1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

James Mustich

3 annotations • data

First annotation on Aug 12th, 2025.

In the first chapter of his Education, Adams writes: Probably no child, born in the [same] year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could not refuse to play his excellent hand. . . . As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and little incident. You'll note that Adams writes of himself in the third person. While on the one hand this device suggests the weight of the legacy the Adams name embodied, on the other it affords the author the perspective needed to examine his own experience through seven decades with the detached, skeptical, witty, and ironic sensibility these pages so richly exhibit.
Written for state-sponsored annual religious festivals held in spring in honor of the god Dionysus, the tragedies were ceremonial as well as dramatic, invoking the strife of legendary heroes—most often Homeric—to steep the community in the grief of individual destinies, the unfathomable energies of the gods, and the agonizing emergence of civilizing impulses. Zeus, the chorus warns us early in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, "lays it down as law / that we must suffer, suffer into truth." Such suffering is the stuff tragedies are made of.
In his lifetime, Isaac Asimov was known as one of the "Big Three" of science fiction, a designation he shared with Arthur C. Clarke (see Childhood's End) and Robert A. Heinlein (see Stranger in a Strange Land).