Books I Keep Coming Back To

This is not a canon, which is supposedly a list of books everyone should read. That reminds me of an old Ezra Pound essay where he claimed that the list of books that everyone should read was really short: the Bible, Homer and Dante. No Shakespeare for some reason.

I'm just going to list a few books that I keep coming back to, ones that I have mostly been reading my whole adult life.

• Robert A. Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress published in 1966 is about the politics of revolution, libertarianism, and has the first major character in a novel who is an artificial intelligence.
• Patrick O'Brian: the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical historical novels written between 1969 and 1999.
• Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That, written in 1929, revised in 1957. A poet's biography of his early life culminating in his experience as a captain in a line regiment in the trenches in World War I and his decision to leave England permanently.
• William Shakespeare, Complete Works. I currently have the edition of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
• Plato: Complete Works, Hackett.
• Homer: Iliad and Odyssey. I have the Robert Fagles translation.
• Frederick Copleston, S. J.: A History of Philosophy. I always have a few volumes of this on my shelves though I have not yet finished reading all of it. It is in nine volumes.
• Willi Apel: The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600. A friend gave me this volume some forty years ago and I have been using it ever since.
• Charles Rosen: The Classical Style. I have had various copies of this for thirty or forty years. First published in 1971, I have the expanded 1997 edition.
• Joseph Kerman: The Beethoven Quartets, published 1966. I have had copies of this on my shelves for forty years or so as well.
• Wing-Tsit Chan: A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, published in 1963. This is where we find the delightful story of Chuang Chou, who once dreamed that he was a butterfly, but later was unsure if he was Chou dreaming he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming it was Chou... (p. 190).
• Paul Johnson: Art: A New History, published 2003. A recent book, but one that I have read a couple of times already.
• Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published 1974. An interesting philosophical approach to politics.
• The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, published 1975. My first year English professor said that Roethke felt he needed to have a nervous breakdown every few years, just to clear away the underbrush.
• Stephen Mitchell: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, published 1984.

From the last one:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

of being No-one's sleep under so many

lids.

As I said, not at all a canon, just a few volumes I feel I need to have handy to go back to.