literature must reads

[mahogany]

There are certain books and/or poems and/or plays in which lay the roots of numerous literary allusions, satirical jokes, common sayings etc.. If a person hasn’t read them, then they’re really not getting the joke, so to speak. I’m trying to think of the top literary works that would fit this category.

So far I’ve thought of:

- The complete works of Shakespeare
- The Odyssey
- Gulliver’s Travels
- A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist
- Oedipus
- The Canterbury Tales
- The Bible
- Alice in Wonderland
- The complete works of the brother’s Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson in their original form
- Aesop’s Fables
- Paradise Lost
- The Divine Comedy

I’m leaving tons and tons and tons of stuff out. Which obvious ones have I failed to include?

Comments

[rillifane.livejournal.com]

Elegy in a Country Churchyard - Sir Thomas Grey
Ode on a Grecian Urn - Keats
To a Skylark - Shelley
To a Mouse - Robert Burns
The Declaration of Independance
Poor Richard's Almanac - B. Franklin
Paradise Lost - John Milton
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time - Robert Herrick
Howl - A. Ginsberg
The collected works of Dr. Seuss

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Sophocles, Plato, St. Augustine all make for a LOT of our moral and ethical underpinnings, as a culture.

I think Don Juan and Don Quixote are big, and The Barber Of Seville. To a lesser extent, JD Salinger and Ken Kesey are more modern writers of the same material.

But Shakespeare is the strongest influence on the language, by far.

[garpu.livejournal.com]

Walden!
Anything by Rilke, he's worth learning German for.
Beowulf
Any decent translation/retelling of the Ramayana
(ditto for the Mahabharata.)

[daisan.livejournal.com]

There's all the classic women writers of the 19th century, too: Austen, Brontee etc.

What about all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries? Does that count as literature?

The Bible, of course.

This is such a great idea, I'd love to see the finished list.

[daisan.livejournal.com]

Poe! Frost!

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Way late, but I, too, love these sorts of lists. I'm in favor of expanding the Canon, but never of trimming it.

T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and possibly other Eliot.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Stuff by Rudyard Kipling, racist imperialist though he was. Still the basis for a lot of the in-jokes of Western culture -- in his work, perhaps Just So Stories

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est"

W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"