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Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, List of Books [1981]

47 entries: 40 monographical, 7 otherwise

Unranked—arranged alphabetically by author, except no. 3, which appears to have been mistakenly placed ahead of no. 4

This list is just a small part of List of Books, which, despite its title, consists of many short lists, defined by genre and other categorizations. However, the editors each chose 25 books to take with them on a "desert island holiday" (not so morbid as the common tendency to assume that the listmaker is stranded on a desert island). With a few choices overlapping, this list is the result.

  1. Aeschylus

    2. Oresteia
    The House of Atreus
    458 B C—Greek

  2. Edward Albee

    3. Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?
    1962—English

  3. David Attenborough

    4. Life on Earth
    1975; book accompanying television series of the same name—English

  4. Aristophanes

    5. Thesmophoriazousai
    411 B C—Greek

  5. Jane Austen

    6. Emma
    originally anonymously published 1815—English

  6. Hector Berlioz

    7. Memoires de Hector Berlioz Comprenant ses Voyages en Italie, en Allemagne, en Russie et en Angleterre
    published in part in Journal des Débats and Le Monde Illustré; in its entirety, 1865—English

  7. Kenneth Burke
    A Grammar of Motives
    1945—English

    • Lord Byron

    Letters and journals of Lord Byron
    early Nineteenth Century—English

    • Constantine Cavafy

    8. Collected Poems
    1975—Greek

  8. Dante
    La Divina Commedia
    The Divine Comedy
    originally entitled La Commedia; written ca. 1308-21—Italian

    • John Donne

    9. Poems
    early Seventeenth Century—English

  9. Fyodor Dostoevsky

    10. Brat'â Karamazovy
    The Brothers Karamazov
    originally published serially 1880 in Rússkij Véstnik—Russian

  10. Gerard Durrell

    11. My Family and Other Animals
    1956—English

  11. Lawrence Durrell

    12. Reflections on a Marine Venus
    1953—English

  12. George Eliot

    13. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
    originally published serially Dec. 1871-Dec. 1872—English

  13. T S Eliot

    14. Four Quartets
    originally published in four volumes: Burnt Norton, in Collected Poems 1909-1935, 1936; East Coker, in the New English Weekly, 1940; The Dry Salvages, in the New English Weekly, 1941; Little Gidding, in the New English Weekly, 1942—English

  14. Gustave Flaubert

    15. Madame Bovary
    originally published serially Oct. 1856-Dec. 1856 in La Revue de Paris—French

  15. Ford Madox Ford

    16. Parade's End
    originally published in four volumes: Some Do Not..., 1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up, 1926; Last Post, 1928—English

  16. James George Frazer

    17. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
    originally entitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, published in two volumes, 1890; expanded and retitled 1900, in three volumes; expanded 1906-15, in 12 volumes; supplemental volume added for 1937 edition; distinct abridged versions, 1922, 1959, and 1994—English

  17. Edward Gibbon

    18. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
    originally published in six volumes: first, 1776; second-third, 1781; fourth-sixth, 1788—English

  18. Joseph Heller

    19. Catch-22
    1961—English

  19. David Hockney

    20. David Hockney
    1976—English

  20. Homer

    21. Odýsseia
    The Odyssey
    ca. Ninth-Eighth centuries B C—Greek

  21. Michael Innes

    22. Operation Pax
    The Paper Thunderbolt
    1951—English

  22. Randall Jarrell

    23. Pictures From an Institution
    1954—English

  23. Ben Jonson

    24. The Alchemist
    1610—English

  24. Franz Kafka

    25. Der Prozess
    The Trial
    1925—German

  25. John McCabe

    26. Laurel and Hardy
    1975; edited by Al Kilgore; includes filmography by Richard W Bann—English

  26. Mary McCarthy

    27. The Groves of Academe
    1951—English

  27. Michel de Montaigne

    28. Les Essais
    Essays
    originally published in three volumes: 1580, 1588, and 1595—French

  28. Vladimir Nabokov

    29. Pale Fire
    1962—English

  29. Friedrich Nietzsche
    Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen
    Thus Spake Zarathustra
    originally published in four volumes, 1883-5—German

    • George Orwell

    30. Collected Essays
    1961—English

  30. Blaise Pascal

    31. Pensées
    Thoughts
    1669—French

  31. Marcel Proust

    32. À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
    In Search of Lost Time; In Remembrance of Things Past
    originally published in seven volumes, two of which originally published as two books each, 1913-27—French

  32. François Rabelais

    33. La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel
    originally published in five volumes: Les Horribles et Épouvantables Faits et Prouesses du Très Renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, Fils du Grand Géant Gargantua, 1532; La Vie Très Horrifique du Grand Gargantua, Père de Pantagruel, 1534; Le Tiers Livre des Faicts et Dicts Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel, 1546; Le Quart Livre des Faicts et Dicts Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel, 1552; Le Cinquiesme et Dernier Livre des Faicts et Dicts Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel, 1564—French

  33. Jean Renoir

    34. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mon Père
    Renoir, My Father
    1962—French

  34. Steven Runciman
    A History of the Crusades
    1951—English

    • William Shakespeare

    Complete works
    late Sixteenth-early Seventeenth centuries—English

    • Isaac Bashevis Singer

    35. A Crown of Feather and Other Stories
    1973—Yiddish

  35. Stendhal

    36. Le Chartreuse de Parme
    The Charterhouse of Parma
    1839—French

  36. Wilfred Thesiger

    37. The Marsh Arabs
    1964—English

  37. Thucydides

    38. History of the Peloponnesian War
    early Fifth Century B C—Greek

  38. Leo Tolstoy
    Voyna i Mir"
    War and Peace
    originally entitled 1805, published in part, 1865 and 1867; retitled and published in its entirety, 1869—Russian

    • François Villon

    39. Poems
    Fifteenth Century—French

  39. Eric Walter White

    40. Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works
    1966—English

  40. Ludwig Wittgenstein

    41. Philosophische Untersuchungen
    Philosophical Investigations
    1953—German