Recommended Reading/old

From /lit/ Wiki
Revision as of 02:13, 29 May 2012 by 173.48.22.154 (talk)
Jump to navigationJump to search

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

Fiction

General

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

French

German

Italian

Japanese

Mexican

Norse

Persian

Russian

Spanish

Genre-Oriented Fiction

Science Fiction

Horror

Suggested horror titles
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
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
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

Classical Philosophy
Classical Philosophy
Classical

Pre-socratics:

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


Travel Literature

General

  • From the Meadows of Gold by Mas'udi
  • The Travels of Ibn Battutah
  • Voyages and Discoveries by Richard Hakluyt
  • The Journals of Captain James Cook
  • South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton
  • The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby
  • Waugh Abroad: The Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh
  • Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinsk
  • The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier

Europe

  • Guide to Greece by Pausanias
  • Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness by Ibn Fadlan
  • A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland by Samuel Johnson
  • A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne
  • Letters From England by Voltaire
  • Italian Journey: 1786-1788 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Letters from Russia by Adolphe De Custine
  • Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Sakhalin Island by Anton Chekhov
  • The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
  • D. H. Lawrence and Italy by D.H. Lawrence
  • Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
  • Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  • A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  • The Silent Traveler in London by Chiang Lee
  • Stones of Aran: Labyrinth by Tim Robinson
  • The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
  • Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere by Jan Morris
  • The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
  • Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk

Asia

  • The Travels of Marco Polo
  • The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
  • An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi
  • Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho
  • Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella L. Bird
  • The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace
  • A Secret Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina by Richard Burton
  • Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan by Lafcadio Hearn
  • The Southern Gates of Arabia by Freya Stark
  • A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  • Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China by David Kidd
  • Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley
  • A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
  • Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
  • A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
  • The Inland Sea by Donald Richie
  • Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
  • The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
  • Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue by Paul Bowles
  • The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

The Americas

  • Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca
  • Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America by Alexander von Humboldt
  • The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman
  • American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens
  • Travels in Alaska by John Muir
  • Two Years in the French West Indies by Lafcadio Hearn
  • Kabloona by Gontran de Poncins
  • Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
  • The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene
  • A Turn in the South by V.S. Naipaul
  • In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
  • An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
  • I See by My Outfit by Peter S. Beagle

Africa

  • Travels in the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park
  • Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley
  • Source of the Nile by Richard Burton
  • The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates
  • Travels in the Congo by Andre Gide
  • Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
  • Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene
  • The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti

Anthologies

  • A Book of Traveller's Tales by Eric Newby
  • Colonial American Travel Narratives
  • Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945: Foreign Authors Report from Germany
  • Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers