Read

In my last post, I discussed the value of learning to play a musical instrument.

This time I discuss the value of reading.

In a nutshell, I suggest reading anything and everything that interests you, from the backs of cereal boxes to the classics.

I won't go so far as to say you can skip school and get a complete education by reading (especially if you stop with the backs of cereal boxes). But you can come awfully close.

And I haven't even mentioned cultural literacy yet.

There's more to cultural literacy -- the ability to converse fluently in the idioms, allusions, and knowledge that creates and constitutes a culture -- than reading. But reading makes up the major part of it.

Cultural literacy covers everything from being familiar with "To thine own self be true" (Shakespeare's Hamlet) to recognizing the origins of "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" (the Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer on the test of the first atomic bomb). And we might as well throw in "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (Hint: Rhett said it to Scarlett.)

Knowing these things marks you as well-bred in sophisticated society. Given that you probably want to be -- and to be considered -- worldly and well-educated, you have to read, read, and then read some more.

I've been prowling around the Internet checking out what others have to say about books that lead to culturally literacy. I don't claim to have come up with the definitive list. But I'll name some of the books with which I'm familiar. Pick a few that you haven't read and give them a shot.

I'm not listing them in any particular order, and you might not enjoy reading all of them. That's okay. It's a quirky list, but it's all mine.

Feel free to add your own suggestions in a comment on this post.

Here's my list:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Earl Stanley Gardner
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Holy Bible: King James Version, multiple authors
To Serve Them All My Days by R.L. Delderfield
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (published in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)
The Odyssey by Homer
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Stand by Stephen King
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

Enjoy!