Literary Books Suggestions

[Cooper]

Since I want to go into English teaching, I'm working some extra hours so I can get some classic books, or books regularly taught in English class. I found a store called ThriftBooks, so I can get tons of books fairly cheap, though I'm going elsewhere for Lovecraft and Lolita, as I wasn't able to find a full collection or just the plain book respectively.

These are on my list, so you can get an idea of what I'm looking for/like:

Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (read part)
The Art of War
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (have read)
The Giver (have read)
Flowers for Algernon
Fahrenheit 451
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Butterfly Revolution
And Lord of the Flies
Crime and Punishment
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
The Things They Carried (read)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (read the first one, not the second)
The Aeneid
A Tale of Two Cities (read some) and Great Expectations
A Modest Proposal and Other Satires (read Modest Proposal)
A Clockwork Orange (read)
Wuthering Heights (read part)
The Vagina Monologues
The Secret Life of Bees
The Phantom of the Opera
The Inferno
I, Robot
Frankenstein
And Then there were None
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Five People You Meet In Heaven (read)
To Kill a Mockingbird (read)

I'm also reluctantly getting Rand's books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged because there are tons of scholarships if you write essays on her stuff.

[AnaKhouri]

If you end up liking Dickens, Bleak House is my favorite of his.

I always liked Jane Eyre myself (the best movie adaptation is with Orson Welles, IMO).

Mary Renault's The King Must Die and the Alexandriad: Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games.

Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass.

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and a devastating short story called The Lagoon.

The short stories of Saki and MR James.

Jack London (The Sea Wolf is my favorite).

The Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Peter Matthiesen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord.

Shusaku Endo: Silence, The Samurai and The Sea and Poison.

Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House.

And Dumas. Good God, how I adore Dumas. Definitely read The Count of Monte Cristo if nothing else by him.

And of course Brave New World, Shakespeare, The Crucible, Metamosphosis etc but I assume you read those in high school.

(sorry for the mega-list, you have hit upon my favorite subject: BOOKS )

[Cooper]

I think I have Jane Eyre. My grandma gave me a small collection of books there.

As for Heart of Darkness, I've studied it before, and I own it. (I don't like it all that much, but I'll have to re-read it.)

Brave New World and the Crucible I've read, and I've tried to keep the ones I read but was 'meh' about off of the list for now.

As for Shakespeare, I have a wonderful collection of his. I have the two volumes of his plays and poems, sorted chronologically and annotated. It was a required textbook for class, so I got it subsidized as well.

[csquared]

Something to look into... A lot of the classics (i.e. expired copyrights) are available for free as downloads from Amazon.

[Cooper]

Yes, but I'll want physical copies. I've used e-readers before, and I get a lot more out of it if I have a physical book.

[Deserted]

God's Debris by Scott Adams (writer of Dilbert).

Dante's Divine Comedy.

The Earth's Children series by Jean M. Auel.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

The Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs (creator of Tarzan).

Anything by Robert A. Heinlein, but especially The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Stranger In A Strange Land.

Frank Herbert's Dune series.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.

C. S. Lewis' Space trilogy.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

Anything by Edgar Allen Poe.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.

E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The Book of Ptath (alternately titled Two Hundred Million A.D.) by A. E. van Vogt.

And what list would be complete without J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

[Kheldarson]

Add Gaiman's recent work Ocean at the End of the Lane. Brilliant piece.

[Barracuda]

A Canticle For Leibowitz is another good, classic science fiction read. The Great Divorce by CS Lewis is good as well. In English, I also read some Orwell--Animal Farm and 1984 are both good reads and thought provoking as well, along the lines of Fahrenheit 451. Les Miserables is good, as well as classic Jules Vern or H.G. Wells (The Time Machine and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea are both good reads.) The Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke is also worth reading.

[fireheart]

Not so much a "classic" per se, but I would strongly recommend The Green Mile by Stephen King. We ended up using it in my Year 11 English class for an analytical piece...so we would examine the plot, the characters, the symbolism and the meaning behind the story.

I also agree with using Animal Farm and 1984.

[BroSCFischer]

And Dumas. Good God, how I adore Dumas. Definitely read The Count of Monte Cristo if nothing else by him.

... Shakespeare...

