As I Live and Breathe
Yes, I am still here. Still reading Augustine. Dipping into The Critical Companion of The Master and Margarita. Rereading a bit of Wodehouse here and there. Eagerly previewing my new Easton Press edition of Bocaccio’s The Decameron. And working on book lists.
This is a list for my younger sister. She asked me to tell her what to read so she would be well-read. She has read a few good books in her spare time but hasn’t had much education of the secondary sort and needs some remedial work. She reads slowly, is more interested in literature than history or philosophy, and wanted a guide for the next five or ten years. Any suggestions for emendation will be considered.
The Bible
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid’s Tale
Augustine, St. – The Confessions
Aurelius, Marcus – The Meditations
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park
Belbenoit, Rene – Dry Guillotine
Boswell, James – The Life of Samuel Johnson
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Bulgakov, Mikhail – The Master and Margarita
Byron – Don Juan
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Capote, Truman – In Cold Blood
Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey – Prologue, The Knight’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale
Chekov, Anton – “The Black Monkâ€
Chesterton, G.K. – The Man Who Was Thursday
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dahl, Roald – The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Dante, Aligheri – The Divine Comedy
Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield, Oliver Twist
Dostoevsky, Fyoder – Crime and Punishment
Doyle, Arthur Conan – Complete Sherlock Holmes
Dumas, Alexandre – The Count of Monte Cristo
Eco, Umberto – The Name of the Rose
Eliot, George – Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss
Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – This Side of Paradise
Goethe – The Sorrows of Young Werther
Golding, William – The Lord of the Flies
Grahame, Kenneth – The Wind in the Willows
Haggard, Rider – King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heaney, Seamus – Beowulf
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Henry. O. – Selected Short Stories
Homer – The Iliad, The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Joyce, James – Dubliners
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, C.S. – Till We Have Faces, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters
McCarthy, Cormac – The Road
Malory, Sir Thomas – Le Morte D’Arthur
Melville, Herman – Typee and Omoo
Milton, John – Paradise Lost
More, Sir Thomas – Utopia
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Plato – The Republic
Poe, Edgar Allen – Complete Short Stories and Poems
Radcliffe, Ann – The Mysteries of Udolpho
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Sonnets
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Spenser, Edmund – The Faerie Queene
Steinbeck, John – Of Mice and Men
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Stoker, Bram – Dracula
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels
Thoreau – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina
Twain, Mark – Huckleberry Finn, Joan of Arc
Tolkien, JRR – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
Virgil – The Aeneid
Watson, Winifred – Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Waugh, Evelyn – Brideshead Revisited, “The Man Who Loved Dickensâ€
Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Grey
Wister, Owen – The Virginian
Wodehouse, P.G. – Carry On, Jeeves
Wollenstonecraft, Mary – A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Yeats, W.B. – The Complete Poems