The New Lifetime Reading Plan

That time has come sooner than one might have expected. For an American in the last decade of the twentieth century, the "global village" is a reality, the world having been shrunk by jet aircraft, by communications satellites, by instantaneous televi- sion news from everywhere, and by the Internet, to the extent that, in a sense, nothing is foreign to anyone's experience. Moreover, the United States, from its origins a nation of immi- grants, has been enriched anew in recent years by fresh arrivals from ali over the world, one consequence of this being that as a people, our cultural roots have become more diverse than ever before. Because our country is now more profoundly mul­ticultural than ever, and also because it is to everyone's per- sonal advantage to cast as wide a net as possible in harvesting the world's cultural riches, the works suggested in The New Lifetime Reading Plan now include Lady Murasaki along with Miss Austen, Tanizaki cheek-by-jowl with Faulkner, Ssu-ma Cfrien as well as Thucydides. We think that these additions to the Plan will enhance both your pleasure and your sense of achievement as a reader.

The inclusion in this edition of such works as the Koran— the fundamental scripture of Islam—and the Zen scripture The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch raises the question of why the Bible is not listed here as well. The reason is simple. We assume that nearly every reader of this book will own a Bible and be at least somewhat accustomed to reading it; and there is nothing we might try to say about it that would not seem presumptuous.

A number of authors represented in earlier editions of the Plan have now been dropped, as having not stood the test of time as well as one might earlier have expected. These include George Santayana, John Dewey, and Andrй Malraux (the latter demoted to a supplementary list of twentieth-century authors). Dropped, too, are several larger works of synthesis, such as the Durants's Story of Civilization. With the expansion of the book to include the non-Western world, we quickly realized that it would be better to drop that category of work, and to restrict our recommendations to what Robert Hutchens of the University of Chicago termed "original communications^,,— books that retain the capacity to speak directly to us across gulfs of time and space. In addition to some two dozen writers from the non-Western world, a few new authors from the Western tradition appear here for the first time, including W. H. Auden, Charlotte Brontк, Emily Dickinson, Anthony Trollope, and Edith Wharton.

Also appearing here for the first time are a handful of scien- tists, from Galileo to Thomas Kuhn. Science is a somewhat dif- ficult category to accommodate adequately in the Plan, for sev- eral reasons. Scientific writing is frequently highly technical, making demands of knowledge that most readers cannot meet. Scientists have often, in addition, not been very good writers, nor has the culture of science necessarily encouraged an agree- able literary style; so many scientific works give little pleasure to the nonspecialist reader. It is also true that books have usu- ally not been the mйdium of choice for original communica­tions in the sciences; most often scientific discoveries have been described in short papers presented at learned meetings or published in professional journals or, more commonly today, distributed as "preprints" on the Internet. But there have been exceptions to these patterns, and we present several of the most interesting of them here.

Still another change in this edition of the Plan is in the arrangement of material. In earlier editions, the readings were arranged topically, under such headings as Narratives, Plays, and Poetry, being grouped within those categories by original language. With the addition of non-Western works to the Plan, that arrangement began to seem more confusing than helpful. In this edition, works, regardless of genre or original language, are arranged in simple chronological order by the birthdates of their authors. (Dates are given in the culturally neutral form "Before Common Era" [b.c.E.] and "Common Era" [c.E.] in place of the specifically Western and Christian designations b.c. and a.d.) We have divided the body of the book into five parts that represent nothing but broad spans of time. They have no general worldwide significance—Heian Period Japan is not equivalent to medieval Europe in any meaningful way— but they might encourage you to look for particular contrasts and similarities in works from widely different places but of roughly the same age. Dividing the contents of the book into smaller parts will also, we hope, make the prospect of reading through ali of these works seem less daunting than it might otherwise.