Love Those Book Series That Are Like

SPIRITED AWAY (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

concept sketches / final result

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We do not remember days, we remember moments.

— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

Hello! So I want to get more into literature, like the eras and classics I should read. (I like to write so I want to educate myself) Where should I start? Or maybe could u give me a list of good ones? (If this is in ur FAQ I'm so so so sorry I don't know how to access it on my phone and I don't have a computer I can get to!) thanks so much if u respond!!! :) love ur blog!

Well, first of all, thank you! And secondly: oh my, an essentials guide to all literature? Since I’m rather narrow in my interests and I haven’t studied literature in any capacity other than in high school (I’m graduating this summer), I can’t guarantee this will be as objective or thorough as it should be, but I’ll give it my best shot. 

This is going to be mostly European literature and listed chronologically era-wise (era as in historical, not literary) but probably not author-wise, the former because the education system where I live is focused on European literature and history, and the latter because I list these as they come to me.

Another thing to note is some of these are works you should know about and not absolute must-reads, as they can be very long and hard to read, but are crucial to know because they’ve been historically influential and/or have inspired countless other works.

A third note: certain… 20th century parts of this list don’t reflect my personal preferences at all. Take from that what you will.

Right then, this introduction has taken long enough… here we go.

WESTERN LITERATURE: A MASTERLIST (of sorts)

CLASSICAL

Subdivision: Greek 

my existing rec list here

Aeschylus. Oresteia.

Aristophanes. Lysistrata.

Plato. The Republic.

Subdivision: Latin

Cicero. Catiline Orations.

Julius Caesar. Commentaries on the Gallic War.

Virgil. The Aeneid.

Ovid. Metamorphoses.

Seneca the Younger. Epistles.

Apuleius. Metamorphoses (which is sometimes known as The Golden Ass).

MEDIEVAL

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy.

Petrarca. Song Book.

Boccaccio. Decameron.

Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales.

Elder Edda.

Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte d’Arthur.

Subdivision: epic poems

Beowulf.

Poem of the Cid.

The Song of the Nibelungs.

The Song of Roland.

The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.

EARLY MODERN

Subdivision: Shakespeare.

Romeo & Juliet. 

Hamlet. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Othello. 

Julius Caesar.

King Lear.

Much Ado About Nothing.

Molière. Tartuffe. || Don Juan. || The Misanthropist. 

Cervantes. Don Quixote.

Christopher Marlowe. Doctor Faustus.

John Donne. The Canonization.

John Milton. Paradise Lost.

EDIT: didyouknowflaubert suggested in addition:

François Rabelais. The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.

Michel de Montaigne. various essays.

18th CENTURY

Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe. || Moll Flanders.

Eliza Haywood. Love in Excess.

Voltaire. Candide. || Micromégas.

Rousseau. Émile.

Frances Burney. Evelina.

René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy.

19th CENTURY

Subdivision: Romanticism

my existing rec list here.

Charles Dickens. Bleak House. || A Tale of Two Cities. || Great Expectations. || Oliver Twist.

William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair.

Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre.

Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights.

Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. || Far from the Madding Crowd.

Emily Dickinson. various poetry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter.

Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. || The Prince and the Pauper.

Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment. || The Idiot.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust. || The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Victor Hugo. Les Misérables. || The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. || Emma. || Northanger Abbey.

Anton Chekhov. Three Sisters. || The Cherry Orchard. || various short stories.

Thomas Babington Macaulay. Critical and Historical Essays.

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. || Anna Karenina.

H. G. Wells. The Time Machine. || The War of the Worlds.

Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary.

Guy de Maupassant. Bel-Ami. || Mont-Oriol. || various short stories.

Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.

Bram Stoker. Dracula. 

20th CENTURY

E. M. Forster. A Room with a View.

W. B. Yeats. various poetry.

Maurice Maeterlinck. The Blue Bird.

Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis.

Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. || Mrs Dalloway.

T. S. Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

James Joyce. Ulysses.

Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby.

Ernest Hemingway. For Whom The Bell Tolls. || The Sun Also Rises.

