Recommended Reading/old

For possible reading recommendation charts for authors, check the Recommended Reading Charts (by Author) page.

Fiction

General

• 
  Classics
• 
  Theater/Drama part 1
• 
  Theater/Drama part 2
• 
  Novellas
• 
  100 Novellas
• 
  Short Story Collections
• 
  Flash Fiction and Short Short Stories
• 
  Female writers
• 
  Humor
• 
  Essential Doorstoppers (Unfinished)
• 
  Dystopia & Utopia (Unfinished)
• 
  Essential Poetry Guide
• 
  A collection of 'must read' lists.

American

Selected Fiction Works.

Great Short Story Authors and Collections

• Hawthorne - Twice Told Tales
• Edgar Allan Poe - Collected Works
• Mark Twain - Collected Short Stories
• Herman Melville - Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales
• Stephen Crane - Maggie and other Stories
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - Flappers and Philosophers
• Ernest Hemingway - Collected Short Works
• Sherwood Anderson - Death in the Woods and other Stories
• Raymond Carver - Where I'm Calling From
• John Cheever - The Stories of John Cheever
• H. P. Lovecraft - H.P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America)

Poets and Poetry Collections

• Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
• Emily Dickinson - The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
• T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land and other Poems
• Wallace Stevens - Harmonium
• Robinson Jeffers - Selected Poems
• Robert Frost - Collected Poems
• Hart Crane - The Bridge
• Williams Carlos Williams - Collected Poems Vol.1 & 2
• John Ashbery - Collected Poems
• Allen Ginsberg - Howl and Other Poems

Plays and Playwrights

• Eugene O'Neill - Complete Plays (Library of America)
• Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
• Thornton Wilder - Our Town
• Tennessee Williams - Plays 1937 - 1955 (Library of America)
• Lorraine Hansberry - A Raisin in the Sun
• Edward Albee - The Collected Plays of Edward Albee
• Sam Shepard - Buried Child
• August Wilson - Fences
• Tony Kushner - Angels in America

Others

• Feminore Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
• Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Henry James - The American
• Henry James - The Turn of the Screw and other short novels
• Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage
• Kate Chopin - The Awakening
• Jack London - The Call of the Wild
• Gertrude Stein - Three Lives
• Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence
• Theodore Dreiser - An American Tragedy
• Willa Cather - My Ántonia
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street
• Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt
• Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy
• Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
• Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bells Toll
• William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
• William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
• Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
• John O'Hara - Appointment in Samarra
• Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• John Steinbeck - East of Eden
• John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
• Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust
• Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
• Richard Wright - Native Son
• Robert Penn Warren - All the King's Men
• Ray Bradbury - Farenheit 451
• J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
• Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
• William Gaddis - The Recognitions
• Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
• Jack Kerouac - On the Road
• William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
• John Updike - Rabbit,Run
• Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingalan
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor
• Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
• Saul Bellow - Herzog
• Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
• Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
• Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
• Thomas Pynchon - V.
• William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
• Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
• Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
• Philip Roth - American Pastoral
• Cormac McCarthy - The Road
• John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
• Don Delillo - Libra
• Don Delillo - Underworld
• David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest

African American Literature.

Slave Narratives

• Olaudah Equiano - The Interesting Narrative
• Solomon Northrup - Twelve Years a Slave
• Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
• - Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Reconstruction Era

• W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
• - The Collected Poetry of Pawl Laurence Dunbar
• Booker T.Washington - Up From Slavery

Harlem Renaissance

• Langston Hughes - Not Without Laughter
• Jean Toomer - Cane
• George S. Schugler - Black No More
• Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Claude McKay - Home to Harlem
• Mella Larsen - Quicksand and Passing
• - The Walls of Jericho
• - The Blacker and the Berry

Civil Rights Era

• James Baldwin - Go Tell it on the Mountain
• Richard Wright - Native Son
• Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
• - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Gwendolyn Brooks - Selected Poems
• Chester Himes - If he Hollers Let Him Go
• Lorraine Hansberry - A Raisin in the Sun

