Time

 

 The Bible

The Bible is widely considered the most read and distributed book in human history. It has been translated into over 3,500 languages, and billions of copies have been printed and shared. With its combination of spiritual guidance, historical narrative, and moral instruction, it’s central to Christianity and has influenced countless aspects of literature and law worldwide.

2. The Quran

The Quran, the holy book of Islam, is another one of the most widely read texts in the world. It has been memorized, studied, and recited by millions of Muslims daily for centuries. Its poetic style, teachings, and laws form the foundation of Islamic belief and practice.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (The Little Red Book)

This collection of quotes by the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong was published in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution. It was required reading in China and distributed to over a billion people. The book was considered a symbol of loyalty to Mao’s communist ideals.

4. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling

This seven-book fantasy series has captivated audiences across generations and countries. With over 500 million copies sold globally, Harry Potter’s influence extends beyond literature into film, merchandise, and theme parks. Its universal themes of friendship, courage, and good vs. evil have made it a modern classic.

 

5. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Published in the 1950s, this epic high-fantasy trilogy revolutionized the genre. Tolkien’s richly detailed world of Middle-earth, filled with hobbits, wizards, and dark lords, continues to inspire generations of readers and writers. The books have sold over 150 million copies and remain popular worldwide.

6. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This philosophical novel about a shepherd’s journey to find treasure has touched readers with its messages about destiny, faith, and purpose. Originally published in Portuguese in 1988, it has been translated into over 80 languages and sold more than 65 million copies.

7. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

This poignant account of a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis during World War II is one of the most powerful memoirs ever written. It has been translated into dozens of languages and remains required reading in many schools, emphasizing the importance of tolerance and remembrance.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

First published in the early 1600s, Don Quixote is one of the earliest and most influential novels ever written. The story of an aging man’s quest to become a knight is both humorous and tragic, and its themes continue to resonate. It has sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.

9. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Before The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien introduced readers to Middle-earth with The Hobbit. This tale of Bilbo Baggins’ adventure with dwarves and dragons is beloved for its humor, heart, and moral lessons. It has sold over 100 million copies and remains a staple in children’s and fantasy literature.

Only one I have not read is

10. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Published in 1937, this self-help classic on success and wealth-building has sold over 100 million copies. It’s credited with inspiring generations of entrepreneurs and motivational speakers. Its influence remains strong in business and personal development communities.

 

100 of the Best Books of All Time

 

Book cover depicts hands holding purple flowers; text reads “Anna Karenina,” “Leo Tolstoy,” “Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.” Black-and-white background with text in white.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)

Ah, Anna Karenina. Lusty love affair or best romance of all time? Most critics pin it as one of most iconic literary love stories, and for good reason. Leo Tolstoy’s sweeping Russian tale of star-crossed lovers is littered with swoon-worthy love quotes like, “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” Described by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” this one belongs on any book collector’s shelf.

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Book cover features tree silhouette, green leaves above red background, text reads “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Harper Lee,” “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird upends the quiet solitude of a segregated Southern town with a story of innocence and virtue, bigotry and hate, love and forgiveness. Eight-year-old Scout Finch and her father, Atticus, find themselves enmeshed in the trial of a Black man accused of raping a White woman. In one of the most deeply sad books, Lee tells the events, revelations, and lessons through the eyes of a young child. Widely read and widely taught, To Kill a Mockingbird continues to spark discussions of race in classrooms and libraries across the country.

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Looking for your next great book? Read four of today’s bestselling novels in the ime it takes to read one with Reader’s Digest Select Editions. And be sure to follow the Select Editions page on Facebook!

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Children and dog lean over a sidewalk’s edge with a “Keep Off” sign; text says “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

3. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein (1974)

The imagination and artistry of Shel Silverstein are on full display in this classic collection of short stories and poems. Where the Sidewalk Ends is truly one of the best poetry books of all time because of its staying power for children and adults alike. Whimsical and masterful, the stories of this American poet, author, singer, and folk artist have something for everyone.

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Book cover showcases bold “Valley of the Dolls” text with pill-shaped cutouts revealing partial faces, set against a pink background.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

4. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann (1966)

Sex and drugs have a common allure, but they also have a common endgame: a downward spiral. In Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann offers in lurid detail the stories of three young women who want nothing more than to reach the pinnacle of life. But just as they see it in their grasp, they lose it all in a coil of sex, lust, romance, and abandonment. This page-turner is one of those classic beach reads you won’t be able to put down, and it paved the way for similar scintillating vacation books.

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Book cover displays “The Shining” by Stephen King. A dimly lit wooden doorway marked “REDRUM” creates a suspenseful atmosphere.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

5. The Shining by Stephen King (1977)

The master of suspense must be included in any list of books you should read in a lifetime. That’s why you’ll find Stephen King’s The Shining here. Brought to life in cinematic perfection by Jack Nicholson, Jack Torrance is a middle-aged man looking for a fresh start. He thinks he’s found it when he lands a job as the off-season caretaker at an idyllic old hotel, the Overlook. But as snow piles higher outside, the secluded location begins to feel more confining and sinister, less freeing and more provoking. Horror fans, take note: This is one of the scariest and best Stephen King books of all time.

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76 The Little Prince By Antoine De Saint Exupéry Via Amazon© via amazon.com

6. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

The Little Prince is a timeless tale of a prince’s journey from planet to planet in search of adventure. What he finds, however, are interactions with adults who leave him frustrated or dismayed. In the Sahara Desert, he runs into the book’s narrator, and the two start an eight-day journey filled with lessons. Don’t let this book’s size fool you—it’s one of the most compelling short books we’ve ever read. It’s also one of the most widely read classics all over the world. Whether you prefer reading in English, French, or another language, you’re bound to find a copy.

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The book cover features a gold ring with an eye, intricate designs on black. Text: “The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

7. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, journey to Middle-earth and into the world of Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Gandalf the Grey, the dark lord Sauron, and the entire assemblage of Tolkien’s most famous characters and story lines. Frodo is tasked with destroying the One Ring, the most powerful Ring in Mordor, but along the way, his quest is filled with many of Tolkien’s unique and captivating characters, as well as an adventure of epic proportions. Though the world of Middle-earth is entirely made up, the trilogy teases out universal themes of good versus evil that have resonated with readers of all ages and backgrounds. It’s widely regarded as one of the best fantasy books of all time and a must-read for lovers of the genre.

 

8. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

Offred, a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, has been removed from the home, family, and life that she knew only to be forced into service as a housemaid—and a working pair of ovaries. As the population of Gilead falls, a woman’s value becomes contingent upon her fertility and ability to reproduce, and those who can procreate are stripped of their independence. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is one part cautionary tale and one part enthralling narrative. Though written decades ago, it remains chillingly compelling for our time as was proven by audience reactions to it’s on-screen adaptation. While Season 6 of The Handmaid’s tale is yet to be released, you can binge the rest of the show on Hulu if you like both watching and reading. There’s a reason Reader’s Digest counts it among the best feminist books.

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Book cover features people flying above a landscape, set against a cosmic background. Text reads© Provided by Reader’s Digest

9. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)

While this book may have seen an uptick in interest thanks to the 2018 film starring Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, and Reese Witherspoon, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time has long been held as a must-read for its fantastical telling of splitting the fabric of time and space. A Newbery Medal winner, this science-fantasy novel follows troublesome and stubborn Meg Murry as she confronts her father’s mysterious disappearance with a collection of peculiar neighbors: Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which. Elements of love, trust, and overcoming fear are woven into this enchanting coming-of-age story. We always recommend reading the book before pressing “play,” so once you’ve thoroughly devoured this story, check out the other stellar books made into movies.

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Book cover features a woman’s portrait gazing sideways. Text reads:© Provided by Reader’s Digest

10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice adorned shelves of many a learned reader in the 1800s and 1900s, but its timeless story and lessons earn it a spot in many home libraries (and on many school reading lists) even today. When eligible young men arrive in their neighborhood, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett must prepare their five eager daughters for the role of a lifetime: wife. While the Bennett sisters’ wit and humor keep the pages flipping, the classic story, which is widely considered one of the best romance novels, also serves as a harbinger for hasty mistakes and erred judgments.

