My list

A good friend of mine who is also a blogger (though his postings enjoy greater intervals between them than mine do) enjoys compiling lists and determining rankings. His latest is a ranked roster of the books “most important” to him. Since we have read many of the same books, having completed the same secondary curriculum, I thought it would be sheyyeq (interesting) to do the same, using some of the books from his list and other books have read. Mine, however, will not be ranked. Here it is:

1. The Prince; Niccolo Machiavelli
2. Twilight of the Idols: or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer; Friedrich Nietzsche
3. The Prophet; Khalil Gibran
4. The Great Gatsby; F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Odyssey; Homer (Fitzgerald translation)
6. The Aeneid; Vergil
7. The Stranger; Albert Camus
8. The Three Sisters; Anton Chekhov
9. The Cherry Orchard; Anton Chekhov
10. Uncle Vanya; Anton Chekhov
11. The Bacchae; Euripides
12. A Farewell to Arms; Ernest Hemingway
13. No Exit; Jean-Paul Sartre
14. The Merchant of Venice; William Shakespeare
15. The Tower; W. B. Yeats
16. Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova; Anna Akhmatova (Penguin)
17. Meditations; Marcus Aurelius
18. The Book of the Courtier; Baldassare Castiglione
19. The Catiline Conspiracy and The Jugurthine War; Sallust
20. The Histories; Polybius
21. History of the Peloponnesian War; Thucydides
22. The Muqaddimah; Ibn Khaldun
23. Selected Poetry of Lord Byron; Lord Byron (The Modern Library Classics)
24. History of the Arabs; Philip K. Hitti
25. Naked in Exile; Khalil Hawi
26. From the Vineyards of the Lebanon; Khalil Hawi
27. The Poems of al-Mutanabbi; Mutanabbi (A. J. Arberry translation)
28. Love, Death, and Exile; Abdul Wahhab al-Bayyati (Franjieh, translator)
29. In Free State; V. S. Naipaul
30. Season of Migration to the North; Tayeb Salih
31. Things Fall Apart; Chinua Achebe
32. War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy
33. Nedjma; Kateb Yacine
34. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century; Adeed Dawisha
35. The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies; Elie Kedourie
36. Paradise Lost; John Milton
37. The Awakening; Kate Chopin
38. Storm of Steel; Ernst Jünger

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