This book appeared on my Amazon queue after I bought Adler’s How to Read a Book. It then came on my Youtube feed after a while. Then it surfaced at random sites as a must-read book. So I finally bought a copy to read. I think the better title for the book could have been ‘What to Read and Why’. His suggestions of short stories, poems and novels are amazing. One feels like going out and buying those books to read. Here are the recommendations.
Short Stories
- Ivan Turgenev
- ”Bezhin Lea"
- "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands.”
- Anton Chekhov
- ”The Kiss"
- "The Student"
- "The Lady with the Dog”
- Guy de Maupassant
- ”Madame Tellier’s Establishment"
- "The Horla”
- Ernest Hemingway
- ”Hill Like White Elephants"
- "God Rest You Merry, Gentleman"
- "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
- "A Sea Change”
- Flannery O’Connor
- ”A Good Man is Hard to Find"
- "Good Country People"
- "A View of the Woods”
- Vladimir Nabokov’s
- ”The Vane Sisters”
- Jorge Luis Borges
- ”Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius”
- Tommaso Landolfi
- ”Gogol’s Wife”
- Italo Calvino
- ”Invisible Cities”
Poems
- A. E. Housman
- ”Into My Heart an Air That Kills”
- William Blake
- ”The Sick Rose”
- Walter Savage Landor
- ”On His Seventy-fifth Birthday”
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- ”The Eagle"
- "Ulysses
- Robert Browning
- ”Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
- Walt Whitman
- ”Song of Myself”
- Emily Dickinson
- ”Poem 1260 - Because That You Are Going”
- Emily Bronte
- ”Stanzas: Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning”
- Popular Ballads
- ”Sir Patrick Spence"
- "The Unquiet Grave”
- Anonymous
- ”Tom O’Bedlam”
- William Shakespeare
- ”Sonnet 121 - Tis Better to Be Vil Than Vile Esteemed"
- "Sonnet 129 - The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame"
- "Sonnet 144 - Two Loves I have, of Comfort and Despair”
- John Milton
- ”Paradise Lost”
- William Wordsworth
- ”A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"
- "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- ”The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- ”The Triumph of Life”
- John Keats
- ”La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
I’ve read many of the poems and many of poets have poems in my list of Favorite Poems.
Novels - Part I
- Miguel de Cervantes “Don Quixote”
- Stendhal “The Charterhouse of Parma”
- Jane Austen “Emma”
- Charles Dickens “Dickens - Great Expectations”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky “Crime and Punishment”
- Henry James “The Portrait of a Lady”
- Marcel Proust “In Search of Lost Time”
- Thomas Mann “The Magic Mountain”
Plays
- Shakespeare “Hamlet”
- Henrik Ibsen “Hedda Gabler”
- Oscar Wilde “The Importance of Being Earnest”
Novels - Part II
- Herman Melville “Moby Dick”
- William Faulkner “As I Lay Dying”
- Nathanael West “Miss Lonelyhearts”
- Thomas Pynchon “The Crying of Lot 49”
- Cormac McCarthy “Blood Meridian”
- Ralph Ellison “Invisible Man”
- Toni Morrison “Song of Solomon”