Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the end; and, to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because this was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and some others complained of; and finally -- and chiefly -- because a rigorous philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and satisfy man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate contradiction.

Favorites.

00 The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, 1907.
01 To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, 1927.
02 The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill, 1939.
03 Der Zauberberg, by Thomas Mann, 1924.
04 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip Kindred Dick, 1968.
05 Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw, 1905.
06 Strange Interlude, by Eugene O'Neill, 1928.
07 The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, 1963.
08 Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, 1847.
09 Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, 1928.
10 Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O'Neill, 1956.
11 A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen, 1879.

Best foreign language poem: An die freude, by Friedrich Schiller, 1785.
Best motivational poem: Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1833.
Best autobiography poem: The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde, 1897.
Best ideas poem: September 1, 1939, by Wystan Hugh Auden, 1939.
Best fictional poem: The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1845.
Best anti-war poem: For the Union Dead, by Robert Lowell, 1964.

Favorite W. Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, 1599.
Favorite D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, by David Herbert Lawrence, 1913.
Favorite O. Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, 1895.
Favorite T. Williams: The Night of the Iguana, by Tennessee Williams, 1961.
Favorite E. M. Forster: A Passage to India, by Edward Morgan Forster, 1924.

Most outrageous: Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, 1961.
Most organized: The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, 1929.
Most ambiguous: Cakes and Ale, by William Somerset Maugham, 1930.
Most twisted: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, 1916.
Most scientific: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1969.

Favorite villain: The Tragedy of Richard III, by William Shakespeare, 1594.
Favorite suicide: Fröken Julie, by August Strindberg, 1888.
Favorite conversation: Heartbreak House, by George Bernard Shaw, 1919.
Favorite absurdism: Les bonnes, by Jean Genet, 1948.
Favorite climax: Suddenly, Last Summer, by Tennessee Williams, 1958.

Like Ethics: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens, 1954.
Like Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Poetry, by Marianne Moore, 1961.
Like Phenomenology of Spirit: Gerontion, by Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1920.
Like Either/Or: Daddy, by Sylvia Plath, 1965.

Most revolutionary thesis: A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, 1929.
Best epistolary novel: Screwtape Letters, by Clive Staples Lewis, 1942.
Most mystical work: The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran, 1923.
Greatest posthumous collection: Moments of Being, by Virginia Woolf, 1940.
Best film adaptation: The Petrified Forest, by Robert Emmet Sherwood, 1935.

Archive.

2006 .txt Books read by June 30.
2005 .txt Books read by June 30.
2004 .txt Books read by June 30.
2003 .txt Books read by June 30.