some reading recommendations for advanced vocabulary

spoony1971

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+ d& L" l) Q/ A+ b& V# ~/ ]0 DRead the great stylists of English, starting with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon and (no joke) the King James Bible. (For a fascinating account of how they pieced that Bible together, read God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson.)
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2 U" O/ _! u9 DYou should have at least two dictionaries on your desk, and buy a copy of Modern English Usage by Fowler (the second edition is best, but do avoid the third edition, for it is too modern for the spirit of the enterprise and throws out the baby with the bathwater).
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- Y; H# J* }  o! C7 v# ^, gRead Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey, but Tristram Shandy will have to come later), Oliver Goldsmith (writing as the Citizen of the World) and Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, his essays and travel books).
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If you had to choose only two plays by Shakespeare, then invite a friend who has English to join you in reading through The Tempest and Macbeth - read them aloud with gusto. Get a good annotated edition (with lots of footnotes and a glossary of Elizabethan slang).
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# }5 H" L$ ]8 Z- {' [Go to a library or a second-hand bookshop and pick up inexpensive reprints of the fairy tales which were translated so beautifully so as to transmit a treasure trove full of word wizardry, worldly wisdom and otherworldly wonder (this is not kids' stuff - you will want them all your life) : Aesop as Englished in 1692 by Sir Roger L'Estrange (who isn't a James Bond villain, but with a name like that he should be) ; classic Victorian renditions of Andersen and Grimm ; Perrault as translated by A. E. Johnson ; and the Arabian Nights as given to all Anglophony by the heroical Sir Richard Burton (read of his life too, in The Devil Drives). (Do not even look at modern translations of these - avoid the name Zipes, for example.)

( c" L7 A) M9 I6 \+ G9 ~The two Dubliners S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker will chill your blood with tales with supernatural horror in exquisitely wrought prose.
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3 X9 ?6 k: K& x3 M6 J: x3 YFrankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley is a mightily brooding philosophical study as well as a fantastic tale (she was a mere teenager when she wrote it on a dare). One by Dickens which I should mention is Great Expectations.

/ I" w- G& n% G# p0 n9 ^6 F- W; _Lewis Carroll, it goes without saying, should be taken in repeated doses throughout the years - Alice In Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass* and Jabberwocky. Drink in anything you can which was composed by Dylan Thomas --a bright-burning soul-- whether verse or prose (his poems often draw us in with stories, and his stories are always spouting rhymes). Find the famous recording of this poet reading Under Milk Wood.

$ p: R* J- Y% H5 G9 s) ^9 wHave you read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ?- It is an important novel not only for its limpid prose, but also its prophetic eye cast upon modern society. (And it's a rather easy read.) Then, immediately afterwards for some much needed comic relief, you should recite, out loud, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. Follow that with 1984 by Orwell. Take solace in the miraculous nonsense of Edward Lear sometimes.

) C9 i; p. g5 ]+ `8 AFor science fiction, read The Coming Race (Vril) by Bulwer-Lytton [the beef extract Bovril was named for this once popular literary sensation < bovine + vril].
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Two big-hearted American novels definitely to be experienced are Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey and A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. Another good pairing is the clever war novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and the raw anti-war Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo (a writer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era).

3 B. O- I* l1 u+ s5 d1 z0 h* X2 ?For plenty of laughing inspiration and finest form by sleight of pen, I can heartily recommend the writings of Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn, The Diaries of Adam and Eve), P. G. Wodehouse (Jeeves stories), historical farces by George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman novels) and the novels of Flann O'Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Dalkey Archive, The Third Policeman).