books every home library should have

[stlukesguild]

Let's get real. The works of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, J.M. Barrie, etc... don't come near to qualifying as essential bits of literature... books that every home library SHOULD have... in spite of how much I may actually like these writers. If you are seeking to construct a library of the central works of Western literature... specifically in the English language... then the canonical works would include books such as:

The Bible (King James Version)
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Orestia- Aeschylus
The Oedipus Plays- Sophocles
The Collected Works of Plato
The Poems of Sapho
The Metamorphoses- Ovid
Collected Poems- Horace
The Divine Comedy- Dante
Collected Poems- Petrarch
Collected Essays- Michel de Montaigne
Plays- Moliere
Don Quixote- Cervantes
The Arabian Nights Entertainments
Canterbury Tales- Chaucer
Paradise Lost- Milton
The Faerie Queene- Spenser
The Collected Poems- John Donne
Tristam Shandy- Lawrence Sterne
Selected Poems by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake
War and Peace- Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov- Dostoevsky
Collected Stories- Checkoff
Madame Bovary- Flaubert
Flowers of Evil- Baudelaire
Leaves of Grass- Walt Whitman
Collected Verse- Emily Dickinson
Faust- Goethe
Confessions- Rousseau
Les Miserables- Victor Hugo
Moby Dick- Melville
Collected Essays- Emerson
The Life of Johnson- Boswell
A Tale of Two Cities- Dickens
Collected Poems- T.S. Eliot
Collected Poems- Wallace Stevens
Collected Stories- Kafka
Illuminations/A Season in Hell- Rimbaud
In Search of Lost Time- Proust
As I Lay Dying- Faulkner
Collected Short Stories- Hemingway
End Game- Beckett
Ulysses- Joyce
Ficciones/Labyrinths- J.L. Borges
etc...

All this would be but scraping the surface and one could certainly go much deeper into any area... more French, more German, more Italian, etc... This would also ignore the brilliance and depth of non-Western literature (excepting the Arabian Nights) and here one might start with the Indian epics (Mahabharata, Ramayana), the Tao Te Ching, the poems of the great Chinese poets such as Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei... the poetry of the great Japanese poets including Buson, Hitomaro, Akiko, Ladi Issa, etc... and the great Persian Epic, The Shahnameh... as well as the Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, Attar, and Omar Khayyam.

What it really comes down to is the reality that the works that are essential to you in your personal library are those books that you find indispensable. Personally I find such central canonical works as I listed above necessary because they continue to resonate through the whole of literature... beyond the fact that most of them are just damn good reading. But certainly there are any number of other books that I personally find indispensable... although they may not be truly central texts. Among these I'd include The poetry of Rilke, Verlaine, Garcia-Lorca, Holderlin, Montale, Cavalcanti, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Thomas Traherne, Neruda, Robert Herrick, etc... as well as the prose writings of Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities!!), Zola, Voltaire, Hawthorne, Poe, Jane Austen, Thomas hardy, Walter Pater, etc...

Good luck on your shopping spree!

[Saladin]

Let's get real. The works of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, J.M. Barrie, etc... don't come near to qualifying as essential bits of literature... books that every home library SHOULD have... in spite of how much I may actually like these writers. If you are seeking to construct a library of the central works of Western literature... specifically in the English language... then the canonical works would include books such as:

The Bible (King James Version)
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Orestia- Aeschylus
The Oedipus Plays- Sophocles
The Collected Works of Plato
The Poems of Sapho
The Metamorphoses- Ovid
Collected Poems- Horace
The Divine Comedy- Dante
Collected Poems- Petrarch
Collected Essays- Michel de Montaigne
Plays- Moliere
Don Quixote- Cervantes
The Arabian Nights Entertainments
Canterbury Tales- Chaucer
Paradise Lost- Milton
The Faerie Queene- Spenser
The Collected Poems- John Donne
Tristam Shandy- Lawrence Sterne
Selected Poems by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake
War and Peace- Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov- Dostoevsky
Collected Stories- Checkoff
Madame Bovary- Flaubert
Flowers of Evil- Baudelaire
Leaves of Grass- Walt Whitman
Collected Verse- Emily Dickinson
Faust- Goethe
Confessions- Rousseau
Les Miserables- Victor Hugo
Moby Dick- Melville
Collected Essays- Emerson
The Life of Johnson- Boswell
A Tale of Two Cities- Dickens
Collected Poems- T.S. Eliot
Collected Poems- Wallace Stevens
Collected Stories- Kafka
Illuminations/A Season in Hell- Rimbaud
In Search of Lost Time- Proust
As I Lay Dying- Faulkner
Collected Short Stories- Hemingway
End Game- Beckett
Ulysses- Joyce
Ficciones/Labyrinths- J.L. Borges
etc...

All this would be but scraping the surface and one could certainly go much deeper into any area... more French, more German, more Italian, etc... This would also ignore the brilliance and depth of non-Western literature (excepting the Arabian Nights) and here one might start with the Indian epics (Mahabharata, Ramayana), the Tao Te Ching, the poems of the great Chinese poets such as Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei... the poetry of the great Japanese poets including Buson, Hitomaro, Akiko, Ladi Issa, etc... and the great Persian Epic, The Shahnameh... as well as the Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, Attar, and Omar Khayyam.

What it really comes down to is the reality that the works that are essential to you in your personal library are those books that you find indispensable. Personally I find such central canonical works as I listed above necessary because they continue to resonate through the whole of literature... beyond the fact that most of them are just damn good reading. But certainly there are any number of other books that I personally find indispensable... although they may not be truly central texts. Among these I'd include The poetry of Rilke, Verlaine, Garcia-Lorca, Holderlin, Montale, Cavalcanti, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Thomas Traherne, Neruda, Robert Herrick, etc... as well as the prose writings of Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities!!), Zola, Voltaire, Hawthorne, Poe, Jane Austen, Thomas hardy, Walter Pater, etc...

Good luck on your shopping spree!

Guess which books you forgot? Its actually remarkable that you did mention Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and so on when it comes to eastern literature.

But after the Bible it`s ok to mention the Quran (Koran) and the Lotus Sutra as must have (religious) books.

But your list is very good indeed!

[stlukesguild]

Yes... and I admitted that my list was but a beginning. The Qur'an and the Bhagavad Gita, The Rig-Veda, the Upanishads, Herdotus, the Icelandic Sagas, Aristophanes, Euripides, Lucretius, Catullus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Sei Shonagon, Pessoa... on and on we go.

[JBI]

...Leopardi...

4 Confucian classics and a couple translations of 300 T'ang poems are a nice touch too.

Tao Te Ching is also a must have - but really there are about 500 must haves from the West-European+American tradition alone.

[stlukesguild]

JBI... I was waiting for you to throw Leopardi in there (I left him out on purpose) but you're slipping, man: "there are about 500 must haves from the West-European+American tradition alone?" What!!?? No mention of a Canadian?

[mortalterror]

Let's get real. The works of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, J.M. Barrie, etc... don't come near to qualifying as essential bits of literature...

I beg to disagree. I think that Catch-22 is as good as Don Quixote but since it came later it is judged by a different set of standards. I don't know why you feel so confident that you can dismiss it out of hand, as a strong contender for the best book of the twentieth century while still including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. I see that you grouped The Aeneid along with Paradise Lost, and I think that Catch-22 bears a corresponding relationship with Don Quixote.

Be that as it may, your list is wonderfully inclusive, almost stiflingly so. An all encompassing, dare I say encyclopedic list that leaves hardly anything out. This may be a virtue in a public library, but what gives the personal library it's character is as much what is left out, the pointed omissions, as what is left in. If we do not exclude certain books which are not to our taste then what remains will have no form of it's own. It will feel like a reference stack compiled from anthologies.

