Stephen Covey's analogy to Sharpen the Saw refers to the process of self improvement in the categories: body, mind

and spirit. The following reading lists represent a comprehensive and useful reference for the mental exercise part of the Sharpen the Saw habit. Use these lists to select reading that will inspire you and broaden your mind. The first list is reproduced from the BBC Big Read book list at www.bbc.co.uk. It is an excellent starting point because the books all have literary merit and have also received popular acclaim. The second list is reproduced from http://readliterature.comand represents what is usually termed the Canon of English Literature i.e. the great classic works of English Literature. The third list is reproduced from www.cop.com and represents the great works of Wisdom Literature.

What to Read - List 1 The BBC Big Read Book List

BBC Big Read List English Literature Canon Wisdom Literature

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien 2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman 4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , Douglas Adams 5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling 6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne 8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell 9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis 10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte 11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller 12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte 13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks 14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier 15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger 16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame 17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens 18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott 19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres 20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell 22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling 23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling 24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban , JK Rowling 25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien 26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy 27. Middlemarch, George Eliot 28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving 29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck 30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll 31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson 32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garc? M?quez 33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett 34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl 36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson 37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

Persuasion, Jane Austen Dune, Frank Herbert Emma, Jane Austen Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery Watership Down, Richard Adams The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Animal Farm, George Orwell A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck The Stand, Stephen King Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth The BFG, Roald Dahl Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome Black Beauty, Anna Sewell Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough Mort, Terry Pratchett The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton The Magus, John Fowles Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett Lord Of The Flies, William Golding Perfume, Patrick S?kind The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell Night Watch, Terry Pratchett Matilda, Roald Dahl Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding The Secret History, Donna Tartt The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins Ulysses, James Joyce Bleak House, Charles Dickens Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson The Twits, Roald Dahl I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith Holes, Louis Sachar Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons Magician, Raymond E Feist On The Road, Jack Kerouac The Godfather, Mario Puzo The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

95. Katherine, Anya Seton 96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer 97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garc? M?quez 98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson 99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot 100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

What to Read - List 2 The Canon of English Literature

The following list is reproduced from the http://readliterature.com web site. It is not a complete, nor an official list of any kind, but I believe it contains essential works from what is usually referred to as The Canon of English Literature.

BBC Big Read List

English Literature Canon

Wisdom Literature

Martin Amis (1949) The Rachel Papers Dead Babies Success Other People: A Mystery Story Money: A Suicide Note Einstein's Monsters London Fields Time's Arrow The Information

Sir Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1995) Lucky Jim The Green Man Jake's Thing The Old Devils

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) Emma Sense and Sensibility Pride and Prejudice Mansfield Park Persuasion

J.G. Ballard (1930) The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard Concrete Island Crash

Cocaine Nights Empire of the Sun The Drought Super-Cannes

Anne Bronte(1820 - 1849) Agnes Grey

Charlotte Bront?(1816 - 1855) Jane Eyre Shirley Villette

Emily Bronte(1818 - 1848) Wuthering Heights

Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993) A Clockwork Orange

Fanny Burney (1752 - 1840) Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Don Juan The Corsair: A Tale Selected Poetry

Thomas Carlyle 2 (1795 - 1881) The French Revolution (3 volumes) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederic The Great (6 volumes)

Geoffrey Chaucer (1342/43 - 1400) The Canterbury Tales Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953 Memoirs of the Second World War History of the English-speaking Peoples

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) Selected Poetry

Joseph Conrad 3 (1857 - 1924)

Nostromo Lord Jim Heart of Darkness The Secret Agent Victory: An Island Tale

Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) Moll Flanders Robinson Crusoe

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870) A Tale of Two Cities David Copperfield Oliver Twist The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewitt Bleak House

John Dryden (1631 - 1700) Virgil's Aeneid (trans. by J.D.) {Virgil: Roman, 70 BC - 19 BC} Virgil's Georgics (trans. by J.D.) Eclogues of Virgil (trans. by J.D.) All for Love Ovid's Metamorphoses (trans. by J.D.) {Ovid: Roman, 43 BC - AD 17} Plutarch's Lives (trans. by J.D.) {Plutarch: Greek, AD 46 - c. AD 119} Plays of John Dryden Astraea Redux Annus Mirabilis The Hind and the Panther Eleonora

Lawrence Durrell 4 (1912 - 1990) The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) Justine Balthazar Mountolive Clea The Black Book

