LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

As a part-time student member of the Duquesne University Library , I enjoyed privileges that went far beyond ordinary borrowing rights. I could take out as many books as I wished and keep them for as long as I wanted. More enticing still, I had access to volumes once considered forbidden. For centuries, the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum (1559–1966) dictated what the faithful should not read. Duquesne , being run by the Holy Ghost Fathers , naturally kept such works carefully shelved, but not beyond reach. Why do I recall this now? Because some of my students have asked me for a list of “good books to read.” I have never been able to compile such a list. Reading is too personal for prescriptive guidance. Yet it has often struck me that the Index itself, ironically, is one of the finest reading lists ever assembled. Consider the company it keeps under the label of “danger”: Jean-Paul Sartre, Nabokov, Dante, Bergson, Edward Gibbon, Alberto Moravia, Simone de Beauv...

Students have asked me several times to draw up a list for them of Authors I deem relevant and worth reading.  I never completed any such list because I thought it would be biased and probably misleading. Plenty of reading lists mention essential, must-read writers and titles where the whims of the composers show their predilections which are often misguided and misleading in my opinion. In my slumbers last night I thought it would be a better idea to mention the authors I have not read. For example, Chesterton, S.C. Lewis, Follet, Saramago, Coelho, Vargas Llosa, Dante, Günther Grass, Boris Pasternak, Mao-Tse Tung, Agatha Christie, García Márquez, Karl Marx, Tagore, Nostradamus, Pérez Reverte... come to mind, off the cuff. There is a spate of more writers I have not read or even heard of. There are 5 Nobel Prize winners in this short roll... Why haven´t I read them? Why didn´t I read Dr. Zhivago when the whole world and his mother were reading the novel in the States in my youth? M...