Contemporary

• Charles Mingus - Beneath the Underdog
• Alice Walker - The Color Purple
• Toni Morrison - Beloved
• Walter Mosley - Killing Johnny Fry
• Alex haley - Roots
• Amiri Baraka - Somebody Blew Up America
• Terry McMillan - Waiting to Exhale
• Gloria Naylor - Linden Hills
• Ismael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo
• - Kindre D
• Edward P. Jones - The Known World

Australian

• 

(includes some non-fiction as well)

British & Irish

• 

Chinese

• 
• 
  Guide to Journey to the West translations
• 
  Guide to Romance of the Three Kingdoms translations

French

• 

German

• 

Italian

• 

Japanese

• 
• 
  100 Works of Japanese Literature

Mexican

• 

Norse

• 

Persian

• 

Russian

• 
  Russian lit
• 
  Maksim Gorky - Mother

Spanish

• 

Genre-Oriented Fiction

Science Fiction

• 
  Sci Fi 1
• 
  Sci Fi 3
• 
  NPR's Top 100 Sci-fi and Fantasy

Horror

Suggested horror titles

Classic Horror

• Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
• Bram Stoker - Dracula
• Henry James - The Turn of the Screw
• Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Washington Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Edgar Allen Poe - The Complete Stories and Poems
• Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
• Matthew Lewis - The Monk
• Charles Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer
• Ambrose Bierce - Ghost, and Other Stories

20th Century Horror

• Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House
• Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
• Clive Barker - Books of Blood
• Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Stephen King - It, Pet Sematary
• Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs
• Dan Simmons - Song of Kali
• Algernon Blackwood - Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood
• M.R. James - Casting the Runes, and Other Ghost Stories
• Mervyn Peake - Boy in Darkness
• William Hodgson - The House on the Borderland
• H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror
• Peter Straub - Shadowland

New Horror

• Laird Barron - Occultation
• Joe R. Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale
• Will Elliot - The Pilo Family Circus
• Edward Lee - Bullet Through Your Face
• Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door
• Dave Brockie - Whargoul
• Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box
• China Mieville - King Rat
• Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

Fantasy

Suggested fantasy titles

Epic Fantasy:

• J.R.R. Tolkien - The Fellowship of the Ring
• George R.R. Martin - A Game of Thrones
• Joe Abercrombie - The Blade Itself
• R.Scott Bakker - The Darkness that Comes Before
• Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon
• J.V.Jones - A Cavern of Black Ice
• Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time
• Paul Kearney - Hawkwood's Voyage
• K.J.Parker - Devices and Desires
• Melanie Rawn - Dragon Prince
• Brian Ruckley - Winterbirth
• Tad WIlliams - The Dragonbone Chair
• David Zindell - The Lightsone
• Daniel Abraham - A Shadow in Summer
• Chris Wooding - The Braided Path
• S.L.Farrell - A Magic of Twilight
• Greg Keyes - The Briar King
• Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of The Wind
• Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

Urban Fantasy

• Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere, American Gods, The Anansi Boys
• Graham Joyce - The Tooth Fairy
• R.A.Macavoy - Tea with the Black Dragon
• Jonathan Carroll - The Land of Laughs

Swords and Sorcery

• R.E.Howard - Conan
• Fritz Leiber - The First Book of Lankhmar
• Michael Moorcock - Elric of Melnibone
• Michael Shea - The Incomplete Nifft
• Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
• Karl Edward Wagner - Gods in Darkness
• C.L.Moore - Jirel of Joiry

Entry Level

• Terry Brooks - First King of Shamhara
• Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising
• David Eddings - Pawn of Prophecy
• David Eddings - The Diamond Throne
• Raymond E.Feist - Magician
• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Dragons of Autumn Twilight
• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Dragon Wing
• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Rose of the Prophet
• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman - Time of the Twins
• C.S.Lewis - The Lion', 'The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
• R.A.Salvatore - Homeland
• Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials

Coming of Age

• Glen Cook - The Swordbearer
• Robin Hobb - Assassin's Apprentice
• J.V.Jones - The Baker's Boy
• Rebecca Bradley - Lady in Gil

