perfidy

With Cliff from Oldsmoblogger, *'d entries are started, not finished.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
*Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
*Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
*Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
*Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
*Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcÃ-a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
*Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Apparently I've been busy. But not busy enough.

J,
See, I found it more snoo-tay to exclude partials.

And Santa's gonna bring you a copy of "All Quiet...." next Festivus.

Ah, see I take it the other way. That is, "Yes, I started Heart of Darkness, and someday may finish it, too!"

BTW do I get extra points for reading Don Quixote in the original Spanish?

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey part of it in Greek no less!
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcÃ-a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved Freakin' hated it. I loved Song of Solomon much better
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

feh! A poor 39. I gotta get a library card.

Maps,
39 is great! I'm obviously the slackdick around here with my 20-odd.

John, I'll give you "Don Q" en espanol, for some early chapters of "All Quiet..." and the first few pages of "Metamorphosis" auf Deutsch.

you know, I actually did it. I bit the bullet, asked my roommate where the nearest library was and got myself a card yesterday. As you can imagine, I took out three books with my new Amazon tree-frog emblazoned card. [Hop into Books!] None of them, however, appear on the list.

I'm waiting for Mr. Big Brained Buckethead to pipe up. I know he reads a lot, but I get the impression sometimes that it's all about spaceships and moldy histories. *ha*

I hate to sound the anti-canon call, but this list sucks. Actually, I have read 47 af the books at 54 of the authors. But this list reads like British Victorian favorites rather than what a well-rounded person should read. There are only three books (by Silko, Ford, and Wright) that I regret not yet having read. I don't think that I have lost anything because I did not read Thackery, but I gained more by reading Exodus and Esther from the Tanach and John from the Christian Bible, Tacitus, Roland, Stendhal, Zola, Hamsun, Kant, and Habermas. That I have read only 24 of the Noble Prize winners in literature is more depressing to me (although I will read Gao Xingjian soon).

I do think this list comprises a lot of the Classic Western Canon of Literature, however, I think there's some good non-canon stuff on there too.

Cultural Literacy is very important. I know a lot of ppl think that ED Hirsch's hypothysis is crap (To be a better participant in a democracy, you must be literate in that democracy's cultural references and allusions), but I think it's a pretty good basis to start an education. There is nothing wrong with reading the traditional canon of literature. The only problem is if you stop there and don't read anything else, or you choose to read crap, i.e. the odious genre known as 'ChickLit'.

Everyone everywhere will disagree on what the definitive list is. The only thing to remember is to keep reading.

Okay, here's my list:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcÃ-a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I've been working my way through Harold Bloom's list from the Western Canon - chronologically. Well, not all of them, but I have been reading a good bit, and most of it isn't on that list. I've read nearly all of Shakespeare, so I got screwed that only four of his plays are on the list. No science fiction, so screwed again there too.

I do read a lot of space stuff and moldy history. Gibbon's decline and fall should be on the list.

Oh well. What was my count? 38. Not too shabby, but I've always felt that my reading in the classics was too thin.

Yeah, I'm totally getting my hole smoked on the count. But as B points out, there's no sci fi or moldy stuff, nor mention of other junk read, so I don't feel bad about it.

Did anyone else notice that everyone who's posted has read "Beowulf"? Huh. I suspect the Ministry was rooting for Grendel...

Smarmy Dickheads read P. J. O'Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson. Well, at least this one does because that's a canon I get get behind. Let's get real here ... Dostoyevsky is soooooo dull and tedious. And so is Tolstoy and Melville and Dickens and Emerson ... you get the idea. Where's the stuff that I WANT to read, not be made to somehow feel dumb because I haven't?

Shakespeare IS the English language and thus is Darn Good Stuff. Beowulf is fun in that viking sort of way. Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain and Flannery O'Connor and Kurt Vonnegut are wickedly funny. But "Catcher in the Rye?" Just about anything else J.D. Salinger wrote is better. Even the "Stay the Fuck Away" sign he hung on his mailbox. Am I the only one who thinks "A Farewell to Arms" was really, really, really bad Hemingway? Grab me a freaking hankie already.

Where's Heinlein and Asimov*? Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood"? Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"?

[* shameless sop to Buckethead]

Okay GP, I'll play.

I loved "A Farewell to Arms." I tend to think Hemingway is overrated in general, but AFTA is no worse than "The Sun Also Rises." Though a true weeper, there's some moments of true genius in there, like the soldier who keeps trying to kick himself in the nuts so he'll be sent back away from the front.

I think NDR has nailed it as a white-man canon with a few sops to feminism on there ("The Woman Warrior," good as it is, doesn't belong on the same list as Pynchon or Proust). Why don't we try to come up with our own canon.

Here's some of my nominations.