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Book cover displays the title “All the President’s Men,” with authors Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; labeled “40th Anniversary Edition” above the subtitle.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

11. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1974)

Political junkies of all stripes will relish the words of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they recount the experiences and events of Watergate. Published just months before President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, the book outlines all the evidence against Nixon and his cohort of political operatives that the two accomplished reporters unearthed during their investigations. It also marks the genesis of Deep Throat (later revealed to be Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI), the secretive government informant who helped take down Nixon in the end.

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The book cover features textured patterns with title© Provided by Reader’s Digest

12. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (1946)

Between 1942 and 1945, Viktor Frankl labored in four Nazi death camps. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Later in life, Frankl became a psychiatrist and practiced what he coined logotherapy, a theory that our lives are primarily driven by the discovery and pursuit of what we find meaningful. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl shares the horrors he faced in those concentration camps. But in this extraordinary Holocaust book, he also shares the lessons he learned—and later taught his patients—about spiritual revival in the face of such great suffering. Here are some more drama book recommendations to add to your reading list.

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Book cover displays decorative golden text “Beloved” on a red background, author “Toni Morrison,” indicating a novel with new foreword.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

13. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Toni Morrison’s Beloved stares down the horrors of slavery and transforms a narrative you think you’ve read a hundred times into a towering tale of pain, agony, triumph, and freedom. The story of Sethe, the novel’s protagonist, is gut-wrenchingly honest and simultaneously beautiful and hideous. She wears the worries of past decisions and strives longingly toward freedom, the arc for which her entire life story bends. The suspense wears heavy on the reader, and the choices you must weigh alongside Sethe are haunting. The book is a cultural landmark for breaking through the monotony of textbook descriptions and offering a human glimpse at a shameful season in history.

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Clouds loom over bare trees in a field, with text “Truman Capote” and “In Cold Blood” overlaid in the sky.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

14. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)

On Nov. 15, 1959, the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, was turned on end by the savage murder of four members of the Clutter family. The police had no suspects and almost no evidence. Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood recounts in chilling detail the deaths of the family and the investigation that ultimately led to the arrest of two recently paroled ex-convicts. Capote’s work may be a story stuck in time, but its nonfiction narrative reveals a lot about violence and evil that resonates even today. This is often considered a model for the best true crime books, regardless of the time period.

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Book cover shows boy carrying a rifle on a dirt path. Title: “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” by Ishmael Beah.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

15. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (2007)

It’s a story so painful, you’d prefer to think it is fiction. But Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone is an entirely true recounting of his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, West Africa. With this book, you’ll get a firsthand look at what life is like for the world’s 300,000 child soldiers, many of whom are stolen from their homes and forced into a world of drugs, guns, and murder. In a world made small by 24-hour news and lightning-speed technology, this is a must-read for understanding the plight of fellow humans.

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Text “DUNE” overlays a cloaked figure walking on red-orange dunes, under a starry sky with a large sun. Text: “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

16. Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)

A science fiction novel for the ages, Frank Herbert’s Dune tells the adventures of Paul Atreides—who will become known as Muad’Dib—as he and his family strive to bring humankind’s greatest dream to life while living on a desert planet. Though written in 1965, much of Dune‘s story may be more relevant to 21st-century readers than it was to bookworms who picked it up in the ’60s. It has sparked countless other works in the collection of stellar science fiction books.

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A sketched portrait depicts a classical figure with detailed lines; below, text reads “Charles Dickens, Great Expectations,” in a minimalist book cover design.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

17. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)

When Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations, he gave life to some of literature’s most colorful and enduring characters: Pip, Miss Havisham, and Uncle Pumblechook, to name a few. His penultimate novel, Great Expectations details the life and stories of an orphan named Pip, growing up in Kent and London in the early to mid-1800s. It’s a classic and a must-read quite simply because it’s been described as one of Dickens’ best works, an appraisal to which Dickens himself agreed.

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20 Daring Greatly How The Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent, And Lead By Brené Brow© via amazon.com

18. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown (2012)

Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, throws everything we know about vulnerability and emotional exposure to the wind in Daring Greatly, one of the most groundbreaking self-help books of our time. After more than a decade of research, Brown wrote this book to dispel the myth that vulnerability is a weakness. Instead, she argues, it’s one of the most accurate measures of courage and the only path to true experiences.

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19. 1984 by George Orwell (1949)

George Orwell certainly couldn’t have known how prophetic his words might have been when he wrote the dystopian novel 1984 in the mid-20th century. Great Britain has fallen and given way to Airstrip One, a province of the fictional superstate Oceania. Airstrip One is ruled by perpetual war and Big Brother, a mysterious leader who uses omnipresent government surveillance and a cult of personality to enforce law and order. Winston Smith, the book’s leading character, must navigate the Party, Big Brother, and his thoughts, which grow more criminal by the day.

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20. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (1996)

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Angela’s Ashes, author Frank McCourt recounts his childhood spent in the slums of Limerick, Ireland: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” McCourt battled poverty, near-starvation, neglect, and cruelty but manages to tell his story with humor, compassion, and self-perpetuating power. His award-winning book is widely considered one of the best memoirs of all time.

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21. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

Most science books, even well-written ones, read a bit too much like textbooks. But renowned English physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking manages to turn some of the world’s most profound questions—How did the universe begin? What happens in the end?—into captivating reading. A modern physics guide, this book was perhaps the first to make the most mysterious elements of the universe (black holes and quarks) entirely accessible for the general public.

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22. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

Guy Montag’s existence in Fahrenheit 451 might hit a little close to home: He’s a fireman in a futuristic dystopian world whose job is to find and destroy the illegal commodities of a world whose sole focus is television: books. Indeed, Montag believes the printed word is dangerous—until a mysterious neighbor, Clarisse, shows up and opens his eyes to the wonder of the written word. This spellbinding story explores questions about the importance of literature and free speech. If you oppose banning books, this is the novel for you.

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23. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)

First released in 2000, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius became a national best seller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a heartwarming classic. This masterpiece is the memoir of a college senior whose life is turned upside down when he loses both of his parents within the span of five weeks and finds himself the guardian of his eight-year-old brother. Despite that ominous start, the book manages to be wildly funny with an irreverently honest take on learning to live with death.

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24. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (1997)

Welcome to the wizarding world, muggles. In J.K. Rowling’s first installment of the beloved series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, you will be introduced to many of the story’s most important—and entrancing—characters: Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dumbledore, Hagrid, and more. But before you get settled into the fun of spells and potions, the action starts right away as Harry finds himself troubled by the feeling his destiny is intertwined with his past. This book landed on our list for its explosive popularity and deep impression on the fantasy genre, as well as its many memorable quotes that will stay with you.

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50 Selected Stories, 1968–1994 By Alice Munro Via Amazon© via amazon.com

25. Selected Stories, 1968–1994 by Alice Munro (1996)

Alice Munro, one of the most prolific writers of the modern era, captures life’s most honest feelings and moments in these 28 magnificent short stories. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, this short story collection will never cease to surprise you with its eloquent story lines, captivating characters, and endlessly wonderful realism. It’s a book that belongs on any bibliophile’s home bookshelf.

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26. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012)

She thought a cancer diagnosis had sealed her fate and written her life story, but a chance meeting with Augustus Waters turns Hazel Lancaster’s life upside down. Irreverent and bold, The Fault in Our Stars is a funny, captivating, and gut-wrenching story. It’s about learning to feel love, enjoy being alive, and live a bold life despite circumstances beyond your control. No wonder it’s ranked among the best sad books (have the tissue box handy) and best books for teens.

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27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1865)

If all you know of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is the zany but sanitized version of the 1951 Walt Disney animation, it’s time to flip your perspective on its head—much like the Cheshire Cat might flip himself. Scholars have tried to apply political, historical, and ideological theories to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but it’s quite simply the dreamlike story of learning to grow (or shrink) and explore, told through the eyes of a curious child. Still, its cultural effects have rippled so far that it’s a must-read for anyone with even a hint of literary interest.

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28. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

A winner of the National Book Award for fiction, Ralph Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man, spent an admirable 16 weeks atop the New York Times best-seller list. Its early success is due in large part to the relatable nature of its narrator, a young, nameless Black man who has to navigate levels of 1950s American culture that are fraught with hate and bias. Eager for a place in time to call his own, the narrator finds that what he hopes for himself will ultimately remain elusive, just as the truth behind the events that surround him remains ambiguous. The 581-page tome is a bit much for younger readers, but you can still introduce them to issues of race and equality with these children’s books about diversity.

