THE ULTIMATE LIST

A LIST OF ALL THE BOOKS I'VE EVER READ (as far as I can remember, at least)

Literature

~ Beowulf

~ Cædmon's Hymm - Cædmon

~ The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

~ Utopia - Sir Thomas More

~ The Faerie Queene - Edmund Spencer

~ An Apology for Poetry - Philip Sidney

~ A Defense for Poetry - Philip Sidney

~ Shakespeare:

All's Well That Ends Well

As You Like It

Cymbeline

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merchant of Venice

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Much Ado About Nothing

The Taming of the Shrew

The Tempest

Troilus and Cressida

Twelfth Night

Winter's Tale

Antony and Cleopatra

Julius Caesar

Hamlet

King Lear

Macbeth

Othello

Romeo and Juliet

Timon of Athens

Titus Andronicus

Henry V

Richard III

The Sonnets

The Rape of Lucrece

Venus and Adonis

Funeral Elegy by W.S.

~ Ben Johnson

The Alchemist

Volpone

Epicoence, or The Silent Woman

Bartholomew Fair

The Devil is an Ass

~ Christopher Marlowe

Tamburlaine

The Spanish Tragedy (written with Thomas Kyd)

The Jew of Malta

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

~ Cornelia - Thomas Kyd

~ Thomas Middleton

The Changeling

Women Beware Women

The Revenger's Tragedy

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

~ The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster

~ John Milton

Areopagitica

Paradise Lost

~ The Way of the World - William Congreve

~ Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Samuel Richardson

~ The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole

~ The Mysteries of Uldopho - Ann Radcliff

~ The Monk - Matthew Lewis

~ Jane Austen

Juvenillia - Volumes I, II, and III

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

Emma

Northanger Abbey

Mansfield Park

Persuasion

Lady Susan

~ Waverly - Walter Scott

~ Ivanhoe - Walter Scott

~ Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

~ Vampyre - John William Polidori

~ Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Nicholas Nickleby

~ Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

~ Catherine - William Makepeace Thackeray

~ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

~ Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

~ George Eliot

Middlemarch

Silas Marner

Adam Bede

~ Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

~ The Purcell Papers - Sheridan Le Fanu

~ In a Glass Darkly - Sheridan Le Fanu

~ Camilla - Sheridan Le Fanu

~ Dracula - Bram Stoker

~ The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells

~ The Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

~ The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

~ The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Kidnapped

Treasure Island

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

~ James Joyce

Ulysses

The Dubliners

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

~ To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

~ Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

~ A Room With a View - E.M. Forster

~ Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

~ The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

~ The Borrowers - Mary Norton

~ The Secret Garden - Francis Hodgon Burnett

~ And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

~ Animal Farm - George Orwell

~ 1984 - George Orwell

~ The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

~ The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

~ Lord of the Flies - William Golding

~ A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

~ Roald Dahl

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The Witches

Matilda

James and the Giant Peach

~ 2oo1: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke

~ Watchmen - Alan Moore

~ The Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling

~ Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

Anna Karenina

The Death of Ivan Ilych

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes From the Underground

Crime and Punishment

The Idiot

The Brothers Karamazov

~ Short Stories - Anton Chekhov

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

~ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

~ Short Stories - Nikolai Gogol

~ Candide - Voltaire

~ The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson Collected Essays

~ Walden - Henry David Thoreau

~ Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe

~ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass

~ The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

~ Short Stories - Herman Melville

~ Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

~ The Rise of Silas Lapham - William Dean Howells

~ Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

Daisy Miller

The Turn of the Screw

~ Margaret Flemming - James Herne

~ Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth

Ethan Fromme

The Age of Innocence

~ Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - Stephen Crane

~ The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

~ Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser

~ The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This Side of Paradise

The Great Gatsby

Tender is the Night

~ Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Sun Also Rises

A Farewell to Arms

The Old Man and the Sea

~ William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

As I Lay Dying

Absalom, Absalom!

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man)

The Hamlet

Go Down, Moses

Light in August

~ A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

~ Arthur Miller

All My Sons

Death of a Salesman

The Crucible

~ John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men

East of Eden

The Grapes of Wrath

~ Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust - Nathaniel West

~ Moloch, or The Gentile World - Henry Miller

~ Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth

~ To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

~ Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow

~ J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

Franny and Zooey

Nine Stories

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction

~ The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

~ Jack Kerouac

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (with William S. Burroughs)

