Since studying English Literature at school (up to age 18) I have held on to two recommended reading lists. I was reminded of them the other day, and I thought I would share them with you.
List One, called ‘A Crash Course in English Literature’, listed by J Neil Waddell
General:
The Book of Common Prayer: Orders for Morning and Evening Prayer
King James Bible: Genesis 1-4, Psalms 9, 19, 23, 24, 46, 90, 100, 137; Ecclesiastes 3; Song of Solomon; Isaiah 9.2-7; Gospel of Matthew; St John 1.1-14; 1 Corinthians 13; The Revelation of St John
Early:
Beowulf
The Battle of Maldon
Chaucer: General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; Knight’s, Franklin’s or Wife of Bath’s Tale
Gawain and the Green Knight
Poetry:
Shakespeare: Sonnets 1, 2, 15, 18, 29, 55, 60, 64, 71, 130
Donne: The Exstasie, A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day
Herbert: The Agonie, Life
Vaughan: The Waterfall
Milton: Lycidas, Paradise Lost books I and II
Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel
Pope: The Rape of the Lock, An Essay on Man
Gray: Elegy in a Country Churchyard
Keats: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey
Tennyson: Ulysses, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, In Memoriam
WB Yeats: Wild Swans at Coole, Easter 1916, Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium
TS Eliot: Four Quartets, The Waste Land
Drama:
Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Shakespeare: Love’s Labours Lost, Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest
Tourneur: The Revenger’s Tragedy
Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Congreve: Love for Love
Wycherley: The Country Wife
Sheridan: School for Scandal, The Rivals
Ibsen: Ghosts, The Doll’s House
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard
Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Osborne: Look Back in Anger
Pinter: The Birthday Party, The Caretaker
Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Novels:
Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Fielding: Joseph Andrews
Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Austen: Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Scott: Waverley
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Dickens: Great Expectations, Bleak House
Eliot: Middlemarch
James: Portrait of a Lady
Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
Forster: Howard’s End
List Two, called ‘Novels worth reading’, listed by Andrew Copping 1983
Selected classics:
Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Walter Scott: The Heart of Midlothian
Jane Austen: Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
George Eliot: Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
WM Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Bleak House
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo
James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
DH Lawrence: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
EM Forster: A Passage to India
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
George Orwell: 1984
Evelyn Waugh: Scoop, The Loved One
Post-war novels
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim
Stanley Barstow: A Kind of Loving
Malcolm Bradbury: The History Man
John Braine: Room at the Top
Joyce Cary: The Horse’s Mouth
Margaret Drabble: The Millstone
Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandrian Quartet, Justine
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Collector
Robert Graves: I, Claudius
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory, The Comedians
William Golding: The Inheritors, The Spire
LP Hartley: The Go-between
Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Ian McEwan: In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden
Compton Mackenzie: Whisky Galore
Nancy Mitford: Pursuit of Love
Iris Murdoch: The Bell, The Sandcastle
Edna O’Brien: Girl with Green Eyes
Alan Paton: Cry, The Beloved Country
Tom Sharpe: Wilt
Nevil Shute: On the Beach
CP Snow: The New Men
Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Davie Storey: This Sporting Life
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings
Charles Webb: The Graduate
Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot
The American Novel
James Baldwin: Go Tell it on the Mountain
Saul Bellow: Hertzog
Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye
JP Donleavy: The Ginger Man
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Dashiell Hammett: The Thin Man
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady
Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt
Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead
Bernard Malamud: The Assistant
Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd
JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
Mark Twain: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Nathaniel West: The Cool Million
I’ve read perhaps 20% of these! A lifetime’s task.