A home library should make a statement, should say something about the person who owns it. There should be an inordinate abundance of titles by a favorite author, the startling omission of some sacred cow, and a preponderance of works from a given period or language. You'll note that in my own list I include American and French works but snub the Russians and English novelists. This was a deliberate choice. I included nearly the complete Greek and Roman dramatic canon but there are gaps covering the entire middle ages and the three centuries from Racine to Beckett. The message of Plato's Republic standing almost alone representing philosophical works would be watered down by adding Rousseau, Locke, or Hegel. It also makes a different point than if I'd gone with Aristotle. Sometimes including a single work to stand for a whole epoch is a more potent statement than every title available. That's one way to build a library.

[JBI]

JBI... I was waiting for you to throw Leopardi in there (I left him out on purpose) but you're slipping, man: "there are about 500 must haves from the West-European+American tradition alone?" What!!?? No mention of a Canadian?

Canada is not part of the so called "Western" tradition. The reason, is firstly, Canada was rejected from it, and secondly, Canada developed a tradition completely away from it, which incorporates many elements completely outside of it.

[JBI]

I beg to disagree. I think that Catch-22 is as good as Don Quixote but since it came later it is judged by a different set of standards. I don't know why you feel so confident that you can dismiss it out of hand, as a strong contender for the best book of the twentieth century while still including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. I see that you grouped The Aeneid along with Paradise Lost, and I think that Catch-22 bears a corresponding relationship with Don Quixote.

Be that as it may, your list is wonderfully inclusive, almost stiflingly so. An all encompassing, dare I say encyclopedic list that leaves hardly anything out. This may be a virtue in a public library, but what gives the personal library it's character is as much what is left out, the pointed omissions, as what is left in. If we do not exclude certain books which are not to our taste then what remains will have no form of it's own. It will feel like a reference stack compiled from anthologies.

A home library should make a statement, should say something about the person who owns it. There should be an inordinate abundance of titles by a favorite author, the startling omission of some sacred cow, and a preponderance of works from a given period or language. You'll note that in my own list I include American and French works but snub the Russians and English novelists. This was a deliberate choice. I included nearly the complete Greek and Roman dramatic canon but there are gaps covering the entire middle ages and the three centuries from Racine to Beckett. The message of Plato's Republic standing almost alone representing philosophical works would be watered down by adding Rousseau, Locke, or Hegel. It also makes a different point than if I'd gone with Aristotle. Sometimes including a single work to stand for a whole epoch is a more potent statement than every title available. That's one way to build a library.

I disagree, if I were looking for the Great Book of the twentieth century (something which I dislike doing, as it is really too difficult a question), I wouldn't dwell much on Heller's Catch 22. Quite simply, when compared to Lu Xun (Hsun)'s Call to Arms, it doesn't even scrape the surface. Even Mann's The Magic Mountain doesn't seem compare to Lu Xun. That being said, one must also take into account every genre, not just novels. And when that happens, I would put something like Eliot's Complete Poems as far more valuable to me than any of the so mentioned names.

Either way though, I don't think much of Catch 22, but when considering the essentials, one must have a wider range than 4 countries.

[stlukesguild]

I beg to disagree. I think that Catch-22 is as good as Don Quixote but since it came later it is judged by a different set of standards. I don't know why you feel so confident that you can dismiss it out of hand, as a strong contender for the best book of the twentieth century while still including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. I see that you grouped The Aeneid along with Paradise Lost, and I think that Catch-22 bears a corresponding relationship with Don Quixote.

Catch-22 struck me as a good read but surely not near a central text of the 20th century, let alone of all time. It is certainly not a book that has drawn me back again and again and again. For me, such texts would include the writings of J.L Borges, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino... the poems of T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Rilke, and a few others.

Be that as it may, your list is wonderfully inclusive, almost stiflingly so. An all encompassing, dare I say encyclopedic list that leaves hardly anything out. This may be a virtue in a public library, but what gives the personal library it's character is as much what is left out, the pointed omissions, as what is left in. If we do not exclude certain books which are not to our taste then what remains will have no form of it's own. It will feel like a reference stack compiled from anthologies.