Historic Fantasy

• David Gemell - Troy
• Guy Gavriel Kay - The Lions of Al-Rassan
• J.Gregory Keyes - Newton's Cannon
• R.A.MacAvoy - Damiano
• T.H.White - The Once and Future king
• Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
• George R.R. Martin - Fevre Dream
• John M.Ford - The Dragon Waiting
• Mary Gentle - A Secret History

Mystery

• Steven Brust - The Book of Jhereg
• Jim Butcher - Storm Front
• Glen Cook - Sweet Silver Blues
• Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds
• Matthew Hughes - Majestrum

Comic Fantasy

• Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum
• Christopher Moore - Lamb
• Peter David - Sir Apropos of Nothing
• Mary Gentle - Grunts
• William Goldman - The Princess Bride

Weird

• H.P.Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
• William Hope Hodgson - The House in the Borderland
• Clark Ashton Smith - The Emperor of Dreams
• Jeff Vandermeer - City of Saints and Madmen
• China Miéville - Perdido Street Station

Mythic

• Roger Zelazny - Creatures of Light and Darkness
• Mickey Zucker Reichert - The Last of the Renshai
• Jonh Myers Myers - Silverlock
• Steven Brust - To Reign in Hell
• Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword
• Michael Scott Rogan - The Anvil of Ice

Alternate World

• Stephen R. Donaldson - The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, The Mirror in her Dreams
• Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land
• Stephen R. Lawhead - The Paradise War
• Poul Anderson - Three Heards and Three Lions
• Roger Zelazny - The Great Book of Amber

Old School

• George MacDonal - Phantastes
• E.R.Eddison - The Worm Ouroboros
• Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter
• Ernest Bramah - The Wallet of Kail Lung
• David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus
• Charles G. Finney - The Circus of Dr.Lao
• Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
• Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan

Miscellaneous

• Paul Edwin Zimmer - The Lost Prince
• David Gemell - Legend
• C.S.Friedman - Black Sun Rising
• K.J.Parker - Shadow
• Kate Elliot - King's Dragon
• Michael A.Stackpole - Talion Revenant
• Matthew Woodring Stover - Heroes Die
• Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer
• Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
• John Marco - The Jackal of Nar
• Andrzej Sapkowski - Blood of Elves
• Ken Grimwood - Replay
• Glen Cook - Chronicles of the Black Company
• Patricia A. Mckillip - The Riddle-Master of Hed
• Sean Ruselss - The Initiate Brother
• Brent Weeks - The Way of Shadows
• Jeniffer Fallon - The Immortal Prince
• John Crowley - Little, Big
• Catherynne M. Valente - In the Night Garden
• M. John Harrison - Viriconium
• Jack Vance - Lyonesse
• Frank & Brian Herbert - The Dune Series
• Dave Duncan - King's Blades Series
• David Eddings - Belgariad Trilogy
• Piers Anthony - Incarnations of Immortality

Non-Fiction

Essays

Essays

Classics

• Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko
• Essays by Francis Bacon
• The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
• Selected Essays by Samuel Johnson
• A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig and Other Essays by Charles Lamb
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Complete Essays of Mark Twain
• The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire
• In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton
• The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose by Oscar Wilde
• Essays by Robert Louis Stevenson

Modern and Contemporary Essays (English Language)

• A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
• The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats [vols. IV and V: Early and Later Essays]
• Selected Essaysby Virginia Woolf
• Selected Essays by D.H. Lawrence
• Selected Essays by T.S. Eliot
• Kokoro by Lafcadio Hearn
• Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport
• Essays of E.B. White
• Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
• Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry by John Simon
• Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experienceby Aldous Huxley
• Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor
• Literary Essays of Ezra Pound
• In Favor of the Sensitive Man, and Other Essays by Anais Nin
• Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote
• The Best of Myles by Flann O'Brien
• A Jacques Barzun Reader by Jacques Barzun
• Reflections on Exile by Edward W. Said
• The Vintage Mencken by H.L. Mencken
• The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
• Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
• Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings by Angela Carter
• Fame & Folly: Essays by Cynthia Ozick
• The Donald Richie Reader by Donald Richie
• Dreamer of Dreams by John Simon
• On Histories and Stories by A.S. Byatt
• Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings by John Fowles
• Finding a Form by William H. Gass
• An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger

