Lifetime Syllabus

Westmont College faculty recommended reading list:

 

Thomas a’Kempis

The Imitation of Christ

Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart

Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy

Isabel Allende

The House of the Spirits

Bryan Appleyard

Understanding the Present

St. Augustine

Confessions

On Christian Doctrine

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

Robert Bellah, et al

Habits of the Heart

Wendell Berry

Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community

What Are People For?

Life is a Miracle

Harry Blamires

The Christian Mind

Allan Bloom

The Closing of the American Mind

Corrie Ten Bloom

TheHiding Place

Eavan Boland

Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Cost of Discipleship

Life Together

Daniel Boorstin

The Image

The Discoverers

Alain de Botton

The Art of Travel

Charlotte Bronte

Villette

Frederick Buechner

Godric

Brendan

Son of Laughter

Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale

Wishful Thinking

The Sacred Journey

The Eyes of the Heart

John Bunyan

The Pilgrim’s Progress

John Calvin

Institutes

Fred Chappell

I Am One of You Forever

Brighten the Corner Where You Are

Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You

G.K. Chesterton

The Man Who Was Thursday

The Father Brown Stories

Orthodoxy

The Everlasting Man

The Quotable Chesterton

Donald Clark

Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education

Billy Collins

The Art of Drowning (poetry)

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

Stephen Covey

First Things First

Brent Curtis

Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God

The Sacred Journey

Charles Darwin

The Origin of Species

Stenley Deetz

Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization

Don DeLillo

White Noise (fiction)