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29. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (1970)

If you read this as an adolescent—and considering it’s often taught in schools, there’s a good chance you did—it’s time to reread Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Awkward and inelegant as they may be, sixth-grader Margaret’s questions and quests (to grow bigger breasts, for example, while also seeking out her preferred religion) lead her to greater understanding and self-appreciation. The book will make you cringe as you recall your own experiences and desires to throw off the chains of childhood while budding into young adulthood. It’s a coming-of-age story that sparked dozens after it, but isn’t the original always the best?

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44 One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel García Márquez Via Amazon© via amazon.com

30. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

According to the New York Times Book Review, this masterpiece by Gabriel García Márquez is “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” One Hundred Years of Solitude recounts the evolution of an entire fictitious town, Macondo. Through tales of men and women, boys and girls, the author—father of the magical realism literary style—offers a striking picture of the heartbreaking beauty and pain of the human race. Though it also landed on our list of the best books by Latinx authors, its true place is here, among the best books of all time.

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31. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

If all you know of this American literature classic is the colloquial expression about decision-making, pick up Catch-22 for a dark and comedic good read. Yossarian, a member of an Italian bomber crew during World War II, is desperate to excuse himself from the increasingly high number of suicidal missions his commanders force him and his servicemen to fly. The catch comes when he realizes the sinister bureaucratic rule, Catch-22, classifies him as sane—and thus ineligible for relief—if he requests to be removed from duty. The book made waves as an anti-war anthem and representation of the individual versus society.

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32. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (2000)

Through this powerful graphic novel, Satrapi tells the story of her childhood in Tehran during the overthrow of the Shah, the rise of the Islamic Revolution, and the destruction of the Iran-Iraq war. As the daughter of two Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Satrapi holds a unique perspective and position in recounting stories of daily life in Iran. Learn, alongside Satrapi, about the history and heroes that define this fascinating country. The book captured readers’ attention for both its modern form—a graphic novel—and important, close-up peek at a country most Americans only know about from the news.

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33. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (1952)

You’re never too old to visit with Charlotte, Wilbur, and Templeton. This heartwarming tale of friendship and dedication follows young Wilbur, a runt of a pig, as he’s spared from one death but subsequently sent to another almost-certain death. Desperate to help the petite porker, Charlotte, a barn spider, hatches a plan that proves genius and life-altering for young Wilbur. Charlotte’s Web remains a touching, great read for families.

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34. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five is a science-fiction-infused, anti-war novel that follows American soldier Billy Pilgrim. A central event in the story—as well as Vonnegut’s own life—is the firebombing of Dresden. Pilgrim begins to see many of the events in his life as repercussions of that deathly event. Much of Slaughterhouse-Five is autobiographical, but that hasn’t stopped pushes for censorship because of the book’s irreverent tone and unfiltered depictions of sex and profanity. One part futuristic storytelling, one part reflective memoir, Slaughterhouse-Five is often held as Vonnegut’s most important piece of writing.

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35. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2009)

Abraham Verghese weaves multiple lush story lines into an opus of secrets, betrayal, love, and redemption in Cutting for Stone. Marion and Shiva Stone, twin brothers born of a secret union between an Indian nun and a British surgeon, are orphaned at a young age by their mother’s death and father’s disappearance. The two, bound together by blood and bond, leave war-seized Ethiopia for New York City only to return later to discover their fates and futures are intertwined with their pasts. The novel was groundbreaking for its depiction of medicine as primarily focused on people rather than procedures.

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A smiling person reclines with a hand on the head, wearing glasses, suit and tie. Text reads: “THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X AS TOLD TO ALEX HALEY.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

36. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive work of an era in American history when cultural, racial, and religious ideologies met at a pinnacle. Malcolm X, a firebrand, Muslim, and anti-integrationist leader, reveals the limits he sees in the American Dream and the changes that can be made through a force of will and effort. Fun fact: Coauthor Alex Haley was once an editor at Reader’s Digest.

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37. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson (1971)

Even if you’ve never consumed a hallucinogenic drug in your life, you’ll likely feel a deep relationship to the wild ride many drug users describe after you read Hunter S. Thompson’s rollicking Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book is the recounting of a wild, long weekend in Las Vegas, where he and his Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, are sent to cover a biker’s race in the deserts of Nevada. The drug-addled duo never gets the story—not much of a spoiler—but what did come of the journey is a tour de force of a bygone era.

18.0045% OFF$9.90 at Amazon

Book cover displays title “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri, with abstract art background and gold badge noting “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

38. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

In this collection of short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri outlines the complex dynamics that exist when Indian traditionalism meets an American culture that often offers little respect for complex cultural dynamics it doesn’t understand. Each character’s story traces recognizable themes—longing, lust, betrayal—but they’re told in a complex story line that’s rich with detail. It’s an important read in our modern, multicultural world.

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39. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)

Reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is a rite of passage for many adolescents and young adults, but older adults will find a lot to appreciate in this young woman’s wise words. Written during World War II as Nazis carried out their campaign of death and destruction, this journal is a day-by-day accounting of what life was like when a family was forced into hiding. Frank’s humanity and grace in light of her circumstances are inspiring and heartbreaking at once. It’s a deeply moving nonfiction book for kids and adults alike.

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40. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita may have first gained fame and notoriety for its infamous accounting of the protagonist’s unnatural (and, many argue, predatory) erotic predilections, but its staying power rests squarely on the breathtaking story that belies the most controversial elements. It’s a requiem about love (and, yes, lust), in all its maddening forms.

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41. Love Medicine by Louise Eldrich (1984)

Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets can barely hold a handle to Louise Eldrich’s Kashpaws and Lamartines. Love Medicine, a dazzling work of storytelling that takes place on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, shares the intertwined fates of two multigenerational families. Themes of injustice, betrayal, magic, and mystique surround a beautiful story that, in the end, is all about the power of love. For more entertainment from this era, turn on one of these fantastic ’80s movies.

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42. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)

This laugh-out-loud collection of short stories makes for great leisurely reading. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris shares the absurd and hysterical twists he was able to tease out of life’s more mundane and boring events growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. The book continues as Sedaris moves to France, where he also shares the awkwardly charming stories of learning to live in a city and country that’s not at all familiar.

19.9955% OFF$8.99 at Amazon

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43. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

Calliope Helen Stephanides was born in Detroit in 1960, the heyday of Motor City, to a Greek American family who lived a quintessentially suburban American life. Moving out of the city, Calliope is faced with the realization that she’s not like other girls. It takes uncovering a family secret (and an astonishing genetic history) to understand why. Middlesex made waves as an audacious story of sexuality that transcends stereotypes of gender, sex, and identity.

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44. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

Saleem Sinai was born at midnight on August 15, 1947. That is precisely the moment India became an independent state. Greeted with fireworks and fanfare, Sinai and 1,000 other “midnight’s children” across India soon find their health, well-being, thoughts, and capabilities are preternaturally linked to one another—and to their country’s national affairs, health, and power. In this magical realism novel, Salman Rushdie offers a timeless, enchanting story of family, heritage, and duty.

19.0042% OFF$10.99 at Amazon

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45. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)

We’d be remiss to leave out one of the most beloved American authors of the 20th century: John Steinbeck. In East of Eden, he presents a masterpiece that highlights the tension between good and evil through three generations of the Trasks and Hamiltons. You’ll be swept away by the complex characters and their similarities to Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. Though Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is assigned more often in high school classrooms, East of Eden takes the cake for its sweeping timeline and broader themes. It’s one of the best historical fiction books in existence.

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46. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (2003)

The Oakland Athletics were written off, discarded, and ignored. Yet somehow they became one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. Was it their throwing talent or their ERA? No, not at all. Instead, as Michael Lewis reveals, the real secret to winning baseball has little to do with skills and more to do with statistics. In what’s been described as “the single most influential baseball book ever,” Lewis reveals the secrets of the A’s and an unusual brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts who’ve identified the real secret to being a winning ball team. This book, which features a decidedly American story about an American tradition, belongs on the bookshelf of any American reader.