Yeah, I would like to second this, and add (if they haven't already been):

Mark Twain (Anything/Everything)
Sir A.C. Doyle (Holmes stories and novels, and The White Company at least)
E. A. Poe (Anything/Everything)
Oscar Wilde (at least The Picture of Dorian Grey)
Edmond Rostand (Cyrano de Bergerac)
Rudyard Kipling (Anything/Everything)
R. L. Stevenson (Anything/Everything)
H. G. Wells (Anything/Everything)

That's all for now,

SF

[Cooper]

I can't believe I forgot The Divine Comedy and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

As for Stephen King, I think Misery is a literary masterpiece. It's literally the best-written book I've ever read. His later work? More debatable. So I do want to get more of his early stuff.

I do want a book from H. G. Wells. Not sure which, yet.

As for Edgar Allen Poe and Doyle, I've got full collections of Poe's work, and Sherlock Holmes.

And I have one of Mark Twain's books: Tom Sawyer. I had the love beat out of me of Huck Finn though.

As for Metamorphosis, no, I didn't study that in class. But it's too weird to pass up.

[Deserted]

As for Metamorphosis, no, I didn't study that in class. But it's too weird to pass up.

You might have to get that one in a "collected edition"; I've never found it by itself. Another good story by Kafka (probably his best-known short story) is In the Penal Colony.

I forgot to mention Alice In Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and Peter and Wendy (a.k.a. Peter Pan).

[42_42_42]

Ok, in no logical order, I recommend (for authors where I've listed more than 1 work, I've bolded the 1 I think it most important you read):

A.S. Byatt: Possession, Angles & Insects, A Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, A Whistling Woman, The Game, The Elementals

Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist

Vanessa Diffenbaugh: The Language of Flowers

Truman Capote: In Cold Blood, A Christmas Memory

J.G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun

James Clavell: Shogun

James A. Michener: Centennial, Hawaii, The Drifters

Ian McEwan: Atonement, The Cement Garden

John Gardner: Grendel

Juan Gabriel Vasquez: The Sound of Things Falling

Barbara Kingsolver: Prodigal Summer, The Poisonwood Bible

Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front

J.K. Rowling: The Casual Vacancy

Ernest J. Gaines: A Lesson Before Dying

Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club

Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies

Jodi Picoult: The Storyteller

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go

The Ramayana (Indian Epic Poem)

Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

Jane Austen: Emma, Persuasion, Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Sense & Sensibility

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Return of the Native

Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby

George Gissing: The Odd Women

Ovid: Metamorphoses

Euripides: Medea

Aristophanes: Lysistrata

Cicero: The Republic and The Laws

The Lais of Marie de France

Sappho: Sappho

Seneca: Dialogues and Essays

Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe (Norton Critical Editions Lynn Staley ed.)

Mary Wollstencraft Shelley: Frankenstein

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, any of his short stories

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent

S. E. Hinton: The Outsiders

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Arthur Miller: The Crucible, Death of a Salesman

George Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984

Homer: The Illiad, The Odyssey

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale, The Penelopiad, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Captive

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance (both of these are far better, IMHO than The Scarlet Letter, which is the book everyone is made to read)

Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Lorraine Hansbury: A Raisin in the Sun

Albert Camus: The Stranger

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises,The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, Death in the Afternoon, To Have and to Have Not, any of his short stories

Toni Morriston: The Bluest Eye

William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go Down Moses

Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer

Herman Hesse: Siddhartha

Joseph Heller: Catch-22

Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Sophocles's Oedipus Cycle

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre, Villette

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera

Chaucer: Canterbury Tales and Troilus & Criseyde

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

Beowulf

The Nibelungenlied

Dante's Divine Comedy

Writings of Julian of Norwich

Poems/Songs by Hildegard von Bingen

The Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim

The Elder Edda (poetry edda) principally, the Volsunga Saga

The Venerable Bede: Ecclesiastical History of England, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles

William Langland: Piers Plowman

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book, Kim, Captain's Courageous

Jack London: White Fang, The Call of the Wild

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov

Henry David Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, essays

John Knowles: A Separate Peace

C. S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Space Trilogy

Victor Hugo: Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Jack Kerouac: On the Road

James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Pearl S. Buck: The Good Earth

James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One's Own

H. G. Wells: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Shape of Things to Come

Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars, 2001 a Space Odyssey, Childhood's End

Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric, Farewell Summer

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo

Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind

Flannery O'Conner: A Good Man is Hard to Find and other short stories

Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances

Pat Frank: Alas Babylon

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw, Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew

Graham Greene: The End of the Affair

Voltaire: Candide

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda

Daniel Defoe: Robison Carusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, A Journal of the Plague Year, Roxana

Tobias Smollet: Roderick Random

Honoré de Balzac: Pere Goriot, Colonel Chabert, The Black Sheep, Cousin Bette

Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence

Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron

St. Augustine: The City of God

Thomas More: Utopia

Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South

Herman Melville: Billy Bud

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance

John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress

Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage

Sir Thomas Mallory: Le Morte d'Arthur

Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene

Aphra Behn: Oroonoko

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy

Frances Burney: Evelina

Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta

Samuel Pepys: The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Ann Radcliffe: The Italian, The Mysteries of Udolpho

C.S. Forester: Horatio Hornblower series

George Eliot: Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss

H. Rider Haggard: She, King Solomon's Mines

Jonathan Switft: The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift (Norton Critical Edition, Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins eds)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley's Secret

Samuel Richardson: Pamela

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

Samuel Johnson: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics, Donald Greene ed.)

Ben Jonson: Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques (2nd ed Norton Critical Editions, Richard L. Harp ed.)

Francis Bacon (I suggest the Major Works Oxford World's Classics)

George Bernard Shaw's Plays (Norton Critical Edition, Sandie Byrne ed)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge*: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, any of his other poems

Walter Scott: Ivanhoe

D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterly's Lover

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagarie, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer

Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House

Reginald Rose: Twelve Angry Men

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho

Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago

Joan Didion: The White Album, The Year of Magical Thnking

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince

Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, The Road, Child of God

Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Test, The Bonfire of the Vanities

William Makepeace Thackery: Vanity Fair, Barry Lyndon

Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories

Christina Rossetti's poems

William Shakespeare's entire oeuvre--most important to read are:
Hamlet
Macbeth
Rome & Juliet
Othello
King Lear
Julius Caesar
Richard III
Henry IV Parts 1 & 2
Henry V
Twelfth Night
Taming of the Shrew
Merchant of Venice
Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Tempest
Sonnets
If possible, with the plays, I recommend reading and then going to see a live performance immediately after and then reading again after having seen it. This really helps! Also, reading Shakespeare out loud helps the language make more sense.

anything by:
Edgar Allen Poe,
Franz Kafka,
Mark Twain (Huck Finn is a must),
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
William Blake*,
Alfred Lord Tennyson* (Idylls of the King is a must),
Lord Byron* (Don Juan is a must),
Alexander Pope* (The Rape of the Lock is a must),
William Wordsworth*,
John Keats*,
Robert Burns*,
Percy Bysshe Shelley*,
John Locke*,
John Donne*

* Oxford World's Classics Editions and Norton Critical Editions are good sources

Other good general sources of works are any of the general Norton Anthologies (Multiple Volumes) and any of the Riverside Anthologies

I also recommend The Art of the Personal Essay from the Classical Era to the Present by Phillip Lopate (1997)

Many of these books are not easy or exactly enjoyable to read, a lot of them I didn't like, but that doesn't make them any less important. Also, as long as this list is, it's still incomplete, but I tried to include works that spanned recorded history and didn't limit to English/American authors. Some repeats from previous posters and your own list, but tried to limit that (that is to say, this list is in addition to any works already listed).

[RayvenQ]

I can't believe I forgot The Divine Comedy and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

As for Stephen King, I think Misery is a literary masterpiece. It's literally the best-written book I've ever read. His later work? More debatable. So I do want to get more of his early stuff.

Thought of getting The Dark Tower? While it probably wouldn't be looked at in class, it is a fantastic read, plus it has references to his other works (and others of his books reference the series)

It took him approx 22 years to "finish" the series.

[BroSCFischer]

I should remind you, as you probably already realize this, there are probably going to be some books/authors you just can't read. Either their writing style doesn't appeal to you, or you find the particular book boring, or the translator/translation isn't very good.

Personal examples: I love the Count of Monte Cristo, I slogged my way though The Three Musketeer, and never finished The Man in the Iron Mask.

I can't stand anything written by Stephen Crane (though The Red Badge of Courage should probably be added to the list)

And I did not enjoy Jane Eyre at all (at least as far as I read).

Just saying, given the diversity of styles/genres there is likely to be something you aren't gonna like.

SC