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] [0%]
The Theocratic Age: 2000 BC-1321 AD [0/98] [0%]
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] [0%]
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] [0%]
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] [0%]
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