24 Feb 2021
To-read list: Hardmode
Taken from Harold Bloom's Western Canon, this list is mostly just for fun as I don't expect to even read a 10th of the books in my lifetime. Fortunately Bloom focuses on 26 writers in particular, so I'll be content if I at least get the majority of these read:
- William Shakespeare
- Dante Alighieri
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Michel de Montaigne
- Molière
- John Milton
- Samuel Johnson
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- William Wordsworth
- Jane Austen
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Charles Dickens
- George Eliot
- Leo Tolstoy
- Henrik Ibsen
- Sigmund Freud
- Marcel Proust
- James Joyce
- Virginia Woolf
- Franz Kafka
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Pablo Neruda
- Fernando Pessoa
- Samuel Beckett
The Western Canon [8/1520]
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The Theocratic Age: 2000 BC-1321 AD [0/98]
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The Ancient Near East
The Ancient Greeks
Hellenistic Greeks
The Romans
The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
The Aristocratic Age: 1321-1832 [2/231]
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Italy
- Dante
- Petrarch
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Matteo Maria Boiardo
- Ludovico Ariosto
- Michelangelo Buonarroti
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Baldassare Castiglione
- Gaspara Stampa
- Giorgio Vasari
- Benvenuto Cellini
- Torquato Tasso
- Giordano Bruno
- Tommaso Campanella
- Giambattista Vico
- Carlo Goldoni
- Vittorio Alfieri
Spain
England and Scotland
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Sir Thomas Malory
- William Dunbar
- John Skelton
- Sir Thomas More
- Sir Thomas Wyatt
- Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
- Sir Philip Sidney
- Fulke Greville, Lorde Brooke
- Edmund Spenser
- Sir Walter Ralegh
- Christopher Marlowe
- Michael Drayton
- Samuel Daniel
- Thomas Nasche
- Thomas Kyd
- William Shakespeare
- Thomas Champion
- John Donne
- Ben Jonson
- Francis Bacon
- Robert Burton
- Sir Thomas Browne
- Thomas Hobbes
- Robert Herrick
- Thomas Carew
- Richard Lovelace
- Andrew Marvell
- George Herbert
- Thomas Traherne
- Henry Vaughan
- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
- Richard Crashaw
- Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
- George Chapman
- John Forrd
- John Marston
- John Webster
- Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
- Cyril Tourneur
- Philip Massinger
- John Bunyan
- Izaak Walton
- John Milton
- Jon Aubrey
- Jeremy Taylor
- Samuel Butler
- John Dryden
- Thomas Otway
- William Congreve
- Jonathan Swift
- Sir George Etherage
- Alexander Pope
- John Gay
- James Boswell
- Samuel Johnson
- Edward Gibbon
- Edmund Burke
- Maurice Morgann
- William Collins
- George Farquhar
- William Wycherley
- Christopher Smart
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- William Cowper
- George Crabbe
- Daniel Defoe
- Samuel Richardson
- Henry Fielding
- Tobias Smollett
- Laurence Sternee
- Fanny Burney
- Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
France
- Jean Froissart
- TODO The Song of Roland
- François Villon
- Michel de Montaigne
- François Rabelais
- Marguerite de Navarre
- Joachim Du Bellay
- Maurice Scève
- Pierre Ronsard
- Philippe de Commynes
- Agrippa d'Aubigné
- Robert Garnier
- Pierre Corneille
- François de La Rochefoucauld
- Jean de La Fontaine
- Molière
- Blaise Pascal
- Jacques-Bénigne Bosuet
- Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
- Jean Racine
- Pierre Carlet de Marivaux