George Eliot Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (1819 - 1880) Silas Marner Romola Middlemarch

T. S. Eliot 5 (1888 - 1965) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1948 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats The Waste Land The Family Reunion

Murder in the Cathedral

Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754) Joseph Andrews Tom Jones Jonathan Wild

Ford Madox Ford (1873 - 1939) The Shifting of Fire Romance The Good Soldier : A Tale of Passion Parade's End The Call: The Tale of Two Passions Some Do Not Return to Yesterday No More Parades A Man Could Stand Up Fifth Queen Last Post

E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970) A Passage to India A Room with a View

John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932 The Forsyte Saga The Man of Property Indian Summer of a Forsyte In Chancery Awakening To Let A Modern Comedy The White Monkey The Silver Spoon Swan Song Castles in Spain Flowering Wilderness The Country House The Patrician The Freelands

Sir William Golding (1911 - 1993) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1983 Lord of the Flies

Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774) Vicar of Wakefield

Robert Graves (1895 - 1985) I, Claudius

Graham Greene (1904 - 1991) Brighton Rock The Power and the Glory The Heart of the Matter A Burnt-out Case The Quiet American Our Man in Havana The Comedians

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928) Tess of the d'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889) Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998) Crow Tales from Ovid

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) Point Counter Point Brave New World Eyeless in Gaza The Devils of Loudun The Doors of Perception

James I, King of England from 1603 to 1625 (1566 - 1625) The King James Bible

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) The Lives of the Poets The Vanity of Human Wishes The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia Selected Poetry and Prose

John Keats (1795 - 1821) Endymion Sleep and Poetry The Complete Poems

Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1907 Just So Stories The Jungle Book

Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) The Whitsun Weddings High Windows

D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) Lady Chatterley's Lover

John Le Carre (1931) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy The Little Drummer Girl Doris Lessing (1919) The Golden Notebook To Room Nineteen In Pursuit of the English

Richard Llewellyn 6 (1906 - 1983) How Green Was My Valley

Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593) Doctor Faustus

William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) The Moon and Sixpence Of Human Bondage The Narrow Corner Cakes and Ale Short Stories Ashenden Far Eastern Tales South Sea Tales For Services Rendered The Razor's Edge The Merry-Go-Round Don Fernando On a Chinese Screen The Painted Veil Catalina Up at the Villa Mrs Craddock The Casuarina Tree Christmas Holiday Liza of Lambeth The Magician

Selected Plays

Ian McEwan (1948) Black Dogs The Comfort of Strangers The Child in Time Enduring Love Amsterdam The Innocent The Cement Garden Atonement

John Milton (1608 - 1674) Paradise Lost

Dame Iris Murdoch 7 (1919) The Bell A Severed Head The Red and the Green The Nice and the Good The Black Prince Henry and Cato The Sea, the Sea The Philosopher's Pupil The Good Apprentice The Book and The Brotherhood The Message to the Planet

Sir V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul 8 (1932) Nobel Prize in Literature, 2001 The Mystic Masseur The Suffrage of Elvira Miguel Street A House for Mr. Biswas In a Free State Guerrillas A Bend in the River The Mimic Men The Enigma of Arrival Beyond Belief Among the Believers

George Orwell ( 1903 - 1950) Down and Out in Paris and London Animal Farm Nineteen Eighty-Four

Harold Pinter (1930) Complete Works, Volume I

Complete Works, Volume II Complete Works, Volume III Complete Works, Volume IV Betrayal

Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) An Essay on Criticism The Rape of the Lock The Dunciad An Essay on Man Poems, Epistles & Satires

Salman Rushdie 9 (1947) Grimus Midnight's Children Shame Imaginary homelands East, West Haroun and the Sea of Stories The Moor's Last Sigh The Ground Beneath Her Feet

(The Satanic Verses has been removed from this list because it is offensive to Muslims.)