Charles Dickens

David Copperfield

Annie Dillard

The Living

For the Time Being

An American Childhood

The Writing Life

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Holy the Firm

Isak Dinesen

Out of Africa

Vincent Donovan

Christianity Rediscovered

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

David James Duncan

The River Why

Brothers K

Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea

George Eliot

Middlemarch

Jacques Ellul

The Humiliation of the Word

The Technological Bluff

Shusako Endo

Silence

Leif Engel

Peace Like A River

Austin Farrer

Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited

William Faulkner

Go Down Moses

Richard Feynmann

Surely you're Joking, Feynmann

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith

Devotional Classics: SelectedReadings

Viktor E. Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning

Brian Friel

Dancing at Lughnasa

Kaye Gibbons

Ellen Foster

Graham Greene

The End of the Affair

Norman Grubb

Rees Howells Intercessor

Os Guinness

A Time for Truth

Edward T. Hall

The Dance of Life

O. Hallesby

Prayer

Ken Haruf

Plainsong

Stephen Hawking

A brief History of Time

Richard Hays

The Moral Vision of the New Testament

Ursula Hegi

Stones from the River

George Herbert

Complete Works

James Houston

I Believe in the Creator

Victor Hugo

Les Miserables

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

Lewis Hyde

The Gift

John Irving

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Harriet Jacobs

Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl

Alan Jones

Soul Making: TheDesert Way of Spirituality

Phillip Keller

A Shepherd looks at Psalm 23

William Kilpatrick

Psychological Seduction

Jon Krakauer

Into Thin Air

Peter Kreeft

Heaven: The Heart�s Deepest Desire

Anne LaMott

Blue Shoe

Traveling Mercies

Bird by Bird

Camera Laye

The Dark Child

Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Madeleine L'Engle

A Wrinkle in Time

A Wind in the Door

A Swiftly Tilting Planet

A Circle of Quiet

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Denise Levertov-

Breathing the Water, A Door in the Hive, Evening Train, Sands of the Well

C.S. Lewis

Chronicles of Narnia

Screwtape Letters

The Great Divorce

Space Trilogy

Perelandra

That Hideous Strength

Out of the Silent Planet

Till We Have Faces

Mere Christianity

Surprised by Joy

A Grief Observed

God in the Dock

The Abolition of Man

The Weight of Glory

Christian Reflections

Miracles

The Problem of Pain

Letters of C.S. Lewis

Letters to an American Lady

Letters to Malcomb: Chiefly on Prayer

Alan Lightman

Einstein's Dreams

The Diagnosis

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Gift from the Sea

Robert Ludlum

The Parsifal Mosaic

George MacDonald

The Princess and the Goblin

The Princess and Curdie

At the Back of the North Wind

The Wise Woman

The Golden Key

The Light Princess

The Grey Wolf

Sir Gibbie

Diary of an Old Soul

Life Essential

An Anthology

Alberto Manguel

A History ofReading

Brennan Manning

Lion and Lamb

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

100 Years of Solitude

Yann Martel

Life of Pi

Michael Mason

The Mysteries of Marriage

Gerald May

Addiction and Grace

Bill McKibben

The Age of Missing Information

Thomas Merton

No Man Is An Island

Seeds of Contemplation

John Milton

Paradise Lost

K. Moore

Finding God at Harvard

Marlo Morgan

Mutant Message Down Under

Robert Morgan

Gap Creek

Toni Morrison

Beloved

Malcolm Muggeridge

Jesus Rediscovered

The End of Christendom

Christ and the Media

The Green Stick

The Infernal Grove

Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim

Andrew Murray

With Christ in the School of Prayer

Kenneth Myers

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Stephen Nachmanovich

Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Shirley Nelson

The Last Year of the War

David Newsome

The Parting of Friends

Kathleen Norris

Dakota

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

The Cloister Walk

Julian of Norwich

Revelations of Divine Love

Henry Nouwen

The Living Reminder

The Wounded Healer

In the Name of Jesus

Reaching Out

The Only Necessary Thing

Return of the Prodigal Son

Flannery O’Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Wise Blood

Mystery and Manners

Everything that Rises Must Converge

Oeglar

Out of Our Past

Mary Oliver

Poetry

J.J. Packer

Knowing God

Blaise Pascal

Pensees

Alan Paton

Cry the Beloved Country

Charles Percy and Baron Snow

The Masters

Walker Percy

The Second Coming

The Moviegoer

Love in the Ruins

Lost in the Cosmos

The Message in the Bottle

Signposts in a Strange Land

Neil Postman

Amusing Ourselves to Death

The Disappearance of Childhood

Technopoly

Conscientious Objections

The End of Education

Chaim Potok

My Name is Asher Lev

Davida’s Harp

Anna Quindlen

Object Lessons

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Speech and Reality

Arundhati Roy

God of Small Things.

Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat

Seeing Voices

A Leg to Stand On

An Anthropologist on Mars

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Little Prince

J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

Mark Salzman Lying Awake

Barry Sanders

A is for OX: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age

The Private Death of Public Discourse

Dorothy L. Sayers

Strong Poison

Gaudy Night

The Nine Tailors

The Whimsical Christian

A Matter of Eternity

Are Women Human?

Shakespeare

King Lear

Ronald Sider

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

Andrew McCall Smith

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

Gregory Spencer

The Welkening : A Three Dimensional Tale

Edmund Spenser

The Faerie Queene

Wallace Stegner

Crossing to Safety

Angle of Repose

Short Stories

John Steinbeck

Grapes of Wrath

Sean Sullivan

Morning Light: The Spiritual Journal

Hudson Taylor

Spiritual Secret

Paul Theroux

Dark Star Safari

R.S Thomas

Poetry

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit

Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Farmer Giles of Ham

“Leaf by Niggle” (in Tree and Leaf)

Walter Wangerin

The Book of Dun Cow

Ragman and Other Cries of Faith

“On Fairy Stories” (in Tree and Leaf)

Leo Tolstoy

Short Stories

Anna Karenina

A.W. Tozer

The Pursuit of God

Walter Trobish

I Loved A Girl

I Married You

Jonathan Weiner

The Beak of the Finch

John White

Eros Defiled

Terry Tempest Williams

Refuge

E.O. Wilson

The Diversity of Life

Dallas Willard

The Divine Conspiracy

Charles Williams

Descent into Hell

The Place of the Lion

Descent of the Dove

He Came Down from Heaven

Virginia Wolf

A Room of Her Own

Herman Wouk

Winds of War

H. Norman Wright

Quiet Times for Couples

Phillip Yancey

What's So Amazing about Grace?

The Jesus I Never Knew

John Howard Yoder

The Politics of Jesus