The Town and the City

On the Road

Visions of Cody

Doctor Sax

The Subterraneans

Desolation Angels

The Dharma Bums

Lonesome Traveler

Big Sur

Atop and Underwood: Early Writings

~ William S. Burroughs

Junky

Naked Lunch

~ The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer

~ Barbary Shore - Norman Mailer

~ Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

~ Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

~ The Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

~ Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

~ Native Son - Richard Wright

~ What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

~ Tony Morrison

The Bluest Eye

Song of Solomon

Beloved

Love

~ The Road - Cormac McCarthy

~ Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko

~ The House of Earth - Pearl S. Buck

~ Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

~ Ray Bradbury

The Homecoming

Dandelion Wine

The Martian Chronicles

The Illustrated Man

The October Country

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Fahrenheit 451

~ Issac Asimov

The Stars, Like Dust --

Foundation

I, Robot

Nightfall, and Other Stories

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories

~ The Cider House Rules - John Irving

~ Rip Van Winkle - Washington Irving

~ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving

~ The Lottery and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson

~ White Fang - John London

~ The Call of the Wild - John London

~ Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver

~ The Colour Purple - Alice Walker

~ Epic of Gilgamsh

~ Lament for Ur

~ The Iliad - Homer

~ The Odyssey - Homer

~ The Odes - Pindar

~ The Snow Leopard - Peter Mathiassen

Philosophy
~ Negative Dialectics - Theodor Adorno
~ The Divine Comedy - Dante
~ Althusser: A Critical Reader - Louis Althusser
~ Anaxagoras
~ Anaximander
~ The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt
~ Metaphysics - Aristotle
~ Ethics - Aristotle
~ Mythologies - Roland Barthes

~ Selected Writings: Volumes 1-4 - Walter Benjamin

~ A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful - Edmund Burke

~ Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Stranger

The Plague

Exile and the Kingdom

~ The Responsibility of Intellectuals - Noam Chomsky

~ The Resistance to Theory - Paul de Man

~ Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs - Jacques Derrida

~ Writing and Difference - Jacques Derrida

~ Positions - Jacques Derrida

~ Discourse on the Method - Rene Descartes

~ Meditations on First Philosophy - Rene Descartes

~ The History of Sexuality - Michel Foucault

~ The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud

~ An Introduction to Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud

~ Hans-Georg-Gadamer

Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies

Philosophical Hermeneutics

Truth and Method

~ Knowledge and Human Interests - Jurgen Habermas

~ Theory and Practice - Jurgen Habermas

~ Martin Heidegger

Discourse on Thinking

The Principle of Reason

An Introduction to Metaphysics

Being and Time

~ Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes

~ Treatise on Human Nature - Thomas Hobbes

~ Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects - David Hume

~ The Essential Husserl - Edmund Husserl

~ Franz Kafka

The Complete Stories

The Metamorphosis

The Trial

~ Either/Or - Soren Kierkegaard

~ Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard

~ Ecrits - Jacques Lacan

~ The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan

~ The Savage Mind - Claude Levi-Strauss

~ Mythologies I-IV - Claude Levi-Strauss

~ Two Treatises of Government - John Locke

~ An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - John Locke

~ The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

~ Wage-labor, and Capital - Karl Marx

~ Capital - Karl Marx

~ Manifesto of the Communist Party - Karl Marx

~ Phenomenology of Perception - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

~ Sense and Non-Sense - Maurice Merlaeau-Ponty

~ On Liberty - John Stuart Mill

~ Utilitarianism - John Stuart Mill

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Human, All Too Human

On the Genealogy of Morality

Ecce Homo

The Birth of Tragedy

~ Pensees - Blaise Pascal

~ The Republic - Plato

~ The Dialogues - Plato

~ John Rawls

A Theory of Justice

Justice as Fairness

The Law of Peoples

~ Conflict and Truth - Paul Ricoeur

~ Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur

~ Why I Am Not a Christian - Bertrand Russell

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea

Being and Nothingness

Truth and Existence

Existentialism and Human Emotion

Critique of Dialectical Reason

~ Ferdinand de Saussure

Course on General Linguistics

Writings in General Linguistics

~ Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings - Friedrich Schleiermacher

~ Peter Singer

Animal Liberation

In Defense of Animals

Practical Ethics

A Companion to Ethics

How Are We To Live?

Writings on an Ethical Life

One World: The Ethics of Globalisation

~ Candide - Voltaire

~ Just and Unjust Wars - Michael Walzer

~ Cornel West

Race Matters

Democracy Matters

~ Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Next. . . poetry.

AND I'M TIRED OF DOING THIS RIGHT NOW . . . TO BE CONT'D

Life Stats

Most likely, there are more than a few of you who have, at one time or another, wished you could have 'life-stats' regarding a particular activity, occurrence, event, and so on. . .

One of the life stats I wish I could have is a list of every good* work of literature I've ever read.

SO - new projectttttttttttttttt :) This will be updated as I remember more books or have more time to write them down.

* by "good" work of literature, i mean real works of literature. not babysitters club books. or goosebump books. or even james patterson books. those are entertaining, but they do not fit within the bounds of this exercise.