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Voltaire
- Abbé Prévost
- Madame de La Fayette
- Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
- Denis Diderot
- Choderlos de Laclos
Germany
- Erasmus
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- TODO Faust, Parts One and Two
- TODO Dichtung und Wahrheit
- TODO Egmont
- TODO Elective Affinities
- TODO The Sorrows of Young Werther
- TODO Poems
- TODO Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
- TODO Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering
- TODO Italian Journey
- TODO Verse Plays
- TODO Hermann and Dorothea
- TODO Roman Elegies
- TODO Venetian Epigrams
- TODO West-Eastern Divan
- TODO Faust, Parts One and Two
- Friedrich Schiller
- Gotthold Lessing
- Freidrich Hölderlin
- Heinrich von Kleist
The Democratic Age: 1832-1900 [1/351]
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Italy
Spain and Portugal
France
- Benjamin Constant
- François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand
- Alphonse de Lamartine
- Alfred de Vigny
- Victor Hugo
- Alfred de Musset
- Gérard de Nerval
- Théophile Gautier
- Honoré de Balzac
- Stendhal
- Gustave Flaubert
- George Sand
- Charles Baudelaire
- Stéphane Mallarmé
- Paul Verlaine
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Tristan Corbière
- Jules Laforgue
- Guy de Maupassant
- Émile Zola
Scandinavia
Great Britain
- Robert Burns
- William Blake
- William Wordsworth
- Sir Walter Scott
- Jane Austen
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Dorothy Wordsworth
- William Hazlitt
- Lord Byron
- William Savage Landor
- Thomas De Quincey
- Charles Lamb
- Maria Edgeworth
- John Galt
- Elizabeth Gaskell
- James Hogg
- Charles Maturin
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- John Clare
- John Keats
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes
- George Darley
- Thomas Hood
- Thomas Wade
- Robert Browning
- Charles Dickens
- TODO The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
- TODO David Copperfield
- TODO The Adventures of Oliver Twist
- TODO A Tale of Two Cities
- TODO Bleak House
- TODO Hard Times
- TODO Nicholas Nickleby
- TODO Dombey and Son
- TODO Great Expectations
- TODO Martin Chuzzlewit
- TODO Christmas Stories
- TODO Little Dorrit
- TODO Our Mutual Friend
- TODO The Mystery of Edwin Drood
- TODO The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- Matthew Arnold
- Arthur Hugh Clough
- Christina Rossetti
- Thomas Love Peacock
- Gerald Manley Hopkins
- Thomas Carlyle
- John Ruskin
- Walter Pater
- Edward FitzGerald
- John Stuart Mill
- John Henry Newman
- Anthony Trollope
- Lewis Carroll
- Edward Lear
- George Gissing
- Algernon Charles Swinburne
- Charlotte Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- George Meredith
- Francis Thompson
- Lionel Johnson
- Robert Bridges
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
- Samuel Butler
- W. S. Gilbert
- Wilkie Collins
- Coventry Patmore
- James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)
- Oscar Wilde
- John Davidson
- Ernest Dowson
- George Eliot
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- William Morris
- Bram Stoker
- George Macdonald
Germany
Russia
The United States
- Washington Irving
- William Cullen Bryant
- James Fenimore Cooper
- John Greenleaf Whittier
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Emily Dickinson
- Walt Whitman
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Herman Melville
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Jones Very
- Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
- Henry David Thoreau
- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
- Frederick Douglass
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Sidney Lanier
- Francis Parkman
- Henry Adams
- Ambrose Bierce
- Louisa May Alcott
- Charles W. Chesnutt
- Kate Chopin
- William Dean Howells
- Stephen Crane
- Henry James
- Harold Frederic
- Mark Twain
- William James
- Frank Norris
- Sarah Orne Jewett
- Trumbull Stickney
The Chaotic Age: 20th Century [5/840]
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Italy
- Luigi Pirandello
- Gabriele D'Annunzio
- Dino Campana
- Umberto Saba
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Giuseppe Ungaretti
- Eugenio Montale
- Salvatore Quasimodo
- Tommaso Landolfi
- Leonardo Sciascia
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
- Cesare Pavese
- Primo Levi
- Italo Svevo
- Giorgio Bassani
- Natalia Ginzburg
- Elio Vittorini
- Alberto Moravia
- Andrea Zanzotto
- Italo Calvino
- Antonio Porta
Spain
Catalonia
Portugal
France
- Anatole France
- Alain-Fournier
- Marcel Proust
- Andre Gide
- Colette
- Georges Bataille
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
- René Daumal
- Jean Genet
- Jean Giraudoux
- Alfred Jarry
- Jean Cocteau
- Guillaume Apollinaire
- André Breton
- Paul Valéry
- René Char
- Paul Éluard
- Louis Aragon
- Jean Giono
- Michel Leiris
- Raymond Radiguet
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Henri Michaux
- Edmond Jabès
- Saint-John Perse
- Pierre Reverdy
- Tristan Tzara
- Max Jacob
- Pierre-Jean Jouve
- Francis Ponge
- Jacques Prévert
- Philippe Jacottet
- Charles Péguy
- Bejamin Péret
- Andé Malraux
- François Mauriac
- Jean Anouilh
- Eugène Ionesco
- Maurice Blanchot
- Pierre Klossowski
- Raymond Roussel
- Antonin Artaud
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Alain Robbe-Grillet
- Nathalie Sarraute
- Claude Simon
- Marguerite Duras
- Robert Pinget
- Michel Tournier
- Marguerite Yourcenar
- Jean Follain
- Yves Bonnefoy
Great Britain and Ireland
- William Butler Yeats
- George Bernard Shaw
- John Millington Synge
- Sean O'Casey
- George Douglas Brown
- Thomas Hardy
- Rudyard Kipling
- A. E. Housman
- Max Beerbohm
- Joseph Conrad
- Ronald Firbank
- Ford Madox Ford
- W. Somerset Maugham
- John Cowper Powys
- Saki (H. H. Munro)
- H. G. Wells
- David Lindsay
- Arnold Bennett
- Walter De la Mare
- Wilfred Owen
- Isaac Rosenberg
- Edward Thomas
- Robert Graves
- Edwin Muir
- David Jones
- John Galsworthy
- E. M. Forster
- Frank O'Connor
- D. H. Lawrence
- Virginia Woolf
- James Joyce
- Samuel Beckett
- Elizabeth Bowen
- J. G. Farrell
- Henry Green
- Evelyn Waugh
- Anthony Burgess
- G. B. Edwards
- Iris Murdoch
- Graham Greene
- Christopher Isherwood
- Norman Douglas
- Aldous Huxley
- Lawrence Durrell
- William Golding
- Doris Lessing
- Mervyn Peake
- Jeanette Winterson
- W. H. Auden
- Roy Fuller
- Gavin Ewart
- Basil Bunting
- William Empson
- George Wilson Knight
- R. S. Thomas
- Frank Kermode
- Stevie Smith
- F. T. Prince
- Philip Larkin
- Donald Davie
- Geoffrey Hill
- Jonathan Spence
- Elizabeth Jennings
- Keith Douglas
- Hugh MacDiarmid
- Louis MacNeice
- Dylan Thomas
- Nigel Dennis
- Seamus Heaney
- Thomas Kinsella
- Paul Muldoon
- John Montague
- John Arden
- Joe Orton
- Flann O'Brien
- Tom Stoppard
- Harold Pinter
- Edward Bond
- George Orwell
- Edna O'Brien
Germany
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Hermann Broch
- Georg Trakl
- Gottfried Benn
- Franz Kafka
- Bertolt Brecht
- Arthur Schnitzler
- Frank Wedekind
- Karl Krauss
- Günter Eich
- Thomas Mann
- Alfred Döblin
- Hermann Hesse
- Robert Musil
- Joseph Roth
- Paul Celan
