I think a more pertinent Philip K. Dick novel is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with its characters seeking happiness by retreating into dream worlds that wind up being designed and controlled by others who only want to exploit and manipulate for their own ends. Sound familiar?
I'd add Zamyatin's We to the sci-fi selection. I read it about the same time I read 1984 & BNW, when I was maybe 16 or 17,and it was the one I enjoyed most.
Shouldn't you have at least one book entitled : How to survive the End of Civilization. Or, Roughing it when Alone in the Woods. The SAS Survival Handbook? Editable Plants? How to hunt and cook small game? On a slightly more serious note I noticed The City without Jews" and The Camp of Saints were missing from the dystopian novels selection.
Jerry Mander 'Four Argument For the Elimination of Television' + Rene Guenon 'The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times' fit right in there as well
Lord of the World by English author Robert Hugh Benson. Written in early part of the 20th century. Quite prescient. Pope Francis highly recommended it in one of his off-the-cuff utterances with news media. Pretty riveting, not too long.
Bizarre; a must have list to end civilization with and not one book about the decline of China and India in the Middle Ages, honest to be sure but regrattably blinkered
Not another list!! Seriously I love this it—and I’m grateful to you that I know a few of these and feel confident if I want to read the others. Incidentally, I was browsing in a bookstore in York today and ran across a memoir from Gibbon. I might need to go back and get it…
Thanks for the timely reading list, Ted. I am about to travel abroad for a month and need some good summer reading to take along. This fits the bill perfectly. I have read six of the books you mentioned, including Gibbon, Orwell, and Spengler, which were all great, but found a few new ones (to me) on your list that really look interesting. I can hardly wait to dig into them.
Interesting reading for interesting times. What will come of our present Revenge of the D Students? Whatever it is, it will not be the stories put forth by the politicians and influencers. It never is. But it will, for better or worse, be new. So there's that. I'd love to read the history 1000 years from now.
I have a lot of reading to do, thank you Mr. Ted. I started Gibbons and never finished because I wanted to learn the why of Rome's fall and without the how of its start . . . also, it is very long and other shinny distractions intruded. I would like to know if your ultimate list includes Toynbee's "A Study of History"?
I think a more pertinent Philip K. Dick novel is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with its characters seeking happiness by retreating into dream worlds that wind up being designed and controlled by others who only want to exploit and manipulate for their own ends. Sound familiar?
I don't need to be more depressed about the fall of the US empire!
I'd add Zamyatin's We to the sci-fi selection. I read it about the same time I read 1984 & BNW, when I was maybe 16 or 17,and it was the one I enjoyed most.
A bit about Zamyatin. There is an audio book out there somewhere on YT. https://www.literatureuniverse.com/2026/03/what-yevgeny-zamyatins-we-taught-orwell.html
Here's the BBC radio version
https://archive.org/details/bbc-r-4-we
Excellent but holy poop I’m still on Herodotus from your humanities course 😂
Shouldn't you have at least one book entitled : How to survive the End of Civilization. Or, Roughing it when Alone in the Woods. The SAS Survival Handbook? Editable Plants? How to hunt and cook small game? On a slightly more serious note I noticed The City without Jews" and The Camp of Saints were missing from the dystopian novels selection.
Good list Ted. May I add the following?:
Transformations of Man by Lewis Mumford
Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
Technopoly by Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Postman
And (humbly) my own: Digital Mythologies
Jerry Mander 'Four Argument For the Elimination of Television' + Rene Guenon 'The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times' fit right in there as well
The Romans...if people drink from lead pipes for hundreds of years, they're bound to decline
Lord of the World by English author Robert Hugh Benson. Written in early part of the 20th century. Quite prescient. Pope Francis highly recommended it in one of his off-the-cuff utterances with news media. Pretty riveting, not too long.
Not to toot my own horn, but Herodotus is worth reading as well.
Bizarre; a must have list to end civilization with and not one book about the decline of China and India in the Middle Ages, honest to be sure but regrattably blinkered
Not another list!! Seriously I love this it—and I’m grateful to you that I know a few of these and feel confident if I want to read the others. Incidentally, I was browsing in a bookstore in York today and ran across a memoir from Gibbon. I might need to go back and get it…
Thanks for the timely reading list, Ted. I am about to travel abroad for a month and need some good summer reading to take along. This fits the bill perfectly. I have read six of the books you mentioned, including Gibbon, Orwell, and Spengler, which were all great, but found a few new ones (to me) on your list that really look interesting. I can hardly wait to dig into them.
Interesting reading for interesting times. What will come of our present Revenge of the D Students? Whatever it is, it will not be the stories put forth by the politicians and influencers. It never is. But it will, for better or worse, be new. So there's that. I'd love to read the history 1000 years from now.
I have a lot of reading to do, thank you Mr. Ted. I started Gibbons and never finished because I wanted to learn the why of Rome's fall and without the how of its start . . . also, it is very long and other shinny distractions intruded. I would like to know if your ultimate list includes Toynbee's "A Study of History"?
An interesting take on the mechanisms setting up decline - Mancur Olson: "The Rise and Decline of Nations"
Needs a soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgIR3GU_5sw