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47. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (1915)

You might not walk away with a big life lesson after reading W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and perhaps that’s what makes this novel so irresistible. The orphaned protagonist, Philip Carey, is raring for adventure and love outside his brief stays in Heidelberg and Paris. Soon, he lands in London, eager to explore, and stumbles upon his greatest adventure yet: Mildred. The irresistible waitress and roaming orphan embark on a wildly fanciful but tortured and tormented affair. This book is widely considered a 20th-century English classic.

$5.53 at Amazon

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48. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

On the Road recounts a hedonistic cross-country road trip between friends in the aftermath of World War II, a story line inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with friend Neal Cassady. Eager to find meaning and true experiences along the way, the duo seeks pleasures in drug-fueled escapades and counterculture experiences. The book is a must-read for its ubiquitous place among American countercultural classics (much like Catcher in the Rye).

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49. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1937)

Isak Dinesen—a pen name for Danish author Karen Blixen—recounts life in British East Africa, just after World War II. While the collection of stories is not free of the racial bias and colonial attitudes of the time, Out of Africa gives a glimpse into an area of the world that’s largely overlooked when telling the coming-of-age narrative of modern countries. Fanciful and fascinating, Dinesen’s book portrays stories of lion hunts and life with native populations and European colonizers alongside a beautiful story of raising and freeing an orphaned antelope fawn. It offers readers a glimpse of a very specific place and time in history.

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50. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)

In a world rife with paperback mysteries and e-books, Agatha Christie remains one of the most popular, well-known mystery writers of all time. In her vast collection, And Then There Were None frequently rises to the top. It’s a classic whodunit. Ten strangers are invited to a remote mansion on a desolate island. Once they’ve arrived, each guest is accused of murder. So what really happened? And who is responsible? Pick up a copy to find out; it makes a great summer read, after all.

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51. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

Deemed highly controversial and too explicit when it was first published, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint is a vividly brash look at sexuality, obscenities, masturbation, and identity. The novel is a monologue of “a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor” that details many awkward and cringeworthy moments alongside quests for identity. It remains a landmark published piece in American literature, and after you read it, you’ll most certainly never look at a piece of liver the same way.

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Book cover displays “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson on green background, includes a 50th anniversary emblem. Subtitles highlight its relevance to environmental movement.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

52. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published as three installments in the New Yorker in the summer of 1962. The stories—and the book that followed in September of that year—launched the American environmental revolution, as the horrors of DDT, a pesticide commonly used at the time, made their way into the American mainstream. While Carson’s work was successful at eliminating the toxin, her story serves as a lasting reminder—and a good read—about the need for protecting our land, water, and air.

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53. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)

Abraham Lincoln upended the political landscape of the 1850s when he won the Republican presidential nomination over a field of well-known, privileged men. Facing a divided nation and a crumbling war effort, Lincoln soon turned to those exact politicians to help build a team of rivals, a group of people he could turn to for honest accountability, effort, and eventually support and friendship. Team of Rivals is a deeply personal biography of one of America’s most respected leaders, told to show how he humbled himself in order to lead and govern.

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54. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

Don’t miss this historical fiction masterpiece that also landed on our list of the best books by Black authors. Readers will fall in love with the riveting story of two sisters with very different fates. One was kidnapped and enslaved. The other married an Englishman and built a life of wealth and prestige. The award-winning book (it won the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award and the American Book Award, among others) delves deep into generational trauma and colonization. It is a must-read for modern bibliophiles.

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55. The Age of Innocence by Edith Warton (1920)

This is a tale of love in the time of rigid societal requirements of New York City’s upper class. Newland Archer, an attorney from a respected family, is engaged to May Welland. Despite his betrothal, Archer finds himself taken by Countess Ellen Olenska, Welland’s unconventional cousin. Despite his own personal desires, Archer marries Welland as he has promised but continues to see Olenska. This best-of-both-worlds approach seems to please Newland, but his dreams ultimately come to an end as he’s forced to face the life he wants versus the life society expects him to lead. The book has sparked discussions in book clubs and classrooms for a century.

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56. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)

You don’t need pirates and boats to have a swashbuckling thriller of a book. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the lives and adventures of a curious and meddlesome pair of cousins are explored in exuberant detail. Cousins Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay swing through the glittering streets of pre–World War II Brooklyn, spinning up comic books to feed America’s growing craze. Their hero, Escapist, fights fascists and falls hard for Luna Moth, an ethereal, mysterious, and desirous paramour. Their lives—and their careers—are equally bright and fanciful. The book received an incredible amount of praise from readers and critics. It also became a New York Times best seller.

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57. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005)

If you’re reading this list, you likely understand the power that a book has to feed and nurture a soul. In that case, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief will be right at home in your hands. In 1939 Nazi Germany, Liesel Meminger seeks meaning and life amid the bombings and death. Her “weapon” of choice? Books and the written word. This is a beautiful, riveting tale that helped make the horrors of World War II fresh again for readers who learned about it from history books. Our editors agree that it’s one of the 100 best books of all time. Want great fiction like this mailed to you every month? Sign up for one of these book subscription boxes.

14.9948% OFF$7.76 at Amazon

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58. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (1973)

Every reader should take the time to read a few of the best LGBTQ books ever published. Rubyfruit Jungle is the perfect place to start. This is Rita Mae Brown’s semi-autobiographical novel about fumbling through her first relationship in sixth grade, landing in New York City’s queer society, and more. It’s a personal, poignant look at what it meant to belong to the LGBTQ+ community in the mid- to late 20th century. The award-winning book is widely recognized as an important contribution to LGBTQ+ and lesbian literature.

18.0042% OFF$10.44 at Amazon

58 The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao By Junot Díaz Via Amazon© via amazon.com

59. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

Oscar Wao is a pleasant nerd living in New Jersey, far removed from the comforts and traditions of the Dominican Republic his mother knows and loves. Wao wants nothing more than to find love—and to be the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. His quest for both plunges readers into mythologies of family curses, immigrant journeys, and the American experience. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a page-turner that’ll find a home with anyone who lusts for love and the human experience.

18.0049% OFF$9.23 at Amazon

Book cover features an illustrated carousel horse, energetic lines, bright text, and urban skyline. Title: “The Catcher in the Rye.” Author: J.D. Salinger.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

60. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

Originally meant for an adult audience, The Catcher in the Rye has become a favorite among adolescent readers and high school literature teachers. The theme of teenage angst and alienation imbue a story of rebellion as the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, looks for acceptance, recognition, and appreciation. Like so many teenagers, Caulfield finds himself facing the decision to leave everything behind, only to face the realization that perhaps his life isn’t as dreadful as it seems. For something totally different, take a bite out of one of these vampire books.

17.9961% OFF$7.03 at Amazon

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61. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride (1995)

“God is the color of water,” Ruth McBride taught her children, expressing her belief that God’s blessings, values, and grace rise above skin color and race. McBride, a “light-skinned” mother to 12 Black children, brought up her kids in the all-Black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, sending them to Jewish schools, shuttling them to free cultural events, and eventually shepherding all of them through college and beyond. But McBride’s son, James, discovers that she’s actually a White woman who was born in Poland, and he unearths the many painful reasons she has for hiding from that truth in this powerful, National Book Award–winning memoir.

17.0046% OFF$9.10 at Amazon

Two figures embrace against a red background; text reads: “Amy Tan, New York Times Bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a novel.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

62. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989)

Any fan of women’s fiction has likely read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. This debut novel tells the story of four Chinese women who move to the United States in search of a better life. As their American-born daughters grow up, the women struggle to reconcile their identities, cultures, and more. It’s a beautiful, important book about mothers and daughters, motherlands and adopted lands. As the world gets smaller and smaller, as more families pack up their belongings to move to a new place, books like these are critical to fostering empathy.

18.0034% OFF$11.95 at Amazon

Book cover shows a family dining, featuring a table laden with food. Text reads: “Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, Winner of the National Book Award.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

63. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)

After 50 years of marriage, Enid Lambert is looking for a little excitement, but it seems the universe is working against her goals. Her husband is frail from disease, and her children’s lives are falling apart or swirling down the drain. In The Corrections, Enid wants nothing more than to bring her whole family together for one last Christmas so she has something to look forward to. What unfolds, however, is nothing short of an emotional roller coaster. The book is brimming with characters who will stick with you, which is what makes it one of the best books to read when you want to deeply feel something.