- Thomas Bernhard
- Heinrich Böll
- Ingeborg Bachmann
- Hans Magnus Enzensberger
- Walter Benjamin
- Robert Walser
- Christa Wolf
- Peter Handke
- Max Frisch
- Günter Grass
- Friedrich Dürrenmatt
- Johannes Bobrowski
Russia
Scandinavia
Serbo-Croat
Czech
Polish
Hungarian
Modern Greek
Yiddish
Hebrew
Arabic
Latin America
- Rubén Dário
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Alejo Carpentier
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
- Severo Sarduy
- Reinaldo Arenas
- Pablo Neruda
- Nicolás Guillén
- Octavio Paz
- César Vallejo
- Miguel Angel Asturias
- José Lezama Lima
- José Donoso
- Julio Cortázar
- Gabriel García Márquez
- Mario Vargas Llosa
- Carlos Fuentes
- Carlos Drummond de Andrade
The West Indies
Africa
India (in English)
Canada
Australia and New Zealand
The United States
- Edwin Arlington Robinson
- Robert Frost
- Edith Wharton
- Willa Cather
- Gertrude Stein
- Wallace Stevens
- Vachel Lindsay
- Edgar Lee Masters
- Theodore Dreiser
- Sherwood Anderson
- Sinclair Lewis
- Elinor Wylie
- William Carlos Williams
- Ezra Pound
- Robinson Jeffers
- Marianne Moore
- Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
- John Crowe Ransom
- T. S. Eliot
- Katherine Anne Porter
- Jean Toomer
- John Dos Passos
- Conrad Aiken
- Eugene O'Neill
- e. e. cummings
- John B. Wheelwright
- Robert Fitzgerald
- Louise Bogan
- Léonie Adams
- Hart Crane
- Allen Tate
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- William Faulkner
- Ernest Hemingway
- John Steinbeck
- Zora Neale Hurston
- Nathanael West
- Richard Wright
- Eudora Welty
- Langston Hughes
- Edmund Wilson
- Kenneth Burke
- Joseph Mitchell
- Abraham Cahan
- Kay Boyle
- Ellen Glasgow
- John P. Marquand
- John O'Hara
- Henry Roth
- Thornton Wilder
- Robert Penn Warren
- Delmore Schwartz
- Weldon Kees
- Elizabeth Bishop
- John Berryman
- Paul Bowles
- Randall Jarrell
- Charles Olson
- Robert Hayden
- Robert Lowell
- Theodore Roethke
- James Agee
- Jean Garrigue
- May Swenson
- Robert Duncan
- Richard Wilbur
- Richard Eberhart
- M. B. Tolson
- Kenneth Koch
- Frank O' Hara
- James Schuyler
- James Baldwin
- Saul Bellow
- John Cheever
- Ralph Ellison
- Truman Capote
- Carson McCullers
- Flannery O'Connor
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Gore Vidal
- William Styron
- J. D. Salinger
- Wright Morris
- Bernard Malamud
- Norman Mailer
- John Hawkes
- William Gaddis
- Tennessee Williams
- Arthur Miller
- Edwin Justus Mayer
- Harold Brodkey
- Ursula K. LeGuin
- Raymond Carver
- Robert Coover
- Don DeLillo
- John Crowley
- Guy Davenport
- James Dickey
- E. L. Doctorow
- Stanley Elkin
- William H. Gass
- Omensetter's Luck
- Riddley Walker
- Cormac McCarthy
- William Kennedy
- Toni Morrison
- Gloria Naylor
- Joyce Carol Oates
- Walker Percy
- Grace Paley
- Thomas Pynchon
- Cynthia Ozick
- Ishmael Reed
- Philip Roth
- James Salter
- Robert Stone
- John Barth
- Walter Abish
- Donald Barthelme
- Thomas M. Disch
- Paul Theroux
- John Updike
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
- Edmund White
- James McCourt
- James Wilcox
- A. R. Ammons
- John Ashbery
- David Mamet
- David Rabe
- Sam Shepard
- August Wilson
- Anthony Hecht
- Edgar Bowers
- Donald Justice
- James Merrill
- W. S. Merwin
- James Wright
- Galway Kinnell
- Philip Levine
- Irving Feldman
- Donald Hall
- Alvin Feinman
- Richard Howard
- John Hollander
- Gary Snyder
- Charles Simic
- Mark Strand
- Charles Wright
- Jay Wright
- Amy Clampitt
- Allen Grossman
- Howard Moss
- James Applewhite
- J. D. McClatchy
- Alfred Corn
- Douglas Crase
- Rita Dove
- Thylias Moss
- Edward Hirsch
- Tony Kushner