HST: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Miller: The Canticle of Leibowitz
O'Rourke: Parliament of Whores
Stephenson: Cryptonomicon
Bester: The Stars My Destination
Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Toole: Confederacy of Dunces
Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
Bukowski: Run With The Hunted
Burroughs: Naked Lunch
Hammett: The Maltese Falcon

GP, I agree that Tolstoy can be dull, but it's merely a different kind of reading that you have to learn how to do-- much the same as learning how to read a technical manual, a 10-K, or code. I love a nice big thick complicated novel once in a while as a break from the more straightforward narratives I read. They start out feeling like heavy lifting, and they never are as easy going as, say, David Brin, but once I've gotten used to slowing down, writing endleaf notes as to who's who, and savoring the language and symbolic world, it's pretty great. Kind of like relearning how to listen to classical music when I've been grooving on funk for a few months.

Johno,

How about the Foundation stories. I can think of no better collection that deals with the intellectual in society in the modern era.

Okay, I'll play the 'What's wrong with this list' game now.

1) Bronte Sisters - utter crap. Victorian pulp ficition. Has a place perhaps in history, but if I wanted a fucking soap opera, I'd stay home sick from work one day and watch All My Children et al. Cry me a fucking river.

2) Why does this list have some of my favorite writers, but not the books I like the best? I'm telling you, Beloved was CRAP. But Song of Solomon was better. Morrison may have won the Puke-litzer for Beloved, but SoS is SO MUCH better.

Or what about Faulkner and The Hamlet trilogy? Or 1984 *and* Animal Farm? (I see AF is on there, why can't you have 2 Orwell?) Or Ulysses? (Not that I've read Ulysses... I tried once and gave up!)

3) This is going to be really, really, really nitpicky, but I had a long discussion about this on another list about ancient cults... I think they should have named specific translations of Homer. It makes a difference. The only two Odyssey translations worth reading are Lattimore and Fitzgerald. Don't go near any of the others. And if you're going read a long Greek epic, you're going to have to read Vergil's Aeneid in comparison. Just doing a comparison of the first 20 lines of each poem is an entire essay's worth of discussion.

4) Why so heavy on the Russian Lit? If so, why isn't Nabakov on there?

5) Who are Chopin and Ford? I've never seen those names before on any list.

6) I agree with NDR, this list needs some more philosophy, like Sun Tzu, Confucius, Nietzche, Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, The Federalist Papers, etc. Then again, where are the great poets? Langston Hughes, Whitman, Coleridge, etc?

7) If you're going to hit the ancients, where's Ovid, Caesar, Aristophanes? All worth reading.

8) WHERE IS MILTON? Geez, even my mom read Paradise Lost when studying English in Korea. Something is seriously wrong with this list... That's what's been nagging me this whole time. Milton has been overlooked!

I can get behind this.

Hemmingway IS overrated: "The man slept. He was tired. He woke up humgover. His bunkmate was dead." If it rhymed, it would be a grim Doctor Seuess.

We don't need to create a best of sci-fi list, cuz you guys took care of that awhile back. But yes, any list of "must-have-read" BETTER have Clarke, Asimov, and Dick to say the least.

Yes, 1984 needs to be on it too.

Would non-fiction be on there? NDR and Maps want philosphy- what about other non-fiction, Keegan's "The Face of Battle" for starters?

Map Girl,

I think you hit the head of the nail on one of the major problems with this list. There are few authors and books that cannot be replaced by another, and an overrepresentation of certain authors and genres. A good Austen book will say as much as the Brontë sisters and Chopin combined. With respect to Orwell, I would say his fiction side and his essayist side should be represented: perhaps 1984 and Wiggan Pier.

Johno,

There need to be more "Bohemian-types": I would suggest Hamsun's Hunger and the poems of Rimbaud. No much of a fan of Bukowski, other than being from LA, but I always wanted to compose a symphony called Bukowski's Fifth.

Geek,

Yes, non-fiction in general should work. I think that it works best for essays and criticisms. I have not read Faces of War, and it would seem a bit young to be chosen. I would offer Weber's Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic and Braudel's The Mediterranean as examples. I am no fan of Weber, and I feel that the Protestant ethic is bunk, but I gotta give him his props.

Geek

... what about Clausewitz On War?

NDR,
Braudel's a great idea. If we want to get really moldy, we can throw in Mommsen (the elder), say. And why not Clausewitz, although we needn't limit ourselves to martial topics of course.

You know, something else struck me, going back to fiction for a second, but why can't "The Hobbit" be a must-read work? Shit, everybody's read it, and it's alot more digestible than LOTR.

NDR - what about Vico and Spengler and Toynbee? And get to work on the symphony!

Mapgirl, IIRC, the Brontes were pre Victorian. I agree with you wholeheartedly on the Beloved. I never read it, but know more about it than I ever would have wished. Long story.

Johno, your list is a good start, but you completely and unforgiveably forgot Chandler.

And yes, I think we were all rooting for Grendel, or at least Grendel's mom.

Buckethead,

Spengler works--degeneration is a good topic. I am not familiar with Toynbee.

And I tried to compose something with that title. At the time I was too tied to the musical vocabulary of Philip Glass. What I wrote sounded like, well, second-rate Philip Glass. On top of that I used a sequencer (my keyboard skills suck) and every note sounded at full volume. No nuances. Project abandoned.