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Book cover features bold title text, a silver award seal, and an image of illuminated classical architecture under dramatic clouds. Author name is prominently displayed.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

64. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson (2003)

The 1893 World’s Fair brought the globe to Chicago—but it also brought a cunning serial killer, H.H. Holmes. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson combines meticulous historical research with a bit of period storytelling to generate a truly captivating nonfiction murder mystery that also shares a lot of history about one of the world’s greatest marvels.

19.0042% OFF$10.98 at Amazon

The book cover features an elderly man contemplating, with trees and a medal in the background. The text reads: “LOIS LOWRY the giver.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

65. The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)

Jonas lives in a Utopian world. Everyone’s role is clear, and everyone fulfills those roles blissfully. Life is a set path that’s followed precisely. When he turns 12, however, Jonas begins to learn the reason his world is very fragile. The Giver is a dystopian story about what you’re willing to give up—and what you’re not—to live a life that’s free of emotions, pain, and suffering.

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Book cover displays colorful stripes with bold text, “The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich. Features “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” badge.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

66. The Night Watchmen by Louise Erdrich (2020)

The Night Watchmen snagged the top spot on our list of the best Native American books for a reason. Based on Louise Erdrich’s grandfather’s life, the story is about one Native American night watchman who fights for his right to land and identity in the United States. The book brims with beautiful sentences and a riveting story, but it also received critical acclaim for its important themes and depiction of cultural identity.

19.9950% OFF$9.99 at Amazon

Cover features a polar bear running across ice under a starry sky. Text: “Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, #1 International Bestseller.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

67. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (1995)

Lyra, a bold and brave young woman, takes off into uncharted territories to rescue her friend and other young children from kidnapping by the Gobblers. She also has to help her uncle build a bridge to a parallel world. What she doesn’t realize, however, is that she will face choices that challenge her and require grit she doesn’t know she has. The first in the His Dark Materials series, The Golden Compass is captivating from word one.

9.9927% OFF$7.34 at Amazon

Book cover features prominent eyes above a cityscape with lights against a deep blue background. Text includes “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

68. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

The roaring twenties still captivate the imagination of many, so dive into The Great Gatsby for a fantastic story and a historical trip that will leave you reeling. Rich characters and detailed imagery ensconce you in the era and whisk you into a beautiful story of the Jazz Age’s glitzy parties and lusty affections. The book is arguably the most well-known work depicting this time. That’s what places it among the books everyone should read. Not sure what to pick up after you close the book on Gatsby and friends? Choose the best book for you based on your zodiac sign.

17.0082% OFF$3.01 at Amazon

Book cover shows Henrietta Lacks standing confidently, set against a bright orange cellular background with text detailing her medical story and its aftermath.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

69. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)

Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black tobacco farmer, died of cervical cancer shortly after giving birth to her fifth child in 1951. During her treatment, Lacks’ cells were taken without her knowledge, and they became the first immortalized cell line. That cell line has been used by doctors, researchers, and medical companies to develop everything from the polio vaccine to clones. Her cells are one of the most vital health tools of the 20th and 21st centuries and have made companies millions. Lacks’ family, however, knew nothing about this. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a riveting story about race, medicine, ethics, and the search for life.

18.9958% OFF$7.99 at Amazon

Face showing eyes and mouth with text overlay. “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, featuring a Nobel Prize sticker.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

70. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Kazuo Ishiguro is on our list of contemporary writers you should have read by now. He won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, and his 2005 publication of Never Let Me Go is at least one reason why. The science fiction story centers on cloned humans living in a boarding school who await their future as forced organ donors. But, of course, clones are humans, too, and the students’ lives intertwine with friendship, love, and lust even as they grow more entrapped by their inevitable role in society. This is a must-read for its portrayal of enduring friendship, its questions about medical science, and its masterful writing.

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71. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (1995)

Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club is a darkly humorous story of life in east Texas in the 1960s with a family that could give anyone’s family a run for its money. A daddy who drinks too much, a mother who marries too much, and a sister whose mouth could make a grown man blush—these characters are brilliant depictions of hilarious, horrific human foibles.

19.0031% OFF$13.13 at Amazon

Cover shows a close-up car grille, with text: “Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye.” Below, “Raymond Chandler is a master.” —The New York Times.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

72. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953)

The Long Goodbye is a murder mystery wrapped up in thrill and suspense. Philip Marlowe befriends a down-on-his-luck veteran, but several clever plot twists later, Marlowe’s friendship with the vet leaves him in the eye of investigators and a gangster. Deeply dark and fascinating, The Long Goodbye belongs to a series of novels about investigator Marlowe, and critics quibble about which are the best. You can’t go wrong with any—they’re all must-read books. Next, check out these book recommendations based on TV shows you might’ve watched.

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Book cover displays title “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” by Lawrence Wright against a background of monochrome portraits. Pulitzer Prize badge visible.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

73. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (2006)

You think you know the events that led to September 11, 2001, but The Looming Tower is a history lesson that is as profound as it is infuriating and painful. In the five decades leading up to one of America’s darkest hours, you will trace the beginning elements of fundamental Islam, the rise of Osama bin Laden, and the terrorist groups that sought to bring down a country.

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Book cover depicts title “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks; blue and orange text on cream background, review quote below.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

74. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Olive Sacks (1985)

Physicians and health care providers could likely fill volumes with the strange, heartbreaking, and obscene things they experience in their practices. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, one doctor finally did commit those episodes to paper. Oliver Sacks recounts stories of patients with a variety of neurological disorders—including, as the name suggests, a man who mistook his wife for a hat—that leave them physically here but mentally miles away. It’s captivating and heartbreaking, and it helps you understand how doctors connect with the humans behind the diagnoses. For more medical dramas, check out our list of the best doctor shows on TV.

16.998% OFF$15.64 at Amazon

Book cover displays grapes, bread, and a bone, introducing© Provided by Reader’s Digest

75. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (2006)

Michael Pollan may ultimately be one of the biggest forces for changes in food systems, sustainability, and healthful living. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan shows how the meals we choose to eat impact everything from our health to the world’s ultimate outlook. Nearly a decade after he first published this book, Pollan’s call to deeper thought and conversation about our food systems continues to shift the way we eat, grow, and share our food.

19.0048% OFF$9.97 at Amazon

Bust of a man emerging from a structure, surrounded by cityscape. Text reads: “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

76. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro (1974)

New York City has been home to big personalities, but perhaps none have been quite as powerful as Robert Moses. He established much of what the city is today, from its bureaucratic utility companies to its physical layout and infrastructure. He was a force to be reckoned with, taking into his control much of the city’s development and prosperity—that is, until he finally met his match in Nelson Rockefeller. We’ve deemed this essential reading for understanding the history and politics of the Big Apple.

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Rocket launching with fiery flames, surrounded by thick smoke; book title “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe, and publisher “Picador” are displayed prominently.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

77. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)

Many words have been committed to paper to commemorate and honor the United States’ race to the moon and the men and women behind those missions. But perhaps no other book can take you deep into the mindset and the tenacity, grit, and courage it took to complete the Apollo missions the way Tom Wolfe did in The Right Stuff.

$21.98 at Amazon

Boy standing at a window, looking contemplative in a black and white photo. Book cover titled “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

78. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

As a gay Black man in the 20th century, James Baldwin inspired generations of readers who relate to any one of his identities. Despite—and sometimes spurred by—the discrimination he faced, he wrote prolifically. While there are many, many Baldwin texts to recommend, Go Tell It on the Mountain landed on this list because of its semi-autobiographical nature. This American classic tells the story of one Harlem man’s spiritual and sexual reckoning.

$57.86 at Amazon

Book cover displays bold title “The Road,” author’s name Cormac McCarthy, and a badge for winning the Pulitzer Prize, set against a dark background.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

79. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

The Road is a deeply poetic and haunting tale of a father and son, “each the other’s world entire,” and the journey they take across a burned and destroyed America. They have little to their names, save each other, some scavenged food, and a pistol, yet they must fend off the worst of post-apocalyptic America—roaming gangs of thieves, isolation, desolation, and devastation—as they make their way to the coast, where they hope to figure out what’s next.

