As the Borders stores close their doors and Kindles are creeping ‘cross our beaches, books are on our minds. So for a short summer series, we asked some of our friends to tell us their favorite books—top ten fiction and top ten non-fiction.
We'll print their individual lists one by one.
David Clemens, professor of English at Monterey Peninsula College
Fiction
Moby Dick—Herman Melville
The Iliad—Homer
The Odyssey including The Lost Books of the Odyssey—Homer and Zachary Mason
The Man Without Qualities—Robert Musil
Billy Budd—Herman Melville
Go Down, Moses—William Faulkner
The Wind in the Willows—Kenneth Grahame
The Nigger of the Narcissus—Joseph Conrad
The Crying of Lot 49—Thomas Pynchon
Non-fiction
Tao Te Ching—Lao-tzu
Why Read?—Mark Edmundson
The Histories—Herodotus
Duty—Bob Greene
Mimesis—Eric Auerbach
Classics Revisited—Kenneth Rexroth
Teaching as a Subversive Activity—Neil Postman
California Diary—The Rev. Walter Colton
Regarding the Pain of Others—Susan Sontag
The Stars, the Snow, the Fire—John Haines
David Clemens is the founder and coordinator of the Monterey Peninsula College Great Books Certificate Program. He publishes in the scholarly and popular press, most recently the San Francisco Chronicle, Inside English, Community College Advocate, Reading at Risk: A Forum, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He also appears in the documentary film Indoctrinate U. He has designed three online classes: “Introduction to Great Books,” “Literature By and About Men,” and “More, or Less, Than Human?” which considers literary and cinematic speculations about the convergence of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. In 2006, he received the Allen Griffin Award for Excellence in Teaching.