H. P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulhu.

Erich Maria Remarque. All Quiet on the Western Front. || Arc de Triomphe.

Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited.

Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita.

John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. || East of Eden.

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit. || The Lord of the Rings.

Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca.

George Orwell. 1984. || Animal Farm.

Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind.

Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl.

Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird.

William Golding. Lord of the Flies.

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451.

Allen Ginsberg. Howl and Other Poems.

Jack Kerouac. On the Road.

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

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five.  

Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar.

Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. || Love in the Time of Cholera.

Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita.

Thomas Harris. The Red Dragon.

Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient.

Neil Gaiman. Stardust.

Bret Easton Ellis. American Psycho.

Donna Tartt. The Secret History.

Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club.

Stephen King. Carrie. || The Shining. || The Dark Tower.

Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. || The Lottery.

Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex.

Jorge Luis Borges. Book of Imaginary Beings. || various short stories.

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. Good Omens.

21st CENTURY

Haruki Murakami. Kafka on the Shore. || 1Q84.

Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games.

Neil Gaiman. American Gods.

Ian McEwan. Atonement.

Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex.

Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter.

Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner. || A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The Shadow of the Wind.

Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. || Gone Girl. 

Elizabeth Kostova. The Historian.

Cormac McCarthy. No Country for Old Men.

Richard Siken. Crush.

Mark Z. Danielewski. House of Leaves.

Donna Tartt. The Little Friend. || The Goldfinch.

Elizabeth Wein. Code Name Verity.

Warsan Shire. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth.

Catherynne M. Valente. Deathless.

Sofi Oksanen. The Purge.

This is more or less all I’ve got… for now. 

Good luck!

xx

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“It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling— that really hollowed-out feeling.”

— J.K. Rowling

Historic Black and White Pictures Restored in Color

Women Delivering Ice, 1918

Times Square, 1947

Portrait Used to Design the Penny. President Lincoln Meets General McClellan – Antietam, Maryland ca September 1862

Marilyn Monroe, 1957

Newspaper boy Ned Parfett sells copies of the evening paper bearing news of Titanic’s sinking the night before. (April 16, 1912)

Easter Eggs for Hitler, c 1944-1945 

Sergeant George Camblair practicing with a gas mask in a smokescreen – Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 1942

Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin in 1919

Painting WWII Propaganda Posters, Port Washington, New York – 8 July 1942

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge ca 1935

tolkien: all the war and death in lotr has nothing to do with the war i was in

tolkien: just like how all the morals/good vs evil/everything my characters believe have nothing to do with my morals/beliefs/religion

tolkien: and that character that comes back from the dead has nothing to do with my religion which is based on someone coming back from the dead and uses coming back from the dead as metaphor literally constantly so don’t get any ideas

tolkien: and none of those giant evil spiders have anything to do with the tarantula that bit me either

clive staples: jirt youre literally so stupid

tolkien:

clive:

tolkien: that really slow grumpy tree who takes forever to get to the point or make up his mind is definitely you though

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Just an annual reminder that you shouldn’t be relying on the first of January to reflect upon whether or not the circumstances you consent to are in your best interest. This is little more than a knee-jerk reaction to the cultural pressure to convey self-improvement; a vast majority of people posturing for social approval, rather than having their goals stemming from a sincere initiative to make change. So may this “New Year’s Resolution” be your last, as you acknowledge your ability to overcome procrastination, stagnancy, and monotony, as you desire, when you desire.

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You see, hear, smell, touch, and feel everything through words. You should even feel your balance and inner sensations just by reading a script.

When putting together a scene on paper..

Be it in a script or in the early stages of notes, describe as much as you can. It’s better to have more to work with later, and you can always narrow it down in the process. Personally, I like to draw scenes out to help submerge myself into a piece. Working with your senses you can help others do the same when they’re looking at or even just reading your film and or writing.

Describe it as if you’ve never thought about the idea. Like you’re walking into a completely foreign place, because that’s what everyone else will be doing when they see your work

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