18.0050% OFF$8.97 at Amazon

Book cover features radial black lines, titling “The Stranger” by Albert Camus centered, set against a white background. “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

80. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

Albert Camus’ The Stranger has long lived a dual life of meaning: In one way, it’s a story of mystery, murder, death, and destruction. In another, it’s a sermon on the absurd and the power of human thought. Camus, for his part, wrote, “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society, any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

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A woman rests, leaning on a tree, on a yellow book cover. Text: “The Sun Also Rises” and “Ernest Hemingway” with a PBS feature.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

81. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

Ernest Hemingway wrote stories filled with powerful emotions and unforgettable characters in a strikingly simple manner. The Sun Also Rises, which examines the disillusionment, angst, and apprehension of the post–World War I generation, is one of his finest works. In this novel, readers follow the tales and adventures of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley as they swing through Europe with bewildered expats, seeking out the next great thrill.

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The book cover displays large text, featuring the title “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, with a National Book Award sticker.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

82. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

Our list of the best books of all time filled up quickly with fiction. But there are a few nonfiction tomes, including Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bible for the Black Lives Matter movement, that cannot be left out. This important book about racism offers a clear understanding of how Black men and women have been ostracized and exploited by formal systems throughout history. What makes the book even more compelling is how it mashes together history and modern memoir. The result is a bold, clear call to upend current racist systems and strive for a truly fair society.

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83. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)

Perhaps the greatest book of fiction on Vietnam, The Things They Carried is a powerful story about war, memory, death, imagination, the importance of storytelling, and the human spirit. Tim O’Brien moves beyond the pain of war to examine the sensitivity and nature that each soldier brought with him on that long journey to Vietnam and the scars that returned with them. It’s a raw, honest look at a war that changed the country.

18.9955% OFF$8.56 at Amazon

Book cover features colorful swirling clouds with geometric white lines and text: “THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE” and “HARUKI MURAKAMI.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

84. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1994)

A search for a lost cat turns into a search for a lost wife in this prescient, engrossing, and humorous novel. At the intersection of a failing marriage, a dark past, and a secretive underground, Toru Okada encounters an untold number of bizarre people and experiences as he longs for answers that may never come for him—or even for you, the reader. Reviewers have said that though this magical realism book takes time and attention to read, the magnificent tome is absolutely worth it.

19.0045% OFF$10.45 at Amazon

Frog sits on typewriter amidst foliage; book cover reads “John Irving, The World According to Garp.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

85. The World According to Garp by John Irving (1978)

Leave any puritan tendencies at the door when you pick up a copy of John Irving’s The World According to Garp. This story highlights the life of T.S. Garp, the bastard son of a feminist and activist. Garp’s world is a roller coaster of extremes—emotional, physical, and sexual. He faces scenarios so outlandishly awful and painful, you can’t help but laugh, cringe, cry, and cheer. Enjoy the journey!

8.9980% OFF$1.80 at Amazon

Skull intricately designed with patterns, centered; surrounded by decorative elements, against a black backdrop. Text reads “HAMLET” and “WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE” above and below.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

86. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1603) plus rest of the plays

If you only ever read one of Shakespeare’s plays, let it be this, the tragic tale of a son on a quest to avenge his murdered father. Part of what makes Hamlet so iconic is how it has been retold and referenced in the centuries since it was first written. This work has spawned an entire collection of other pop culture, from Disney’s The Lion King to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. If you haven’t read it already, grab a copy of this slim little work and prepare to be swept away by madness, intrigue, and bitter fate.

$7.95 at Amazon

Book cover displaying the title “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion, featuring minimalistic design and a gold National Book Award winner seal.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

87. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

One of life’s truest axioms is that there will be good times and there will be bad times. If you can relate to both, or even if you can’t, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is a heart-wrenching story of a marriage, a family, a relationship, and a life that’s good, great, bad, awful, and everything in between. And in the end, isn’t that just a story about life?

18.0047% OFF$9.60 at Amazon

Silhouettes face each other, filled with intricate patterns on a red background. Text reads “Chinua Achebe, THINGS FALL APART,” with a Penguin logo below.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

88. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

More than a century ago, worlds collided on the African continent when European colonizers arrived to establish outposts for their respective queens, kings, and presidents. What happened to the countries, the natives, and the settlers was nothing short of cataclysmic and tragic. Things Fall Apart tells the story of pre-colonial Africa and the great loss the world suffered when these civilizations and traditions were wiped away.

16.0049% OFF$8.09 at Amazon

A plane flies over ocean at sunset; text reads: “LAURA HILLENBRAND UNBROKEN: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

89. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

The story behind Unbroken is so unbelievable and so improbable, it’s difficult to accept that it’s the real story of Louis Zamperini. Rebellious teenage years gave way to an Olympic career and eventually a stint as a U.S. airman. Zamperini soon found himself stranded in the Pacific Ocean and adrift thousands of miles from help. Where other men may have accepted their fate, he fought with hope, toughness, and humor to triumph. It’s an inspiring read for all.

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A group of four girls reads a book together inside a warmly lit room, surrounded by red curtains. Text: “Louisa May Alcott Little Women.”© Provided by Reader’s Digest

90. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)

Is there any other mother-daughter book as iconic as Little Women? Louisa May Alcott’s story of the March sisters—Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy—traverses their lives from childhood to adulthood. It’s a coming-of-age story that remains relevant for women everywhere because of its themes of love, career, and budding identity. No list of the best books of all time would be complete without this truly classic novel.

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Book cover displays title “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith in bold white text on an orange background, labeled a national bestseller.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

91. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)

Zadie Smith’s debut novel tells the tale of two women whose lives are forever changed by what they experienced together during World War II. This fast-paced historical fiction story covers a lot of ground: race, ethnicity, religion, class struggles, and more. The powerhouse novel landed on our list for its overwhelming praise from readers and critics alike.

18.0044% OFF$10.04 at Amazon

Book cover displays two faceless figures, heads touching; text reads “The Color Purple, A Novel, Alice Walker.” Background is a muted pink.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

92. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

When Alice Walker’s award-winning novel was first published in the 1980s, it was quickly censored. The author has said that most of the criticisms come from those who never even cracked open the book. So, what’s all the hubbub about? The Color Purple tells the story of a Black teen in 1930s rural Georgia. It centers around Celie, who writes about her day-to-day life in letters addressed to God. Yes, the book contains sexual themes, profanity, and violence. But its powerful prose has won awards, resulted in film and musical adaptations, and earned a spot on “best of” lists everywhere.

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A girl sits on stone steps, surrounded by trees. Text reads: “National Bestseller, Ian McEwan, Atonement.” A quote from John Updike is included.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

93. Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)

Set in World War II–era England, Ian McEwan’s award-winning Atonement also landed on our list of the best historical fiction of all time. The novel tells the story of Briony Tallis and how her childhood accusation against a family friend changes three lives forever. It’s a romance. It’s a war novel. It’s historical fiction that will grab hold of your 21st-century heart and squeeze it till you cry. Though it’s not a light read, you’ll find yourself flying through the pages until you reach the gut-wrenching finale.

19.0040% OFF$11.35 at Amazon

99 Wuthering Heights By Emily Brontë Via Amazon© via amazon.com

94. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Could a book you read in high school really be considered one of the best books of all time? In the case of Wuthering Heights, yes. Emily Brontë’s classic novel takes a simple love story and smashes it to pieces with deft psychology and a dark Gothic atmosphere. Handsome Heathcliff falls head over heels for his foster sister, Catherine. But when another man enters the scene, their love story takes a manipulative, violent turn. The ripple effects of his jealousy even carry over into the next generation. Whether you end up loving or detesting this classic, dark romance, it’s worth a read.

$8 at Amazon

A lion’s face dominates the image, embraced by two children. Text reads:© Provided by Reader’s Digest

95. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950) plus rest of the Narnia stories

C.S. Lewis wrote and published numerous nonfiction and fiction books throughout his lifetime, but none have seeped so soundly into pop culture as those in the Chronicles of Narnia series. In this, the first installment, Lewis whisks readers through the wardrobe and into a vivid allegory that children and adults have fallen in love with again and again. You’ll see good and evil clash in the fight between Aslan and the White Witch. You’ll see compassion and forgiveness bloom between the Pevensie siblings. And you’ll certainly whet your appetite for more fantastical adventures as you reach the final page. This book is a children’s classic for a reason.

