Help with my classics reading list?

[Silver96]

Hi guys I have compiled this list of 50 works of Literature for myself to read. I have read a few at school but not many but I hope to remedy that. Can any of you guys offer advice on whether I have missed important books out or not and what I could take away from the list.


I'm worried I'm being to biased towards England at the expense of other places
I would like to keep the number of works at 50 so if you suggest something suggest what should be taken away as well.

Homer - The Iliad (Around 700BC)
Homer - The Odyssey. (Around 700BC)
Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (1308)
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales (1400)
William Shakespeare - Hamlet (1602)
William Shakespeare - Othello (1603)
William Shakespeare - King Lear (1606)
William Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey (1818)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Jane Austen - Persuasion (1818)
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield (1850)
Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables (1862)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment. (1866)
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (1877)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (1895)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
D .H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913)
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
George Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty Four (1989)
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
John Steinbeck - East of Eden (1952)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Joseph Heller - Catch 22 (1961)

[mal4mac]

Good list! Maybe there are a few too many kids classics lurking on there, I'd replace them with a few heavyweights.

I'd remove:

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)

And replace them with:

Plato - Dialogues
Montaigne - Essays
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Goethe - Faust
George Eliot - Middlemarch
Flaubert - Madame Bovary

[Lokasenna]

Wonderful though Chaucer and Dante are, they're the only medieval writers on your list - perhaps you should have something to help span the nearly 2,000 year gap between Homer and Dante? Beowulf would be an obvious choice from Western European medievalism, but if that's too Anglo-centric you could might consider Egils saga or Njáls saga (Icelandic), the Mabinogi (Welsh), the Nibelungenlied (German), Chanson de Roland (French), or loads of other possibilities...

As for who to get rid of, well, that's more subjective - though you might want to weed out multiple works by the same author: are four novels by Dickens necessary, or three by Austen (wonderful though they are)? And then there's the matter of the length of some of them - the Canterbury Tales, for example, is on a word-for-word count probably not much short of the entire plays of Shakespeare, yet it occupies one slot whilst four individual plays are given seperate entries.

[mal4mac]

It's all looking a bit Western, why not add:

• Epic of Gilgamesh
• Bhagavad Gita
• Tao te Ching
• An Artist of the Floating World - Katzuo Ishiguro

These are all quite short

• Arabian Nights (quite long, try a selection of the best bits)

Why not replace Shakespeare and Chaucer with The Oxford Book of English Verse?

Other ideas to keep the size of works down:

• Instead of Plato's complete dialogues, try just The Republic.
• There is a good Penguin selection of Montaigne's essays.
• Try Dante's Inferno, rather than the whole trilogy
• Goethe's Faust part I may be sufficient.

[chrisvia]

I think the KJV Bible is unavoidable for approaching the ilk of literature represented here (at least for those folks after Homer). Of course, the Bible shouldn't be the only religious text, but mal4mac has attributed the right works to expand your view--I might only add the Qur'an.

The only other essential I can think of at present is Woolf. Either Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.

[Marbles]

Good list though I argue for the inclusion of, among other things, international modern classics in order to diversify your reading experience because, in my opinion, our international globalised age demands it. My suggestions would be:

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Franz kafka - The Trial and The Metamorphoses
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Milan Kundera - Unbearable Lightness of Being
V.S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

Good list! Maybe there are a few too many kids classics lurking on there, I'd replace them with a few heavyweights.

I'd remove:

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)

I second the removal of the above. I'd perhaps retain Of Mice and Men but I'd cross out H.G. Wells' Time Machine

It's all looking a bit Western, why not add:

• Epic of Gilgamesh
  
• Bhagavad Gita
• Tao te Ching
• An Artist of the Floating World - Katzuo Ishiguro

Vishnu Sharma's Panchtantra [3rd BCE] would make for a better reading than the Gita, in my opinion.

The only other essential I can think of at present is Woolf. Either Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.

Yes, definitely include To the Lighthouse. It's also short.

