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EDITOR'S BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

 

Books he read ...

 
 

 

Swami Vivekananda

 

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."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- www.vivekananda.net edited by Frank Parlato Jr.

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