Modern and Contemporary Essays (non-English Language)

• Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Visions of Excess by Georges Bataille
• Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec
• Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays by Raymond Queneau
• Selected Essays of Zhou Zuoren
• Selected Bilingual Essays of Lin Yutang
• Illuminations: Essays by Walter Benjamin
• A Barthes Reader by Roland Barthes
• Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
• The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
• Less Than One: Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky
• Myself With Others: Essays by Carlos Fuentes
• The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz
• The Spirit of Prague by Ivan Klima
• Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera
• How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays by Umberto Eco
• Anathemas and Admirations by E.M. Cioran
• Passing By: Selected Essays by Jerzy Kosinski
• Other People's Trades by Primo Levi
• Nobody's Home by Dubravka Ugresic
• Campo Santo by W.G. Sebald

Philosophy

• 
  Christian and Medieval
• 
  Modern
• 
  Modern Part 2
• 
  Scientific Revolution
• 
  German Idealism
• 
  Existentialism
• 
  Analytic Part 1
• 
  Analytic Part 2
• 
  Postmodernism
• 
  Feminism/Queer Theory

Classical Philosophy

Classical

Pre-socratics:

• Various - Early Greek Philosophy
• Kenneth Sylvan Guthre - The Pythagorean Sourcebook and library
• Charles H.Kahn - The art and thought of Heraclitus
• Parmenides of Elea - Fragments
• David Gallop - Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments
• John Dillon, Tania Gergel - The Greek sophists
• Empedocles - The extant Fragments
• Various links
  • http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presocratics
  • http://www.heraclitusfragments.com
  • http://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/

On Socrates:

• I.F.Stone - The trial of Socrates
• Aristophanes - The clouds
• Charles H.Kahn - Plato and the Socratic dialogue
• Karl R. Popper - The open society and its enemies
• Gail Fine - Plato on knowledge and forms.

By plato:

(Note made by Isabelle: later translations are usually more accessible. I AM not a fan of Jowett. Since she composed this list I thought it necessary to add this)

• Early Works:
  • Apology
  • Crito
  • Euthyphro (holiness, the Euthyphro dilemma)
  • Ion
  • Laches (courage)
  • Protagoras (the teachability of virtue)
  • Gorgias (rethoric vs. philosophy)
  • Meno (virtue, Meno's paradox)
• Middle Works
  • Parmenides - Forms
  • Phaedo (the death of socrates, the afterlife)
  • Phaedrus (love and rethoric)
  • Republic (politics, the state and the soul)
  • Symposium (true love, the 'Ladder of Love')
  • Theaetetus (knowledge)
• Later Works
  • Critias (Atlantis=
  • Sophist (more on Forms)
  • Timaeus (the purpose of the universe)

On Aristotle

• David M.Balme - Aristotle on Nature and Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies
• Cristopher Shields - Aristotle
• David Furley - From Aristotle to Augustine

By Aristotle

(Another note by Isabelle: Oxford translations are best)

• The Nicomachean Ethics (virtue ethics, leads into Politics)
• Rethoric
• Metaphysics
• Poetics
• Politics

Cynicism

• Farrand Sayre - Diogenes of Sinope: A study of Greek cynicism
• R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé -The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy

Epicureanism

• James Warren - The Cambridge's companion to Epicureanism
• Eugene O'connor - The essential Epicurus
• Lucretius - The nature of things

Stoicism

(Isabella specified Penguin Classics)

• Seneca - Letters from a stoic
• Epictetus - Discourses and selected writings
• Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

Skepticism

• Norman Maccoll - The Greek Sceptics: From Pyrrho to Sextus
• Sextus Empiricus - Outlines of Pyrrhonism
• Richard T. Wallis - Neoplatonism and Gnosticism
• John Gregory - The neoplatonists
• Plotinus - The enneads