[R.F. Schiller]

Homer - The Iliad (Around 700BC)
Homer - The Odyssey. (Around 700BC)
Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy (1308)
Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales (1400)
William Shakespeare - Hamlet (1602)
William Shakespeare - Othello (1603)
William Shakespeare - King Lear (1606)
William Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey (1818)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
Jane Austen - Persuasion (1818)
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre (1847)
Charles Dickens - David Copperfield (1850)
Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables (1862)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment. (1866)
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)
Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (1877)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (1895)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
D .H Lawrence - Sons and Lovers (1913)
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
George Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty Four (1989)
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
John Steinbeck - East of Eden (1952)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Joseph Heller - Catch 22 (1961)

Question: Are you only interested in Western Literature? Because if not, I would recommend expanding the list to be more diverse. I would recommend Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Story of the Stone and the Dao De Ching from Chinese literature alone. You are also lacking post-1960 classics. I would recommend stuff like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Money by Martin Amis or American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

I bolded the works that I don't really considering great "classics" (If you want to read Twain, Huck Finn is much better). I'm heavily (positively) biased towards European Modernists and I firmly believe that Proust's In Search of Lost Time (just read the first volume, Swann's Way if you don't want to read the whole thing), Kafka's The Trial/The Metamorphosis should be on there. I would also like to add Milton's Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Nabokov's Pale Fire , Albert Camus's The Stranger and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Maybe some short stories by Chekhov, Borges, or O'Connor (Flannery) would be nice. Some non-fiction in the forms of Emerson's essays, or literary autobiographies like Richard Wright's Black Boy or Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory would be good. Could also use some African-American literature like Frederick Douglass's slave narrative or Wright's Native Son.

Last point I'm going to make is: do you really need four works by Dickens, three by Austen (one of which I don't think is particularly great)? Important authors no doubt, but 7 total works combined?

EDIT: I lied. This is the last point I'll make. I applaud you for selecting 4 mammoth works by Tolstoy/Dostoevsky, but you could supplement 1 or 2 of them with much shorter novellas that are also great like The Death of Ivan Ilyich or Notes From the Underground.

[Silver96]

Thanks everyone! I did want to be less Western centric but my knowledge of anything non-western is abysmal and that's why I asked for suggestions.

People have mentioned lots of stuff I'd never heard of so thanks for broadening my horizons.

[mortalterror]

the Canterbury Tales, for example, is on a word-for-word count probably not much short of the entire plays of Shakespeare,

No way. Canterbury tales is maybe 1/3 as long as the complete 37 plays of Shakespeare.

[AuntShecky]

I wholeheartedly agree that the list includes The Canterbury Tales.

No 17th century literature? Milton, Donne, et al.?

Your 20th century offerings should include Samuel Beckett as well as O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night; The Iceman Cometh.)

Also, it would be great if it had some examples of Black American literature; my choice would be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

I'd dump Lord of the Flies. It's over-rated.

[mortalterror]

Drop Jules Vern, HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Tender is the Night. Pick one Austen, Dickens, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevski. Add Ovid's Metamorphosis, Virgil's Aeneid, Beowulf, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Balzac's Old Goriot, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

[Bill 42]

Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)
Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days (1873)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)
H.G Wells - The Time Machine (1895)
Bram Stoker - Dracula (1897)
H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds (1898)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
George Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)
J.D Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird (1960)
Joseph Heller - Catch 22 (1961)

I know a lot of posters have recommended to remove some of the above entries from your list, but I would recommend reading these first. They are simple, easy reads and really good books. Start with Around the World in 80 Days and Treasure Island, since they are the easiest. In your first post you mentioned that you haven't read many of these, so I'm going to assume you haven't read a lot of books. Start with something easy...

[Paulclem]

I wonder how many have read all the list?

Just pick a few and read what you like and get some modern stuff smattered in there. The list will take years to complete anyway. And don't worry about ditching the boring stuff. Literature - unless you're tracing the history and development of it - is a very subjective term.

[Lokasenna]

No way. Canterbury tales is maybe 1/3 as long as the complete 37 plays of Shakespeare.

Well, alright, I was exaggerating a bit - but the basic point about the disparity in length between certain texts still stands!

[Lykren]

I agree with pulling out the books other people mentioned. They aren't terrible for the most part, but neither are they particularly interesting or well written. Just my two cents of course.

I've put a list together that I've been working on for a few years now. I realize it's anglocentric as well, but it does have a good deal of breadth to it.

