Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 15:01:39 -0500
From: Thomas Palakeel <tjp-AT-bradley.bradley.edu>
Subject: Last Call for World Literature reading lists/top 10


Dear Friends on Poco and other Lists,

I thank you all for sending me your lifetime reading lists. It was a
beautiful experience for me. Yes. If any of you out there meant to make
your lists of books (and now movies as well, because of popular demand!)
please don't hesitate to send them to me. I will no more write publicly
about this on our list. Thanks again.

A friend of mine has just finished the design of the page. In a month or
so, the complete
list will be posted on the new website.

If anyone missed the original, this was the call, a bit altered:

Would you be able to participate in a soul searching about your top TEN
reading experiences? Great Books in your whole life. In any genre. Books
that mattered profoundly. I need only a list of titles and their
authors.

I will use your lists for an educational website consisting primarily of
reading lists by the people. I will alphabetize the lists by profession,
real or aspiring, or even by your ex-profession.

Here is my own list:
Thomas Palakeel, ex-advertising copy writer from India (fired after two
months!) currently college teacher in Peoria, USA.Secretly dreams about
becoming one of those shepherds seen in pastoral poetry.

The Mahabharata by Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Legends of Khasak (in Malayalam) by O.V Vijayan
My Story (in Malayalam and English) by Kamala Das
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoevsky
Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

I will be happy to make changes to your lists or delete them if
requested at a later date. I will consider anonymous submissions, too,
provided you give me an alias like this: BigFoot, age 39, NY, waiteress,
ex-nun; 65 year old Australian blacksmith.

Before making the list, would you think of the various elements that
shaped your life? Your intellectual and aesthetic development in the
presence of books?  Ideas. People. Name the TEN most important of those
books. In any genre. Any language....The obvious. The surpising. The
shocking. The silly. Lists books that are true to YOUR experience.  I am
thinking of your entire reading life. Of all those great books,
which are the ones that mattered?  No need to say why. And I know you
will have to exclude many many great books!

So far I have about 100 lists collected in various categories , and many
have suggested a movie list would be equally useful, and so if you
consider movies as seriously as books, please give me a top 10 movie
list also.

Want to see my movie list?  For me this was harder to do.

The Seventh Seal Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Rashomon by Akira Kurosowa
Apu's Trilogy by Satyajit Ray
Elipathazahm (in Malayalam) by Adoor Gopalakrishnan
The Name of the Rose by Jean-Jacques Annaud
The Godfather Trilogy by Francis Ford Coppola
Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore
Farewell, My Concubine by Chen Kaige
Lawrence of Arabia by David Lean
The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci

Even if you don't remember fully the names of authors or directors or
titles, I promise to
research them and get them right before posting. Please help me out.
Let's get this going.

Thanks a million. Also, pass this message out on to the infinite
cyberspace....let the lists come back...

sincerely,

Thomas Palakeel




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