Undoubtedly the inclusiveness of my list is owed to the scale of my personal library. Had someone asked the same question when I was just out of high-school my list would probably have been heavy in the works of the Russians, French poets, and a few clearly iconic figures such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, and Dante. As my library now numbers some 3000 books it is necessarily more inclusive. Even so... as any library... it has its biases... if only owing to the fact that I am an English-speaking reader and am dependent upon the accessibility of certain works in English. Personally, I see no problem with reading and owning books that are in strict disagreement. I have argued with both Plato and Rousseau extensively in the margins... yet feel both are essential reads. With time, however, I have come much closer to Montaigne, Emerson, and others.

Looking at my shelves, the English-language writers dominate... and this is undoubtedly owed to the fact that I tend to be more enamored of poetry than the novel and poetry is perhaps the most difficult genre to translate. Thus I have all of the great English Romantics (Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth) as well as the secondary English Romantics (Robert Burns, Arthur Hugh Clough, John Clare, Emily Bronte...) as well as the Americans (Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, Tuckerman, Dickenson, Whitman, etc...). Yet from the same period I have little in French poetry and am limited to Goethe, Holderlin, Novalis, Heine, and Morike among the Germans. Certain indisputably central figures such as Virgil, Homer, Dante, Sappho, Horace, Baudelaire, etc... have been quite ably translated. Others... not so much so. I've found Holderlin in translation by Micheal Hamburger and Rilke by Edward Snow has fared far better than Goethe in many instances... and Goethe has fared far better than Pierre Ronsard, Francisco de Quevedo, Gustavo Adolpho Becquer... and until just recently: Luis Gongora and Victor Hugo.

Certainly I acknowledge the strength of the Russians... but having a clear preference for poetry followed by shorter fiction and non-fiction prose... the Russians certainly lose out. I have studied the history of literature (and the accompanying history of art) enough to recognize that the Baroque-era was a golden age of literature and art in Spain... yet I have scant little to prove this is so... at least in terms of literature: Not a single volume by Becquer, a sole, but recently acquired volume on Gongora, a few poems by most of the other poets in slim anthologies, a few bits of theater by Rojas, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon de la Barca. The most complete works I have beyond Cervantes (at least prior to the 20th century) are the romance Tirant lo Blanc by Martorell and De Galba praised by Cervates and ably translated by David Rosenthal, The Poem of the Cid marvelously translated by W.S. Merwin, and the poems of San Juan de la Cruz translated by Roy Campbell and John F. Nims.

I will also note that having owned and read a book and admitted to its merits is no where near the same as liking or loving it. I cannot help but recognize and admit to Joyce's centrality among Modernist prose... but I'll take Proust, Kafka, Borges... even Joyce's follower, Beckett over him by personal preference.

[mortalterror]

Catch-22 struck me as a good read but surely not near a central text of the 20th century, let alone of all time. It is certainly not a book that has drawn me back again and again and again.

Don Quixote struck me about the same way; but instead of low-rating it, I was reminded of how some people still fail to understand the exquisite beauty of Catch-22 and what a tragedy that can be. I consoled myself that at least I liked one of them and if I'd lost one treasure I'd found another.

I've noticed this funny trade off more than once in my readings where I'll have nothing but disdain for one artist and completely love another similar one who does all the things I think I dislike in his alternate. I can't stand Dickens for his plot contrivances and phony bologna characters, but I'm awe struck by the same things in Hugo.

If you do not think that Catch-22 is one of the best books of the twentieth century, allow me to offer the possibility that you undervalue comedy in your aesthetic appraisal. You routinely recommend Joyce and Borges but rarely mention Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence, Petronius, Rabelais, Farquhar, Wycherley, Etherege, Goldsmith, Swift, Gay, Congreve, Goldoni, Gozzi, Lesage, Wilmot, Marivaux, Fielding, Peacock, Wilde, Twain, or Wodehouse. Comedy has a hard time getting itself taken seriously, in the world as well as on these boards.

