The Compleat Book Bag

The purpose of the game -- to brighten some of the weighty thinking on the preceding pages -- is to reduce everything to a little list. What five books should every educated person have read?

Some of the intellectuals approached by TIME resolutely refused to play. 'Tm against it," said Garry Wills, author, columnist and professor of American culture and public policy at Northwestern. "I think it's profoundly uneducated to frame the question in terms of lists." Others were willing to play but mistrusted the rules. "Very few books stand on their own," said Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard. "You cannot read Kant without having read Hume, and you can't read Hume without having read Descartes..."

Herewith a sampling of the results:

Daniel Bell: No List is possible, but the Antigone is "one of the great landmarks of human imagination." The Bible is also a landmark of human imagination, though reading it is just the beginning. "The goal is to know the relevant questions in a variety of different fields. An educated person should have an awareness of epistemological questions, that is, the conditions of knowing what you know. An educated person should have some conception of metaphysics. That is, what is out there in the world and what are its Limits?"

Daniel Boorstin, historian and Librarian of Congress: The Dialogues of Plato, The Travels of Marco Polo, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, War and Peace, Francis Parkman's France and England in North America.

Paul Engle, poet and founder of the University of Iowa writers' program: Moby Dick, "because the prose is equal to the theme"; Tom Sawyer; the poems of John Donne; the plays of Shakespeare; the King James Bible, because "the language is equal to the great theme." Engle, 74, has further observations: "The most important and profoundly felt thing is that to my surprise I come to the end of my Life convinced that love is indeed possible in a basically unlovely world. It seems to me love is not only possible, but it is the ultimate reason for life on earth."

Fritz Stern, professor of history at Columbia: "There is a certain absurdity and arbitrariness in making such Lists." Nonetheless: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the Bible, King Lear, Hobbes' Leviathan and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.

James R. Killian Jr., retired president of M.I.T.: The five indispensable books are Darwin's Origin of Species, Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe, Ernst Mayr's Growth of Biological Thought, the works of Thomas Huxley, James Watson's Double Helix, Rene Vallery-Radot's Life of Pasteur, Eric Ashby's Technology and the Academics: An Essay on Universities and the Scientific Revolution and Sir WiLliam Cecil Dampier's History of Science. And the Bible. And Fowler's Modern English Usage. Also Spengler's Decline of the West, Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and Frazer's Golden Bough. And George Meredith's works, especially his Essay on Comedy. And H.G. Wells' Time Machine and The Outline of History and any good history of the U.S. And Cardinal

Newman's The Idea of a University and also Pilgrim's Progress. And certainly, notes Killian, any educated person must have had some exposure to the poetry of Keats and Matthew Arnold, to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the Brontes, Gissing, A.E. Housman...

Leon Edel, biographer of Henry James and professor at the University of Hawaii: Five books that have been important to him are the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, the essays of Freud, Don Quixote and Anna Karenina.

Carl Sagan, author and professor of astronomy at Cornell: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Wilfrid Sheed, novelist and Literary critic: The Divine Comedy, Plato's Republic, The Confessions of St. Augustine, one of Shakespeare's tragedies, The Brothers Karamazov. "What is particularly interesting about this list is that I've only read two of the books myself," says Sheed, leaving it to be guessed which two they might be. List making nonetheless inspires further Sheedian reflections: "The object of the intellect is truth, as that of eyes is sight. Being clever is just the sports department of thinking, to be enjoyed for its own sweet sake, but not to be confused with the real business at hand ... All institutions had some point to them once. Our traditions, even marriage, were not invariably fashioned by neurotic sadists. Whether they still have a point is subject to periodic (not constant) review ... Arguing is a game of skill, with fairly clear wins, losses and stalemates. When one of these is perceived, disengage, withdraw, cease babbling. Do something."

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