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Books he read ... |
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The following is a partial list of books mentioned in various sources as those that Vivekananda read.
- Bhagavad Gita
- Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis (carried it with him as a wandering monk)
- Yogavâsishtha Râmâyana
- Short History of the English People by John Richard Green (as a student)
- Works of Herbert Spencer (as a student)
- Immanuel Kant (as a student)
- Schopenhauer (as a student)
- John Stuart Mill (as a student)
- Auguste Comte (as a student)
- Aristotle (as a student)
- Poetry Wordsworth (said in the Life of Swami Vivekananda by his eastern and western disciples to be his favorite poet as a youth) (as a student)
- Three Essays on Religion by John Stuart Mill (said by Brajendra Seal to have “upset his first boyish theism and easy optimism.” ) (as a student)
- David Hume (a friend introduced him to the study of Hume) (as a student)
- Hymn to the Spirit of Intellectual Beauty by Percy Shelley (as a student)
- Other poems (recommended to him by Brajendra Seal) (as a student)
- Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (said that he read it several times)
- The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold. Vivekananda said it "represents more of Vedantism than Buddhism." "That beautiful poem" he called it.
- Encyclopedia Britanica: First 10 volumes of first edition at least, according to reminiscences of Sarat Chandra Charkravarty.
- Ashtadhyayi
(Source. Reminiscences by G.S. Bhate)
- Amarakosha
(Source. Reminiscences by G.S. Bhate)
- Lalita Vistara
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Nârada Sutras
- Shândilya Sutras
- Vairagya Shatakam
- Katha Upanishad
- Kalidasa's Shankantalam
- The Earth and Its Inhabitants by Elisee Reclus [French geographer and social philosopher].
Los Angeles, December 1899.
- Alice in Wonderland
- Alice Through the Looking Glass
Swamiji said that Lewis Carroll had some kind of intuition-this was not an ordinary mind-to have written such books. He thought Alice in Wonderland "the most wonderful book for children that has been written in this [the nineteenth] century."
"There is no such thing as law or connection in this world, but we are thinking that there is a great deal of connection," he had said in 1896 during a New York class. "... The world is the same unconnected thing. Alice in Wonderland-with no connection whatever."
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- www.vivekananda.net edited by Frank Parlato Jr.