Books, are the Greatest Treasure of Mankind

 Books are the Greatest Treasure of Mankind

A Tribute to the late "Ka Mao" Chanco, veteran journalist, publisher and environmentalist.

Dr Abe V Rotor

 Author inspects piles of books for display at a family museum 
and reading center, or donated to other reading centers. 

Books, once the privilege of a few in pre-printing machine era, each page painstakingly handwritten, each book a well-kept treasure. 

Books, the authority, the final say, unquestioned, un-refuted, else any one rising contrary faces punishment, including death or damnation. 

Books, the diary, the ledger, the document of conquest and discovery, of battles fought, often in favor of the writer and party.   

Books, the novels that carry the greatest stories of all times are called classics, for which they are regarded timeless for their universal values.

Books, the epics of Homer, stories of the Grimm Brothers distilled from oral literature passed through generations to the present. 

Books, written ahead of their time - Galileo's astronomy, Darwin's evolution, Martin Luther's Protestantism ignited dis-pleasure of the Church.

Books, bedtime stories, baby's introduction to the world, legends and fantasies that take young ones to the land of make-believe. 

Books, the record of ultimate scholarship, are the epitome of the greatest minds in thesis and dissertation, theories and principles. 

Books, the precursor of the Internet, the framework of the i-Pod, Tablet, Galaxy, and other gadgets that man becomes a walking encyclopedia. 

Books, the progeny of the earliest forms of writing like the cuneiform, hieroglyphics, cave drawings, etchings, scrolls of the Dead Sea.     

Books, that gave the idea and structure of the Wonders of the Ancient World, and the significance and belief for which they were built. 

Books, that grew with knowledge, brought new schools and movements in arts and philosophy, in unending search for truth. 

Books, the most widely read, the Bible; the shortest, Albert Einstein’s e=mc2, and book-to-cinema versions of Spielberg, Lucas, Cecil B de Mille et al. 

Books, the greatest treasure of mankind, its collective attributes as humanity, the very stimulus of man's rationality to rise above other creatures - and himself.

Books, that brought about man's disobedience to his creator, playing god, and questioning if god made man, or that man made god.  

Books that enlighten man to care for the environment, guide the young and future generations to a better future, and lead man to save his own species from extinction. ~
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The 100 most meaningful books of all time (Internet)

A 2002 survey of around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the most meaningful book of all time in a poll organized by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo. Voters included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes and Norman Mailer. Miguel de Cervantes’ tale gained 50% more votes than any other book, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer and Tolstoy.

Ten authors got more than one book on to the list. After Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky emerged as the most worthwhile read with four books listed. The only Shakespeare plays the authors agreed on were Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. The Bard was matched by Franz Kafka whose three angst-ridden tales of grotesque alienation on the list were The Trial, The Castle and the Complete Stories. Three works by Leo Tolstoy made it: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf both scored twice, along with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Other than Don Quixote in first place below, the remaining 99 titles are reproduced as published by De Norske Bokklubbene in alphabetical order and are not ranked.

·         Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes

·         Things fall apart Chinua Achebe

·         Fairy tales and stories Hans Christian Andersen

·         Pride and prejudice Jane Austen

·         Old Goriot Honore de Balzac

·         Trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable Samuel Beckett

·         Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio

·         Collected fictions Jorge Luis Borges

·         Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte

·         The Outsider (The Stranger) Albert Camus

·         Poems Paul Celan

·         Journey to the end of the night Louis-Ferdinand Celine

·         Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer

·         Nostromo Joseph Conrad

·         The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri

·         Great expectations Charles Dickens

·         Jacques the fatalist and his master Denis Diderot

·         Berlin Alexanderplatz Alfred Doblin

·         Crime and punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·         The Idiot Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·         The Possessed Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·         The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·         Middlemarch George Eliot

·         Invisible man Ralph Ellison

·         Medea Euripides

·         Absalom, Absalom William Faulkner

·         The Sound and the fury William Faulkner

·         Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

·         A Sentimental education Gustave Flaubert

·         Gypsy Ballads Federico Garcia Lorca

·         One hundred years of solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez

·         Love in the time of cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez

·         The Epic of Gilgamesh

·         Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

·         Dead souls Nikolai Gogol

·         The Tin Drum Günter Grass

·         The Devil to pay in the backlands Joao Guimaraes Rosa

·         Hunger Knut Hamsun

·         The Old man and the sea Ernest Hemingway

·         The Iliad Homer

·         The Odyssey Homer

·         A Doll’s house Henrik Ibsen

·         The Book of Job Anon

·         Ulysses James Joyce

·         The Complete Stories Franz Kafka

·         The Trial Franz Kafka

·         The Castle Franz Kafka

·         The Recognition of Sakuntala Kalidasa

·         The Sound of the mountain Yasunari Kawabata

·         Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis

·         Sons and lovers D H Lawrence

·         Independent people Halldor K Laxness

·         Complete poems Giacomo Leopardi

·         The Golden notebook Doris Lessing

·         Pippi Longstocking Astrid Lindgren

·         Diary of a madman and other stories Lu Xun

·         Mahabharata Anon

·         Children of Gebelawi Naguib Mahfouz

·         Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann

·         The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann

·         Moby Dick Herman Melville

·         Essays Michel de Montaigne

·         History Elsa Morante

·         Beloved Toni Morrison

·         The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu

·         The Man without qualities Robert Musil

·         Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

·         Njal’s saga

·         1984 George Orwell

·         Metamorphoses Ovid

·         The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa

·         The Complete tales Edgar Allan Poe

·         Remembrance of things past Marcel Proust

·         Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais

·         Pedro Paramo Juan Rulfo

·         The Mathnawi Jalalu’l-Din Rumi

·         Midnight’s children Salman Rushdie

·         The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard) Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz

·         A Season of migration to the north Tayeb Salih

·         Blindness Jose Saramago

·         Hamlet William Shakespeare

·         King Lear William Shakespeare

·         Othello William Shakespeare

·         Oedipus the King Sophocles
·       The Red and the Black Stendhal

·         The Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne

·         Confessions of Zeno Italo Svevo

·         Gulliver’s travels Jonathan Swift

·         War and Peace Leo Tolstoy

·         Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

·         The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories Leo Tolstoy

·         Selected Stories Anton Chekhov

·         Thousand and One Nights

·         The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

·         Ramayana Valmiki

·         The Aeneid Virgil

·         Leaves of grass Walt Whitman

·         Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

·         To the lighthouse Virginia Woolf
  Memoirs of Hadrian Marguerite Yourcenar ~