Reading path
The Living and the Dead
Snow falls past the window onto a city of the living and a country of the dead, and for a moment the line between them thins to nothing. These are the books that put the dead in the room with you and your own end somewhere in the distance, not as horror but as the oldest human knowledge. A king turns a jester's skull in his hand, a whole town speaks from its graves, a man learns in three days what he would not learn in fifty years. Remember that you must die, they keep saying, and live as someone who has heard it.
In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.
The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.
The route
- 1. The Epic of GilgameshAnonymous, 2100 BCE
- 2. EverymanAnonymous, 1495
- 3. HamletWilliam Shakespeare, 1601
- 4. Elegy Written in a Country ChurchyardThomas Gray, 1751
- 5. Old MortalitySir Walter Scott, 1816
- 6. The Masque of the Red DeathEdgar Allan Poe, 1842
- 7. A Christmas CarolCharles Dickens, 1843
- 8. Because I could not stop for DeathEmily Dickinson, 1863
- 9. The Death of Ivan IlyichLeo Tolstoy, 1886
- 10. The DeadJames Joyce, 1914
- 11. The Bridge of San Luis ReyThornton Wilder, 1927
- 12. Our TownThornton Wilder, 1938
- 13. Pedro PáramoJuan Rulfo, 1955
- 14. AubadePhilip Larkin, 1977
- 15. Lincoln in the BardoGeorge Saunders, 2017
- 16. The Duino ElegiesRainer Maria Rilke, 1923
- 17. The Year of Magical ThinkingJoan Didion, 2005
- 18. DesolaciónGabriela Mistral, 1922
- 19. Human ActsHan Kang, 2014
- 20. IronweedWilliam Kennedy, 1983
- 21. The Old Curiosity ShopCharles Dickens, 1841
- 22. Crossing the BarAlfred, Lord Tennyson, 1889