[Uberzensch]

thankyou everyone, this is really helpfull, I am currently on amazon buying all your suggestions, please keep them coming

First off, Wow! I wish I had enough money to do that!

Second, I think the best library is the one that you create on your own piece-by-piece. Tastes vary greatly and you may not like what others suggest. MortalTerror is right, here.

For example, my library would contain no Jane Austen, but that's just me

One more thing!

It's great to look at your old books and remember where you were when you first bought it. I actually keep the receipt in the book when I buy it. It makes a good bookmark, but more importantly, it timestamps the book. It's funny to look at a book you bought and say, "Wow, I bought this when I was doing X. I was so stupid back then!" Or something else like that.

Unless your goal is to just create a great library now, not necesarily to read, but to cover the important ground. If so, then proceed!

[stlukesguild]

...allow me to offer the possibility that you undervalue comedy in your aesthetic appraisal. You routinely recommend Joyce and Borges but rarely mention Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence, Petronius, Rabelais, Farquhar, Wycherley, Etherege, Goldsmith, Swift, Gay, Congreve, Goldoni, Gozzi, Lesage, Wilmot, Marivaux, Fielding, Peacock, Wilde, Twain, or Wodehouse. Comedy has a hard time getting itself taken seriously, in the world as well as on these boards.

I don't know that this is entirely valid. I have mentioned Wilde more than once and certainly would include Swift among the "must reads" (Haven't we already discussed A Modest Proposal?). To this I would add Sterne, Boccaccio, Marivaux, Moliere, surely Cervantes and Twain... but also Bulgakov, Landolfi, Gogol, etc... Of course my own sense of humor leans toward something darker and twisted so I would also add Kafka, Faulkner, O'Connor, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthleme, etc...

[The Comedian]

No home library should be without comics: Maus, Watchmen, Persepolis, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Understanding Comics, A Contract With God, Starman Omibus. . . just to name a few.

[sixsmith]

Let's get real. The works of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, J.M. Barrie, etc... don't come near to qualifying as essential bits of literature... books that every home library SHOULD have... in spite of how much I may actually like these writers. If you are seeking to construct a library of the central works of Western literature... specifically in the English language... then the canonical works would include ....

What it really comes down to is the reality that the works that are essential to you in your personal library are those books that you find indispensable. Personally I find such central canonical works as I listed above necessary because they continue to resonate through the whole of literature...

Good luck on your shopping spree!

Yours is an impressive list (and a motivating one) St Lukes but as you recognise, a work does not have to be canonical to be essential. Judge time may not be kind to some of the books i've mentioned but they nevertheless loom large in my library and in my reading. So it's in with Heller and out with Cervantes . I think MortalTerror has the right idea in general here.

[andave_ya]

Let's get real. The works of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, J.M. Barrie, etc... don't come near to qualifying as essential bits of literature.

whyever not?? Saint-Exupery's and Barrie's works have resounded in the hearts of children though the ages...would you actually say that disqualifies them from being considered classics? quintessential literature, even, especially to develop imaginations and to prepare them for the heavier reading you listed? Speaking as an eighteen-year-old, I can already understand how those books I read earlier in my reading experiences have strengthened my mental foundation for these works.

Furthermore, writing to both children AND adults (as Saint-Exupery undeniably does) is NOT an easy thing to do; at least, admire their artistry.

What it really comes down to is the reality that the works that are essential to you in your personal library are those books that you find indispensable. Personally I find such central canonical works as I listed above necessary because they continue to resonate through the whole of literature... beyond the fact that most of them are just damn good reading. But certainly there are any number of other books that I personally find indispensable... although they may not be truly central texts.

I find Barrie indispensible. And Dorothy L. Sayers. J.R.R. Tolkien. I mention these in particular because they're not held in very high "classical" esteem among some.