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1950 History of Western Philosophy Religion and Science The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell Human Knowledge Sceptical Essays

Sir Walter Scott 10 (1771 - 1832) Waverley Ivanhoe

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Romeo and Juliet King Lear Julius Caesar Othello Macbeth Henry VIII A Midsummer Night's Dream The Sonnets

Tom Sharpe (1928) Riotous Assembly Indecent Exposure Porterhouse Blue Blott on the Landscape Wilt The Great Pursuit The Throwback

Mary Shelley (1797 - 1817) Frankenstein

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Robert Louis Stevenson 11 (1850 - 1895) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863) Vanity Fair The History of Henry Esmond

Dylan Thomas 12 (1914 - 1953) Eighteen Poems (18 Poems) Twenty-five Poems (25 Poems) The Map of Love Fern Hill Deaths and Entrances Under Milk Wood Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (1934 - 1952) Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973) The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings

Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882) Orley Farm (1860) He Knew He Was Right (1869) The Way We Live Now (1875) Dr. Wortle's School (1881) The Barsetshire Chronicles: The Warden (1855) Barchester Towers (1857) Doctor Thorne (1858) Framley Parsonage (1861)

The Small House at Allington (1864) The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) The Palliser Novels: Can You Forgive Her? (1864) Phineus Finn (1869) The Eustace Diamonds (1873) Phineas Redux (1874) The Prime Minister (1876) The Duke's Children (1880) Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) Decline and Fall Vile Bodies Black Mischief A Handful of Dust Put Out More Flags When the Going Was Good Brideshead Revisited Men at Arms Officers and Gentlemen Unconditional Surrender The Loved One The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold A Little Learning Diaries

Denton Welch (1915 - 1948) In Youth is Pleasure Maiden Voyage A Voice Through a Cloud

H.G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866 - 1946) Invisible Man The Time Machine The War of the Worlds Tono-Bungay The History of Mr. Polly The New Machiavelli

Patrick White 13 (1912 - 1990) Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973 Happy Valley The Tree of a Man Voss Riders in the Chariot The Solid Mandala The Twyborn Affair A Fringe of Leaves The Vivesector The Cockatoos Collected Plays

Sir P.G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse 14 (1881 - 1975)

The Code of Woosters Jeeves and the Tie That Binds How Right You Are, Jeeves Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves Jeeves in the Morning Cocktail Time

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) Mrs. Dalloway To the Lighthouse

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) Selected Poems

What to Read - List 3 Wisdom Literature by Cop Macdonald

BBC Big Read List English Literature Canon Wisdom Literature

The following information is reproduced from the web site www.cop.com It is not an official list of any kind, but it contains some important works from what is usually referred to as Wisdom Literature. The scientific literature was written to help us understand the laws of nature. The traditional Wisdom Literature was written to help us understand the laws of life and our place in the universe. Some of this literature dates from 3000 years ago, or before, and includes works from India, China, Greece, the Middle East ? and later from Europe. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the teachings of Moses, The Book of Job, The Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, the teachings of Jesus, and later, those of Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and other Christian Mystics. In the Hindu tradition we find The Upanishads, and The Bhagavad Gita. In Taoism the Tao Teh Ching and the I Ching. In Buddhism we have teachings of the Gautama Buddha embodied in the Sutras, and elaborated upon in a myriad of later works. From the Greeks we have the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus. To get a taste of this literature, compilations can be helpful. Among my (Cop Macdonald's) favorites are:

UNIVERSAL WISDOM: A Journey Through The Sacred Wisdom of the World by Bede Griffiths, Editor, Harper San Francisco, 1994

THE ENLIGHTENED HEART: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, Stephen Mitchell, Editor, New York: Harper and Row, 1989 THE ENLIGHTENED MIND: An Anthology of Sacred Prose, Stephen Mitchell, Editor, New York: Harper and Row, 1991 A MANUAL OF ZEN BUDDHISM, D.T. Suzuki, Editor, London: Hutchinson (Rider), 1983 THE ESSENTIAL TEACHINGS OF BUDDHISM: Daily Readings from the Sacred Texts, Kerry and Joanne O'Brien, Editors, London: Hutchinson (Rider), 1989 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF LAO TZU: Tao Teh Ching and Hua Hu Ching , Ni Hua Ching, Translator, Malibu, CA: Shrine of the Eternal Breath of Tao

Larry Kahaner noticed that I hadn't mentioned the TALMUD. I should have. The Talmudis a major work in the wisdom literature, and has a central place in Jewish culture. He notes that "the Talmud is not a sacred work, a mystical work or a religious document. The Talmud is a guidebook for life that contains everything from how to raise children, grow crops, and heal the sick, to how to run your business. Most important, theTalmud teaches ethics. It offers precise instruction on how to handle everyday matters in a fair and just manner." A more detailed bibliography appears in the Covey/Merrill/Merrill book First Things Firstwhich is available from our SEARCH.

Further Reading
The 8th Habit Biography of Stephen Covey First Things First Sharpen the Saw Reading Lists Stephen Covey Franklin Covey Leadership

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