this is real, as far as I can tell. A different take on the e-book, God on the Go (pictured) contains the entire NRSV Bible, plus reading software, on a thumb-sized flash drive. Wherever you may be, just plug in to have your scriptures. on Amazon, $39.95.
I used to collect bibliographic lists — Modern Library 100 best novels, for example — and put them up at my site LiteraryCritic.com. This was back in 2000 or so, back when I and the Web were young. For years it attracted book hunters who clicked from my pages through to Amazon, earning me commissions which, to my amazement, were sometimes as much as $100 a month.
Now it’s just another moldering dead project, and I even lost the domain name by not renewing in time, losing it to someone sharper who… has done nothing with it.
But I digress. I’ve resurrected the pages and put them at tjm.org/literarycritic. I might even update and add on to it. So, enjoy, and may I recommend Harold Bloom’s magisterial summation of the Western canon as he sees it. Also, send me any lists you’ve come across, no matter how obscure. In fact, obscure is good, because when Google crawls my site and finds the names of obscure authors and books, I get good Google rank on these items (because hardly anyone else on the Web mentions them). Thus I probably make more Amazon commission money on these obscurantists, searching for, say, 19th-century Hungarian authors.
Send me those lists..
Global information publisher Thomson Reuters recently collected citations from the journal literature it indexed in 2007 — mainly academic / peer-reviewed journals — to books and their authors. Below is the list of the most-cited works/authors in the humanities and social sciences. (in the sciences, the journal rather than the book is the main communication vehicle).
For a measure of your canonical literacy, or perhaps your academic orientation, see how many of these authors you’ve read something by. I’ve been so bold.
From Times Higher Education (UK).
1 Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism”
2 Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology
3 Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Philosophy
4 Albert Bandura (1925- ) Psychology
5 Anthony Giddens (1938- ) Sociology
6 Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Sociology
7 Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Philosophy, sociology”
8 Max Weber (1864-1920) Sociology
9 Judith Butler (1956- ) Philosophy
10 Bruno Latour (1947- ) Sociology, anthropology”
11 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis
12 Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Philosophy
13 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Philosophy
14 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Philosophy
15 Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Linguistics, philosophy”
16 Ulrich Beck (1944- ) Sociology
17 Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Philosophy
18 David Harvey (1935- ) Geography
19 John Rawls (1921-2002) Philosophy
20 Geert Hofstede (1928- ) Cultural studies
21 Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Criticism
22 Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Sociology
23 Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Criticism, philosophy”
24 Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Anthropology
25 Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Political theory
26 Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Criticism, philosophy”
27 Henri Tajfel (1919-1982) Social psychology
28 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Philosophy
29 Barney G. Glaser (1930- ) Sociology
30 George Lakoff (1941- ) Linguistics
31 John Dewey (1859-1952) Philosophy, psychology, education”
32 Benedict Anderson (1936- ) International studies
33 Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Philosophy
34 Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criticism”
35 Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) History and philosophy of science
36 Karl Marx (1818-1883) Political theory, economics, sociology”
37 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosophy