read more classics and poetry

More books and poems that I want to read! (in date order, more or less)

Ancient:
Metamorphoses (Ovid)
*Thousand and One Nights

14th century:

16th century:
*King Lear, Othello (Shakespeare)
*Sonnets (Shakespeare)

17th century:

18th century:
*The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Sterne)

19th century:
*Middlemarch (Eliot)
*Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
*Jude the Obscure (Hardy)
*The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)
*Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Grimm Brothers)
*Leaves of Grass (Whitman)
*Tess of the D’Ubervilles (Hardy)
*Odes (Keats)
*The Woman in White (Collins)
*Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy)
*Germinal (Zola)
*Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)

1800-1850:

1851-1900:

1901-1910:
*The Wind in the Willows (Graham)
*Kim (Kipling)
*Lord Jim (Conrad)

1910-1920:
*Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)

1920’s:
*The Waste Land (Eliot)
*Secret Adversary (Christie)
*The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
*The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)

1930’s:
*Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
*Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons)

1940’s:
*The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers)
*The Little Prince (de Saint-Exupery)
*Invisible Man (Ellison)
*Native Son (Wright)

1950’s:
*Lolita (Nabokov)
*On the Road (Kerouac)
*A Town like Alice (Shute)

1960’s:
*The Golden Notebook (Lessing)
*A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
*Quotations from Chairman Mao (Zedong)
*Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys)
*Dune (Herbert)
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey)

1970’s:
*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
*The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles)
*A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)

1980’s:
*Midnight’s Children (Rushdie)
*A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving)
*The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood)
*The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
*Beloved (Morrison)

1990’s:
*Birdsong (Faulkes)
*A Suitable Boy (Seth)
*The Secret History (Tartt)
*Possession (Byatt)
*A Fine Balance (Mistry)

2000-2010:
*A Thousand Splendid Suns (Hosseini)
*The Kite Runner (Hosseini)
*Atonement (McEwan)
*A Shadow of the Wind (Zafon)
*Notes from a Small Island (Bryson)
*Cloud Atlas (Mitchell)
*The Five People You Meet in Heaven (Albom)

Democracy in America (de Tocqueville)
*Leviathan (Hobbes)
*Light in August (Faulkner)
*The Souls of Black Folk (du Bois)
*Song of Solomon (Morrison)
*In Cold Blood (Capote)
*The Big Sleep (Chandler)
*As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
*I, Claudius (Graves)
*All the King’s Men (Warren)
*Go Tell it on the Mountain (Baldwin)
*Rabbit, Run (Updike)
*The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
*Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth)
*An American Tragedy (Dreiser)
*The Day of the Locust (West)
*Tropic of Capricon (Miller)
*Tropic of Cancer (Miller)
*The Maltese Falcon (Hammett)
*Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather)
*The Education of Henry Adams (Adams)
*The Varities of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature (James)
*Brideshead Revisisted (Waugh)
*Silent Spring (Carson)
*The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes)
*Goodbye to All That (Graves)
*The Affluent Society (Galbraith)
*The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley and Malcolm X)
*The Second World War (Churchill)
*The Big Sleep (Chandler)
*Invisible Man (Wells)
*King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Mallory)
*The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper)
*Peter Pan (Barrie)
*Phantom of the Opera (le Roux)
*The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
*Silas Marner (Eliot)
*Time Machine (Wells)
*Treasure Island (Stevenson)
*War of the Worlds (Wells)
*Songs of Innocence and Experience (Blake)
*Collected Poems (Yeats)
*Collected Poems (Hughes)
*The Portrait of a Lady (James)
*Sword of Honour trilogy (Waugh)
*The Ballad of Peckham Rye (Spark)
*The Human Stain (Roth)
*Les Liaisons Dangereuses (de Laclos)
*Alexander trilogy (Renault)
*Master and Commander (O’Brian)
*Dr Zhivago (Pasternak)
*The Plantagenet Saga (Plaidy)
*Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (le Carre)
*Red Dragon (Harris)
*Murder on the Orient Express (Christie)
*The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe)
*Killshot (Leonard)
*On War (Clausewitz)
*A History of the Crusades (Runciman)
*Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence)
*The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
*A People’s Tragedy (Figes)
*Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Schama)
*The Origins of the Second World War (Taylor)
*Confessions (St Augustine)
*Lives of the Caesars (Suetonius)
*Lives of the Artists (Vasari)
*If This is a Man (Levi)
*The Trial (Kafka)
*The Complete Essays (de Montaigne)
*City of God (St Augustine)
*Utopia (More)
*Medea (Euripides)
*The Way of the World (Congreve)
*Odes (Horace)
*The Complete Poems (Coleridge)
*Being and Time (Heidegger)
*Being and Nothingness (Sartre)
*Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon)
*Under the Volcano (Lowry)
*The Stranger (Camus)
*Native Son (Wright)
*Perfume (Suskind)
*Pale Fire (Nabokov)
*Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
*Light in August (Faulkner)
*Darkness at Noon (Koestler)
*The Way of All Flesh (Butler)
*Henderson the Rain King (Bellow)
*Appointment in Samarra (O’Hara)
*The Wings of the Dove (James)
*Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald)
*The Good Soldier (Ford)
*The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
*Of Human Bondage (Maugham)
*A High Wind in Jamaica (Hughes)
*A House for Mr Biswas (Naipaul)
*The Day of the Locust (West)
*The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Spark)
*A Room with a View (Forster)
*A Bend in the River (Naipaul)
*The Call of the Wild (London)
*The Sheltering Sky (Bowles)
*The Call of the Wild (London)
*The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Morris)
*The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
*Blood Meridian (McCarthy)
*Steppenwolf (Hesse)
*Leviathan (Hobbes)
*Beyond Good and Evil (Nietszche)
*Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco)
*All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarqe)
*The Strenuous Life (Roosevelt)
*Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)
*The Long Goodbye (Marlowe)
*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
*Self Reliance (Emerson)
*Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston)

Wow…. this will probably take several years to work through.. !!

Read in July:

• The God of Small Things (Roy)
• Hamlet (Shakespeare)
• The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd)
• Life of Pi (Martel)
• The Tenderness of Wolves (Penney)
• The Waves (Woolf)
• Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
• Mr Toppit (Elton)
• Memoirs of a Geisha (Golden)

A week or so ago I memorised Goethe’s ‘Gefunden’, a poem about his wife. He uses metaphor, comparing her to a flower he found in the forest. Instead of picking the flower, he digs it up ‘mit allen den Wurzeln’ and plants it in his garden where it happily blossoms.

It’s the only poem of Goethe’s that I’ve read so far, and I have found it going round my head at odd moments when I least expect it.

I also learned ‘Sehnsucht’ by Schiller.

Recently I have been reading poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet. I particularly like ‘Before going to sleep’.

Some ideas:

• War and Peace by Tolstoy (and finish Anna Karenina)
• Norse sagas
• Beowulf
• Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat
• Matsuo Basho’s haikus
• William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets
• Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Cressyde
• Alighieri Dante’s The Divine Comedy
• Tu Fu and Li Po’s Tang poetry
• Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles’ plays
• Sappho
• Homer’s The Iliad, and The Odyssey
• Milton’s Paradise Lost