10.9949% OFF$5.59 at Amazon

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96. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

If you haven’t yet read something by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it’s time to start. Americanah won the 2013 U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (joining the likes of Ian McEwan’s Atonement) and captured the imagination of readers all over the world. It’s the story of love, regret, and identity, as experienced by a Nigerian immigrant to the United States. The book simultaneously weaves a beautiful tale while revealing truths about the African diaspora that many American readers might not already know. It’s a new classic and truly one of the best fiction books you’ll read all year.

19.0048% OFF$9.87 at Amazon

Book cover displays Zora Neale Hurston’s© Provided by Reader’s Digest

97. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

This groundbreaking novel by Zora Neale Hurston took years to get the praise it deserved. Now it’s widely regarded as a landmark book in African American literature. It reveals themes of fate versus free will, gender, and race in the story of Janie Crawford, a young Black girl who must make her own way in 1930s Florida.

17.9954% OFF$8.21 at Amazon

Mechanized figure with raised arms below a gear; “Brave New World, Aldous Huxley” text centered. Black-and-white steampunk aesthetic on a book cover.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

98. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Walk either through the best bookstores in each state or your local bookstore and it won’t take long to find a shelf full of dystopian fiction. From The Hunger Games and Divergent to The Handmaid’s Tale and The Giver, twisted tales of societies gone wrong have practically become de rigueur. But once upon a time, that wasn’t the case. When Aldous Huxley penned the story of the World State, in which humans were conditioned out of their emotions and ability to bond with others, his ideas were new and somewhat shocking. The parallels to today—medicating oneself to stop feeling, genetic engineering, and instant gratification—make it all the more compelling for modern readers.

18.9949% OFF$9.60 at Amazon

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99. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)

Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel has been read by millions of people all over the world, clearly marking it as one of the best books of all time. It tells the touching story of two boys in modern-day Afghanistan: one wealthy, the other poor. The timing of the book (published at the height of the country’s presence in American news) buoyed its popularity, but the story is powerful enough to stand on its own. Themes of friendship, redemption, and familial love make it a universal chronicle that will keep readers of all ages riveted until the end. For more deeply moving fiction, join an online book club and discuss your reads with like-minded book lovers.

18.0034% OFF$11.85 at Amazon

Book cover shows overlapping colorful dancers; text reads: “national bestseller, jennifer egan, a visit from the goon squad, a novel, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” Black spine text.© Provided by Reader’s Digest

100. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

This 2011 Pulitzer Prize–winning book is a series of 13 stories. All are connected by a record company exec named Bennie Salazar (and his assistant, Sasha). The stories intersect through time, revealing each character’s past—and the way time changes us all. It stands apart for its form, quietly shocking characters, and acknowledgment of how the world keeps spinning madly, whether we keep up with the pace or not. It’s a must-read for its insight and trajectory toward modern-day classic status. Need something else to keep you entertained when you finish this book? Press Play on one of the best movies from the past 100 years.

$12.99 at Amazon

 

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November 2, 2025

 

The 20 best sci-fi books of all time – ranked

 

 

best science fiction books

Fiction is there to drive us out of our heads, and science fiction even more so: it makes the wildest notions seem pressingly relevant to us, extends our imaginations and our sympathies.

I’ve not only written many science-fiction (SF) novels myself, but for years I’ve written about SF, championed it, criticised it, taught it (whatever that means) and – God help me – edited it.

Feminist SF never quite shook off Russ’s influence – ponderous imitations abound – and it’s easy to forget how much sheer fun Russ had with her foundational novel. Long ignored by the anti-feminist crowd, its anti-trans passages are now winning it new opprobrium. Well, to hell with people who won’t let their bubbles be pricked.

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17. Cat’s Cradle (1963)

by Kurt Vonnegut

To write a good spoof, you need a truly hare-brained imagination; SF arises where invention takes on a peculiar life of its own. In Kurt Vonnegut’s fourth novel, a Cold War skit, a writer investigating the development of the atomic bomb uncovers “ice-nine”, a catastrophic polymer capable of solidifying all water. This uncomfortably believable idea – look it up: H2O is odd – pushes Vonnegut beyond satire and into a doomed and hilarious world all of his own.

 

16. Camp Concentration (1968)

by Thomas M Disch

America has declared war on the rest of the world, and sinister army doctors have infected Sacchetti, an incarcerated poet, with a strain of syphilis, seeking to boost his intelligence. On these satirical foundations, Thomas Disch, one of the genre’s great jokers, built a terrifying enquiry into the relationship between language and perception, genius and pain. Anyone tempted to plug a chip into their brain, or microdose their way up to a pressing deadline (ahem), is well advised to nail this book to their desk.

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15–11

15. Neuromancer (1984)

by William Gibson

It’s hard to say whether William Gibson wanted to satirise his times, or had got drunk on the Kool-Aid. Either way, Neuromancer defined the 1980s. Case, a hacker, is washed-up and neurologically crippled from accessing cyberspace. With nothing to lose, he signs up for one last job: breaking into the heavily guarded computer systems of a powerful corporate dynasty.

Little does he know, he has become the tool of Wintermute, a rogue artificial intelligence striving to merge with its more powerful sibling and achieve true sentience. Any attempt to précis Neuromancer makes it sound like a bad copy of itself, so let’s try this: before Tenet and The Matrix, before Ready Player One and The Windup Girl, there was this odd, twisted, noirish beast, its skin the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.

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14. The Dispossessed (1974)

by Ursula K Le Guin

By the time you’re taking pot-shots at the human condition itself, you’re less a commentator than a species of philosopher. We follow Shevek, a brilliant physicist (based on Robert Oppenheimer, a family friend of Le Guin), who travels to the capitalist hell-hole planet Urras, while pining for Anarres, his socialist homeworld.

Yet we don’t: the more Shevak remembers, the more stultifying Anarres seems. Urras is no picnic either: adrift in its shallowness and brutality, Shevak’s loneliness is visceral. How, then, should we live? No point asking Le Guin, who drove critics mad with a novel that insists readers think for themselves.

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13. Last and First Men (1930)

by Olaf Stapledon

Let’s start at the end. Barely warmed by the light of an ageing Sun, the last man reflects on his species’ history: how it evolved, blossomed, speciated and died. Last and First Men isn’t merely a novel; it’s an imaginative history of the solar system across two billion years, detailing the dreams and aspirations, achievements and failings of 17 different kinds of future Homo. At last, extinction beckons: “It is very good to have been man… And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage.”

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12. Station Eleven (2014)

by Emily St John Mandel

Bring that thousand-yard stare back down to earth, and turn it upon our 21st-century lives, and you wind up with books like this one – not that there’s anything quite like Station Eleven. A few days before a flu pandemic ravages humanity, celebrated actor Arthur Leander dies on stage. His friends and family remember and misremember him, living as much in their versions of the past and conceptions of the present as they do the future – and it begins to dawn on us that Leander, by his passing, may just have saved humanity.

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11. Engine Summer (1979)

by John Crowley

In this melancholy and uplifting vision, Rush That Speaks, a young man dedicated to “Truthful Speaking” (harder than it sounds), goes in pursuit of his lost love Once A Day. His quest takes him across strange lands, and among peoples transfigured by disaster and alien visitation into attitudes of rare gentleness. Humanity has adapted in fascinating ways to what, at first, seems a quite hostile environment. Crowley makes a poignant and often heartbreaking drama out of our happy future.

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10–6

10. The Time Machine (1895)

by HG Wells

On the other hand, you could just frighten the life out of people: The Time Machine is one of the genre’s great, foundational shockers. HG Wells’s nameless narrator builds a machine to take him to the year 802701 AD, where he finds humanity split into gentle, stupid Eloi and cruel, clever Morlocks.

The Eloi are beautiful, gentle, charming – and tasty, which is why the Morlocks are farming them. Despite what you might have been told, The Time Machine isn’t a political fable. Wells trained under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, and this is a powerful, well-informed novel about evolution, as Huxley’s generation understood it. Time annihilates any attribute that proves useless to survival – even beauty and intelligence.

