Ok, here's a first cut at a list of the western canon to read. A maximum of one book or set per author, and about a 2½ year supply at one a fortnight.
- Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
- Aeschylus: The Oresteia†
- Hans Christian Anderson: Fairy Tales and Stories
- Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
- Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron
- Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fiction
- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
- Albert Camus: The Stranger
- Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
- Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
- Anton Chekhov: Collected Short Stories
- Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
- Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy†
- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
- Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
- Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
- William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
- Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
- E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust
- Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls
William Golding: Lord of the Flies‡- Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
- Joseph Heller: Catch-22
- Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
- Homer: The Odyssey
- Victor Hugo: Les Misérables
- Aldous Huxley: Brave New World‡
- Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
- James Joyce: Ulysses
- Franz Kafka: The Trial
- Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird‡
- Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Herman Melville: Moby Dick
- John Milton: Paradise Lost
- Toni Morrison: Beloved
- Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
- One Thousand and One Nights
- George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty Four‡
- Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination‡
- Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time†
- Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel†
- Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
- J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
- William Shakespeare: Hamlet‡
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
- Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
- Sophocles: The Thebian Trilogy†
- John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
- Stendhal: The Red and the Black
- Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
- William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
- Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
- Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
- Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Virgil: The Aeneid
- Voltaire: Candide
- Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
- Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
† These are multi-volume sets, each volume counts as a book in the 52 books challenge.
‡ I've read these before, but not this millennium, so they count for the challenge.
The single book that is crossed out I was forced to read at school, and I refuse to pollute my bookshelves with it again. Once in a lifetime is one too many readings for that piece of tripe.
The following books were bumped from the list due to the one book per author rule:
- Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment‡
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Idiot
- William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
- William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
- Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
- Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
- Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
- Homer: The Iliad
- James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Franz Kafka: Collected Stories
- Franz Kafka: The Castle
- Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
- Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks
- Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
- George Orwell: Animal Farm‡
- Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
- Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
Technically Crime and Punishment should be on the first list, and The Brothers Karamazov on this list, however I’ve read C&P and TBK was only one place below on my source list. I think it made sense to bend the rules slightly here.
The following books were bumped from the lists because I've read them this millennium:
- Jane Austen: Emma
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
- Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
This list was generated by pulling the top 90 or so entries from The Greatest Books, which is a meta-list of lists of the greatest western literature. This was essentially a way of consulting a large number of experts as to what was canon, my idea being that any book that made it into the top 100 of the meta-list (of just shy of 2000 books appearing on at least one of their source lists) has to be on most people’s list of great literature.
See later: The Best Laid Plans… The Lifeline Book Sale.
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