Tale of Genji
Moby Dick
Ulysses
War and Peace
Pride and Prejudice/Emma/Sense and Sensibility
Lord Jim
Tess of the D'urbervilles
Middlemarch
Pygmalion
Atonement
Brideshead Revisited
Waiting for Godot
The Homecoming
Jane Eyre/Wuthering Heights
A Tale of Two Cities
The Good Soldier
Paradise Lost
The Importance of Being Earnest
Gulliver's Travels
The Fountain Overflows
Mrs. Dalloway/To The Lighthouse
Tom Jones
Tristram Shandy
The End of the Affair
The Way We Live Now
The Golden Notebook
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Of Human Bondage
A Passage to India
Ivanhoe
Complete Shakespeare
Oresteia
Theban Plays
Medea
Lysistrata
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Heike Monogatari (Tyler)
Kokoro
Snow Country
The Makioka Sisters
Oku No Hosomichi
The Story of the Stone (Hawkes)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Roberts)
The Plum in the Golden Vase (Roy)
La Princesse de Cleves
A la Recherche du Temps Perdue
Pere Goriot/Cousin Bette
Madame Bovary
Therese Raquin
La Malade Imaginaire
Phedre
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Red and the Black
Les Miserable
The Plague
Candide
Blindness
The book of disquiet (Zenith)
The Lusiads (Oxford)
The devil to pay in the backlands
Don Quixote
Fuenteovejuna
Life is a Dream
Blood Wedding/Yerma/The House of Bernarda Alba
One Hundred Years of Solitude/Love in the Time of Cholera
Hopscotch
The Old Gringo
Ficciones
Conversations in the Cathedral
Pedro paramo
Faust
Wallenstein Trilogy
The Tin Drum
The Trial/The Metamorphosis
The Magic Mountain
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Darkness at Noon
Hunger
Miss Julie
My Struggle (Knausgaard)
Hedda Gabbler
The Threepenny Opera
The Man Without Qualities
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Divine Comedy (Hollander?)
The Decameron
The Name of the Rose
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
I Promessi Sposi
Eugene Oenegin
Hadji Murad
Petersburg
Crime and Punishment
One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich
The Nose
Anna Karenina
Chekhov: Complete Plays/Stories (Pevear/Volokhonsky)
The Master and Margarita
Oblomov
Life and Fate
Oryx and Crake
Who Do You Think You Are
Red Doc>
Catch-22
On The Road
Atonement
Ada, or Ardor
U.S.A. Trilogy
Franny and Zooey
Beloved
Gravity's Rainbow
The Age of Innocence
The Sun Also Rises/A Farewell to Arms/Old Man and the Sea/For Whom the Bell Tolls
Portrait of A Lady/The Wings of the Dove/Turn of the Screw
The Scarlet Letter
Infinite Jest
Invisible Man
The Sound and the Fury/As I Lay Dying
My Antonia
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Long days Journey into Night
The Red Badge of Courage
The Awakening
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Last of the Mohicans
The Bridge of San Luis Rey/Our Town
Rabbit Angstrom novels
Blood Meridian
Underworld
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
In Cold Blood
Cathedral
Tender is the Night/A Winter Dream/The Great Gatsby
American Pastoral
Revolutionary Road
All The King's Men
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Stoner
Aeneid
Metamorphoses
Hans Christian Andersen
The Brothers Grimm
One Thousand and One Nights (Burton)
The Canterbury Tales
Iliad and Odyssey (Fagles)
Nibelunglied
Chanson de Roland
El Cid
Baghavad Gita
Beowulf
Njals Saga
Sinuhe
Epic of Gilgamesh


Selected poems of (I just did english-language poets here because of the translation problem):
Spenser
Donne
Pope
Milton
Gray (Elegy)
Burns
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
Shelley
Keats
Byron
Tennyson
Brownings
Hopkins
Yeats
Hardy
Pound
Eliot
Auden
Thomas
Crane
Whitman
Dickinson
Frost
Williams
Stevens
Bishop
Plath
Sexton
Louise Gluck
Merrill
Geoffrey Hill
Ashbery (Self-Portrait)
Heaney (Opened Ground)