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9. Plague of Pythons (1965)

by Frederik Pohl

As society succumbs to a plague of madness, an engineer called Chandler, who committed rape and murder while out of his mind, must fight to clear his name. The plague, in reality, is the doing of mysterious “possessors” who inhabit and manipulate other people as though they were living costumes to be shed at will.

Chandler falls in with a cult that uses pain to ward off possession, and learns that the possessors are hackers who’ve developed technology that can penetrate the human psyche. But, having fallen under their control once again, how can he stop them? Social media has given this agelessly nasty idea new life: Plague of Pythons is an inadvertent parable for our age.

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8. The Islanders (2011)

by Christopher Priest

So much for moral angst. Sometimes you just want your imagination to let rip. In prose that could be pernickety to the point of bizarrerie, Christopher Priest monomaniacally rearranged two or three foundational ideas into brilliant, haunting sui generis novels such as this. The Islanders is his mischievous and magical gazetteer of the Channel Islands, recast as the Dream Archipelago, in which we drift through a chain of fragmentary consciousnesses, and both time and space prove unreliable. It must be the strangest shaggy-dog story ever written.

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7. The Stars My Destination (1956)

by Alfred Bester

Gully Foyle is uneducated, unskilled, unambitious, cowardly, venal and weak. He’s trapped aboard a derelict spaceship, and the company that should rescue him is leaving him to die. But, after surviving his ordeal, Gully plots a revenge as transformative as it is terrible, as he leaps from world to world, acquiring strength after strength and skill after skill. No one, before or since, matched Alfred Bester for energy or economy; no one, with the possible exception of Quentin Tarantino, has ever shown such love for or commitment to pulp fiction.

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6. Rogue Moon (1960)

by Algis Budrys

Give the imagination enough rope, and you soon end up in a place about which you can’t even ask sensible questions, never mind receive comfortable answers. Thrill-seeker Al Barker is repeatedly copied and his copies teleported into an alien artefact on the Moon, which kills him again and again and again.

Maybe it’s trying to communicate, but who knows? “Perhaps it’s the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle’s burrow? […] Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it – or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it?”

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5–1

5. Roadside Picnic (1972)

by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

In 1957, a massive explosion at a nuclear waste dump in the eastern Urals contaminated several hundred square kilometres of land. To prevent people wandering into the forbidden zone, the Soviet government turned it into a nature reserve. Fifteen years later, two Russian brothers wrote Roadside Picnic.

Aliens have visited Earth and left their rubbish behind. Redrick “Red” Schuhart, is a stalker, one of many who illegally brave these abandoned and overgrown “picnic spots” in search of powerful, transformative, toxic and often deadly litter. In some cases, the weirder SF gets, the more it comes to resemble reality.

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4. Dune (1965)

by Frank Herbert

Cast into the wilderness of planet Arrakis by invading House Harkonnen, young Paul Atreides learns the ways of the desert and becomes in one swoop a focus for royalist hopes and religious fanaticism – all while riding on the back of an enormous sand-worm. Dune’s several film and TV adaptations all do a splendid job of conveying the novel’s epic scale. What they can’t do so easily is convey its oddness: like much of Herbert’s best work, Dune is set in a world that has overthrown its own thinking machines, and must now, and for its own survival, breed, drug and otherwise warp individual humans into becoming something very like gods.

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3. Fiasco (1986)

by Stanisław Lem

The trouble with becoming divine is that there’s no finishing line: no point beyond which you magically acquire the wisdom and patience you need to govern your new power. In Lem’s great novel, first published in German translation before it appeared in the original Polish in 1987, idealistic human explorers approach the planet Quinta, which seems to harbour intelligent life. They try to establish contact, but the Quintans are engaged in a war, and refuse to pay any attention to the humans’ arrival. The explorers’ efforts to force the aliens to engage grow increasingly violent, in this bleak, brilliant account of good intentions gone horribly awry.

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2. Ubik (1969)

by Philip K Dick

In the end, wherever we go, we’re stuck with ourselves. Technician Joe Chip is caught in a corporate ambush, and his boss, Glen Runciter, is killed. Reality quickly unravels: objects regress in time, deteriorating into earlier forms, and Joe and his friends find themselves moving backward through the decades. Maybe they’re dead, and Runciter is alive. Runciter certainly seems to think so: he’s constantly turning up in advertisements, pushing “Ubik”, a substance that can temporarily reverse the universal decay. In Dick’s world, we only have each other. The very fabric of reality depends on other people.

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1. The Day of Creation (1987)

by JG Ballard

Mallory is a WHO doctor in war-torn central Africa, where he dreams of bringing water to the parched land. Funnily enough, while digging, he unleashes a powerful, ever-growing river. Becoming obsessed, he names the river after himself and embarks on a journey upstream, through Edenic lands that grow steadily more poisonous and feverish, while the river turns into a force only Mallory can stop.

The Day of Creation caps a formidable series of explorations of psychological “inner space”, that began with 1962’s The Wind from Nowhere. Ballard’s central insight was that no one experiences reality, only those bits of it that seem relevant. That’s where science fiction starts.

Buy the book

Simon Ings’s novels include Wolves and The Smoke

 

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Bold I read

  • On my list
    1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
    2. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
    3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
    4. Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
    5. *The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on my list to read
    6. . East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
    7. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
    8. 1984 by George Orwell
    9. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
    10. Watership Down by Richard Adams
    11. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
    12. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
    13. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
    14. *The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
    15. *The Stranger by Albert Camus
    16. 16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    17. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    18. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

19.                Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

20.                The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

22. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

23. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

24. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

25. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

26. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

27.* Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert on my list to read

28.* Ulysses by James Joyce On my list to read not on the basic list though

29. Dracula by Bram Stoker

30. A Tale of Two Cities Novel by Charles Dicken

 

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A self-help book from 1884 gets me through the year, one day at a time

 

Qoutes

 

Douglas Adams In the Salmon of Doubt Hitchiking the Galaxy One Last Time

 

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” ~ Douglas Adams in “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”

Neil Armstrong quote

In 1969, Neil Armstrong described the earth as a “tiny pea, pretty and blue,” which could be obscured by his thumb as he looked down upon us during his mission to the moon. Today, I can see Mars as a bright speck in the night sky and then go inside, turn on my computer and view images sent down from the Mars rover Curiosity, which show vivid scenes of the sprawling landscape up close and personal, bringing to mind the alien terrain I saw during my first voyage on the way to Auburn. http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/tech/mars-curiosity-anniversary/

Anne Kagan in the After life of Billy Finger

“A shift in perspective makes the particles in your universe dance to new possibilities.” ~ Annie Kagan in “The Afterlife of Billy Finger”

Waiting for Us by Lawrencealot (December 18, 2014)
Joyce Kilmer Trees

 

“What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you’re a poet. But there isn’t one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn’t any formula for it.”
~ Erica Jong“One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is: “Whatever you do, don’t be boring.”
~ Anne Sexton“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
~ Emily Dickinson“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”
~ Sylvia Plath

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,”
-Maya Angelou

“Find the key emotion; this may be all you need to know to find your short story.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I would also suggest that any aspiring writer begin with short stories. These days, I meet far too many young writers who try to start with a novel right off, or a trilogy, or even a nine-book series. That’s like starting in rock climbing by tackling Mt. Everest. Short stories help you learn your craft.”
– George R.R. Martin

Qoutes

Find yourself someone who talks about you the way he talks about Marcia. Expect your friends to be jealous. Or perhaps a bit concerned.

An emptiness so vast, the night screams in envy—
It devours the stars yet still hungers for my sorrow.

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.~~ Chief SeattleA house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house. ~~Anita Shreve

(What a fantastic idea for a book! Hmmmm)

You may delay, but time will not. ~~Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present. ~~Bil Keane

Time and tide wait for no man. ~~Geoffrey Chaucer

Lost – yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. ~~Horace Mann

The past is but a thread in the tapestry of our future. ~~Nora Roberts, Three Fates

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.~~ Chief Seattle

A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house. ~~Anita Shreve

(What a fantastic idea for a book! Hamm)

You may delay, but time will not. ~~Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present. ~~Bil Keane

Time and tide wait for no man. ~~Geoffrey Chaucer

Lost – yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever. ~~Horace Mann

The past is but a thread in the tapestry of our future. ~~Nora Roberts, Three Fates

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