The Ultimate Longhorn Reading List

Members of UTs Academy of Distinguished Teachers

May / June 2007

Poetry
Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems (186086)
Iliad, Homer (c. 7th century B.C.)
Sappho: A Garland, Trans. Jim Powell (6th century B.C.)
William Butler Yeats, Complete poems (18861939)

Nonfiction
Ray

Constructive Function Theory (3 vol.),

I. P. Natanson (1965)

Alistair Cookes America, A. Cooke

(1973)

The Devil in the White City, Erik

Larsen (2003)

The American Political Tradition,

Richard Hofstadter (1948)

The Enchanted Boundary, Walter

Franklin Prince (1930)

Annals of the Former World, John

McPhee (1998)

The Field Guide to Eastern Birds, Western Birds, Roger Tory Petersen
(1934)

Age of Spiritual Machines,

Kurzweil (1999)

The Bible (King James Version, 1611)

Foundations of the Metaphysics of

Morals (also published as Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals),
Immanuel Kant (1785)

Blake, Peter Ackroyd (1996)

Built to Last: Successful Habits of
Visionary Companies, Jim Collins &
Jerry Porras (1994)

Franklin D. Roosevelt (4 vol.), Frank

Freidel (1973)

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris (1989)

God: A Biography, Jack Miles (1995)

Originally published in The Alcalde magazine, vol. 95, no. 5 (May/June 2007): 3847. The original article
includes brief descriptions / synopses of each selected work, which I have omitted from this list.

 The Great War and Modern Memory,

Paul Fussell (1975)

A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf

(1929)

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond (1997)

Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman,

Richard Feynman (1985)

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy

and its Consequences, John Allen
Paulos (1989)

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius

of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns
Goodwin (2005)

John

The Trial of Socrates, I. F. Stone (1988)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb,

Richard Rhodes (1986)

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer
(1951)

The Mask of Command, John Keegan

(1987)

Who Wrote the Bible?, Richard Elliot

Friedman (1987)

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis (1952)

Working: What People Do All Day and

How They Feel about What They Do,
Studs Terkel (1974)

Looking at Photographs,
Szarkowski (1974)

Minima Moralia: Reflections from

Damaged Life, Theodor Adorno
(1974)
Hannah Arendt

Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose (1997)

Only in America, Harry Golden

(1959)

The Varieties of Religious Experience:

A Study in Human Nature, William
James (1902)

Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch

(1988)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig (1974)

On Revolution,
(1963)

Fiction
Blindness, Jose Saramago (1995)

All of My Friends Are Going To Be

Strangers, Larry McMurtry (1972)

The Blue Place, Nicola Griffith (1998)

Alice in Wonderland (1865) and

Through the Looking Glass (1871),
Lewis Carroll

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

(1932)

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1877)

Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

(1951)

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario

Vargas Llosa (1977)

Cathedral, David Macauley (1973)

Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks (1998)

Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853)

2

 The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

(c. 1308)

Notes from the Underground, Fyodor

Dostoevsky (1864)

Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott (1884)

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

(1813)

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (1943)

The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen

Crane (1895)

The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein

(1964)

A Separate Peace, John Knowles

(1959)

The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis (1945)

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
(1861)

Sherlock Holmes, Complete Series, Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle (18871927)

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1952)

The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton

Wilder (1942)

The Light of Other Days, Stephen Baxter & Arthur C. Clarke (2000)

The Song of the Dodo, David Quammen (1997)

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Straight Man, Richard Russo (1997)

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy,

J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)

A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth (1994)

Love Medicine (1984) or Tracks

(1988), Louise Erdrich

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

(1960)

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

(1857)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

(1927)

Maigret Series, Georges Simenon

(193172)

Trail of Feathers: Searching for Philip

True, Robert Rivard (2005)

Master and Commander (and the

entire Aubrey-Maturin series),
Patrick OBrian (19702004)

Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero,
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1848)

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail

Bulgakov (1966)

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1869)

Middlemarch, George Eliot [Mary

Anne Evans] (1871)

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)

Winters Tale, Mark Helprin (1983)

Midnights Children, Salman Rushdie

(1981)

The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong

Kingston (1975)

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)

Members of the Jury

Mia Carter (English)

David Laude (Chemistry & Biochemistry)

Alan Cline (Computer Sciences)

Carol MacKay (English)

Katherine Davis (Mathematics)

Henry Dietz (Government)

John Murphy (Advertising)

Betty Sue Flowers (Director, LBJ Library)

Melvin Oakes (Physics)

William Powers (UT President)

George Forgie (History)

Robert Prentice (Management Science & Information Systems)

Rod Hart (Communication Studies)

David Heymann (Architecture)

Larry Speck (Architecture)

Jonathan Koehler (Management

Science & Information Systems)

Philip Varghese (Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics)

Pat Kruppa (History)

Donald E. Winget (Astronomy)

Thomas Garza (Slavic Languages &

Literature)

Suzan Zeder (Theatre & Dance)