Pondering by chance it in one of those rare idle moments away from the Internet, I thought: What fun to set myself the task of making list, limited to ten works, the absorbing of which would move one farthest in the direction of the kind of understanding McKillop referred to.

No easy task, that, but here--in alphabetical order--is the result, shaped not least by awareness of McKillop's ability to do completely dead-pan, multi-layered Scottish irony.

Yes, there are major, shocking omissions, and maybe major, shocking inclusions as well (Brecht, but no Shakespeare? The guy's clearly cuckoo!). Try it yourself and you'll see what a difficult but stimulating task it is.

(The titles are clickable and will take you
to the Amazon page for each work.)

	Animal Farm. by George Orwell.		Candide. by Voltaire.
	Frankenstein. by Mary Shelley.		Gulliver's Travels. by Jonathan Swift.
	Johnny Got His Gun. by Dalton Trumbo.		Life Against Death. by Norman O. Brown.
	Marat/Sade. by Peter Weiss.		Myra Breckinridge. by Gore Vidal.
	Tao Te Ching. by Lao-Tze.		Three-penny Opera. by Bertolt Brecht.

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