Basically just the title. I had a sudden urge to become well read, therefore I’ve been compiling a list of classic literature I want to read. What I most want to read is the essential American/European literature (Moby-Dick, Old man and the sea, war and peace) but I didn’t want to limit my scope so I took basically any recommendation I was given. I would love some more recommendations, along the lines of classic literature or the kind of thing an English major would read. Also if anyone has feedback on the current list I would be more than happy to hear it.
Current list (I had it in a google doc but I cant post the link)
Premodern
The Saga of the Volsungs (Penguin Classics) – Jesse L. Byock (Author, Translator), Anonymous (Author)
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (Penguin Classics) – Anonymous (Author), Jesse L. Byock (Editor, Translator, Introduction)
Egil’s Saga (Penguin Classics) – Anonymous (Author), Bernard Scudder (Translator), Svanhildur Oskarsdottir (Introduction)
The Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous (Author), N. K. Sandars (Translator)
The Aeneid (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) – Virgil (Author), Robert Fagles (Translator), Bernard Knox (Introduction)
The Odyssey – Homer
The Iliad – Homer
The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore – Snorri Sturluson
Beowulf – Translated by David Wright
Tales from 1,001 Nights – Translated by Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons
African Myths of Origin – Stephen Belcher
The Secret History of the Mongols – Christopher P. Atwood
The Divine Comedy Inferno – Dante
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Travels – Marco Polo
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Analects – Confucius
The Pillow Book – Sei Shonagon
The Bhagavad Gita – Anonymous
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
Tao Te Ching – Laozi
Medea – Euripides
The Mahabharata – Vyasa
The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
Modern
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
The Ring of the Nibelung – Richard Wagner
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Oliver Twist – Dickens
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense – Lewis Carroll
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
The Jungle Books – Rudyard Kipling
Love and Freindship – Jane Austen
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Waiting for Godot – Beckett
The Souls of Black Folk – Du Bois
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
William Shakespeare Complete Works Second Edition – Shakespeare
The Crucible – Arthur Miller
Utopia – Thomas More
Not Without Laughter – Langston Hughes
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories – Leo Tolstoy
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Twelve Angry Men – Reginald Rose
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Castle – Franz Kafka
Metamorphosis and Other Stories – Kafka
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave – Frederick Douglass
Twelve Years a Slave – Solomon Northup
America Is in the Heart – Carlos Bulosan
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
The Song of Roland – Anonymous
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Invisible Man – H G Wells
White Nights – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
The Time Machine – H G Wells
The Outsider – Camus
The Fall – Camus
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom The Bell Tolls – Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms – Hemingway
The Old Man and The Sea – Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Complete Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
The Trial – Kafka
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Republic – Plato
Plato: Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo – Plato
Aristotle’s Ethics – Aristotle
The Myth of Sisyphus – Camus
Being and Nothingness – Sartre
Critique of Pure Reason – Kant
Beyond Good and Evil – Nietzche
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
Faust – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Honoré de Balzac – Pere Goriot
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
2001: a Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
by Shaedaxx