BLaw School and the Ethics of Cannibalistic Voracity

"You either stand up for your profession or you don't. You either care or you don't."

My professional responsibility professor said this in class today during a discussion about attorney advertising rules. Ambulance chasing - handing out business cards at morgues and funerals, showing up aside a tragic multi-fatality accident - is a discouraged activity that falls under these advertising rules. The class discussion, for a while anyway, centered around the legitimacy of ambulance chasing. Why is it reprehensible to be an ambulance chaser? Is it truly reprehensible, or is it at the very core of what it means to be a lawyer?

Here's where the aforementioned quote from my law professor comes in. The two men teaching our Professional Responsibility class are lawyers that deal with attorney ethics/rules violations as the main subject matter of their 9-5s. They are really passionate about upholding the rules and preserving the integrity of the legal profession. These rules cover the whole gambit of personal/professional activity, and often extend far beyond the boundary of professional livelihood deep into one's personal life. Some of the rules, in my opinion, are excessively deontological. For example, one rule dictates that a lawyer has a duty to report professional and personal misconduct of fellow lawyers. If you don't report, then you can be held accountable. I understand how a rule like this promotes honesty and integrity, but it's not as if circumstantial information could, in many instances, mitigate the wrongness of an action. Sometimes, not tattling on someone for a transgression seems to be the best choice. Fans of the "system" would insists that there are procedural safeguards to determine if a transgression should be forgiven. In other words, let the committee vested with the power to assess the violation have the final say in whether or not an action runs afoul of professional ethics. Let them assess the facts of any given situation. My issue with this is that by mandating reporting, it ignores the ability of each of us, as legal professionals, to assess the situation using our own good reason. If we've gotten this far - if we've passed all the character/personality assessments necessary to be allowed to practice - isn't it safe to say that we possess the ability to weigh a difficult situation and act according to our assessment? I think it does. And I think that being allowed our own opinion and right of action makes for a more honest system in the end. It reduces paranoia and increases the likelihood that there will be open dialogue about ethical issues. Instead of people doing shady things behind closed doors for fear of being caught, people will discuss their options with others, allowing for the advice of others to possibly halt unethical actions before they become issues.

Secondly, I don't think that upholding a rigid code of conduct necessarily means that you're standing up for your profession. In a sense, it seems almost over-reactionary. Like a child, when caught doing something naughty, will 'protest too much' in hopes of convincing others they are not guilty. Does having strict rules help to placate feelings of guilt around the reputation of the legal profession? After all, if viewed from a moral perspective, lawyering can be repulsive. Many attorneys make their living on other people's tragedies. Like ambulance-chasers - they (hopefully) care about the emotional well-being of the people they represent, but in the end, its all money.

And that's the point - that it's all money. Just like everything else in this country, the rights of individuals is reduced to economic incentive. Universal healthcare is denounced as being unprofitable. However, last time I checked, the point of healthcare is the health of our country's citizens, not how much money we can make off of their illnesses. Why is ambulance chasing any more morally reprehensible than the activities of the insurance adjuster, whom the attorney is attempting to outwit by his chasing? To me, the answer is that it's not any worse.

"You either care about your profession or you don't."

There is a difference between caring about your profession and caring about the public perception of your profession.

During the class discussion about reporting rule violations, we were often asked to raise our hands to indicate whether or not we thought a hypothetical individual's behavior should be reported, and if reported, if it should be grounds for punishment.

After one particularly even vote - about 50/50 for report or not-report - the professor exclaimed, "Should you report? It's expected of you under the rules. But besides the rules, would you really want a person like this working in a law firm as your partner?" (For informational purposes, the hypothetical individual failed to disclose juvenile misdemeanor charges that his lawyer-uncle helped him dodge.) As he was asking the question, the professor was posturing so as to indicate his assumption that no one would want to work with such a person. A hushed chorus of "no - oh no way - nope" circulated the lecture hall. My voice didn't lend any support. I'd rather work with someone who ducked responsibility when he was 16 years old than with someone who has recently behaved like a child but who is NOT going to be reprimanded because of their ability to play on our confessional-culture - one where you can confess your sins and ::poof:: all the sudden you're "saved." Restored to full humanity! The catch is that the latter individual would not only most likely not be reprimanded, but be lauded as an example for all to follow. The former individual - the 16 year old past transgressor - would be reprimanded and made an example of as an immature, perhaps even unfit, individual.

In conclusion, the gist of this ramble is the contrast between the realities of the legal profession (any many other professions, too) and the conduct rules that a practicing lawyer is expected to uphold. The concreteness of the rules offset and highlight the uneasiness emanating from a profession that knows, all too well, it's own transgressions. How to fix it? Well, how does one fix an innate and fundamental human flaw?