A Real Hobbit Always Returns To His House On The Hill.

Folks, it’s time to evolve. That’s why we’re troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything’s failing? It’s because, um – they’re no longer relevant. We’re supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

Bill Hicks (via aejphillips)

love those book series that are like

1st book: Hero goes on a big adventure, makes a bunch of friends, and saves the day!

Latest book: Hero copes with debilitating PTSD while growing increasingly disenchanted with the moral dubiety of the people and world around them, yet nevertheless still strives towards a heroic ideal.

About Time (2013) dir. Richard Curtis

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When you hit your elbow against something, but that specific point of your elbow

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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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In the rain please. Always.

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