THE LIST

This is the beginning of an impossible, anxiety-inducing, ambitious, exciting list, namely "All the Books Any One Aspiring to Enlightenment Must Read." I will start adding them randomly and in alphabetical particular order.

Most of these works are immediately recognizable as belonging on a "Best of" list, though some you may not have heard of before. However, I can almost guarantee that you will not regret reading any single title on this list!

• Adams, Richard, Watership Down
• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
• C.J.L. Almqvist, Drottningens Juvelsmycke (The Queen's Jewels)
• Anonymous, Arabian Nights (aka One Thousand and One Night)
• Anonymous, Beowulf
• Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Anonymous, Everyman
• Anonymous, The Poetic Edda
• Aristotle, The Poetics
• Austen, Jane, Emma; Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Persuasion (Actually, read all Austen novels).
• Balzac, Honoree, Le Pere Goriot
• Blixen, Karen [Isak Dinesen], Out of Africa
• Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron
• Blake, William, Songs of Innocense and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Visions of the Daughters of Albion
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Bremer, Fredrika, En Dagbok [A Diary]; Hertha, or, The Story of a Soul
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
• Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book
• Byron, George Gordon, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan;Manfred;Marino Falieri
• Camus, Albert, The Plague
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
• Coleridge, S.T., The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner; Christabel
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Defoe, Daniel, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House; Great Expectations (Actually, read all Dickens)
• Dostoyevski, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment
• Euripides, Medea
• Fielding, Henry, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling.
• Fitzgerald, Scott, The Great Gatsby
• Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Far from the Madding Crowd
• Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises; The Old Man and the Sea
• Goethe, Wolfgang von, Faust. A Tragedy; The Sorrows of Young Werther
• Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey
• James, Henry, What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove

• John Keats, Lamia; "Isabella, Or, The Pot of Basil" (Read all Keats)
• Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings Saga [The Saga of Gösta Berling], Herr Arnes penningar [Mr. Arne's Money]
• LeClezio, J.M.G., Wandering Star
• Matthew "Monk" Lewis, The Monk
• Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed
• Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita
• Mario Praz, Romantic Agony
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
• Philip Roth, Everyman
• Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children; The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Satanic Verses
• Rydberg, Victor, Singoalla
• Shakespeare, William, Othello; King Lear; Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet (oh h---, ALL of it should be read!)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or, The New Prometheus, The Last Man, Castruccio Castracani
• Percy B. Shelley, The Cenci. A Tragedy in Five Acts, A Defence of Poetry
• Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath
• Stendhal [Henri Beyle], The Red and the Black
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• Strindberg, August, The Red Room; Fröken Julie [Miss Julie], Hemsöborna [ Natives of Hemsö]
• W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina
• Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
• Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome
• Whitman, Walt, The Leaves of Grass
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray; A Woman of No Importance; Lady Windermere's Fan; An Ideal Husband
• Zola, Emile, Nana

Want to get started on your list? Find out more about my teaching at the individual course pages.

The List was last updated on January 22, 2009 .