Favorite Literature

Submitted by Marquee on Wed, 05/12/2010 - 10:46
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  • "Great literature is written in a sort of foreign tongue.To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty."
  • —Marcel Proust

  • Vyasa (~800-900 BC)
  • Mahabharata

  • Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)
  • The Canterbury Tales (~1385)
  • • "The General Prologue"
  • • "The Miller's Prologue and Tale"

  • Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
  • The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha - Part 1 (1605)

  • William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
  • Romeo & Juliet (1597)
  • Julius Caesar (1599)
  • Hamlet (1601)
  • Troilus and Cressida (1602)
  • Othello (1603)
  • Coriolanus (1605)
  • King Lear (1606)
  • Antony and Cleopatra (1608)
  • Macbeth (1607)
  • Sonnets (1609)
  • The Tempest (1611)

  • Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
  • On My First Sonne (1616)

  • John Milton (1608-1674)
  • Lycidas (1637)
  • Paradise Lost (1667)

  • Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
  • An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650)
  • To His Coy Mistress (1650)
  • Upon Appleton House (1651)

  • Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
  • An Essay on Criticism (1709)

  • Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
  • Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750)

  • William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
  • Lyrical Ballads (1800)
  • • The Matthew poems
  • • The Lucy poems
  • • We Are Seven
  • • Lucy Grey
  • • The Brothers, a Pastoral Poem
  • • The Childless Father
  • • The Old Cumberland Beggar, a Description
  • • Poems on the Naming of Places
  • • Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800)
  • The Ruined Cottage (1800)
  • Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)
  • Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1804)
  • The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind (1805)
  • "Surprised by joy" (1815)

  • Jane Austen (1775-1817)
  • Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  • Persuasion (1816)

  • John Keats (1795-1821)
  • On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816)
  • Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)
  • Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
  • The Living Hand (1819)

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
  • The American Scholar (1837)
  • Circles (1841)
  • Self-Reliance (1841)
  • Spiritual Laws (1841)
  • The Transcendentalist (1842)
  • Experience (1844)
  • Nature (1844)
  • Fate (1860)

  • Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
  • Walden (1854)

  • Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)
  • Fathers and Sons (1862)

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
  • Crime and Punishment (1866)

  • George Eliot (1819-1880)
  • Middlemarch (1872)

  • Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
  • Song of Myself (1855)
  • Song of the Open Road (1856)
  • When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1865)
  • The Riddle Song (1880)
  • Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night (1891)
  • On the Beach at Night (1900)
  • Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (1900)

  • Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
  • War & Peace (1869)
  • Anna Karenina (1877)

  • Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
  • There's a certain Slant of light
  • The Soul selects her own Society
  • I heard a Fly buzz--when I died
  • Because I could not stop for Death
  • My triumph lasted till the Drums

  • Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
  • The Darkling Thrush (1901)

  • Henry James (1843-1916)
  • The Europeans (1878)
  • The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
  • The Middle Years (1893)
  • The Altar of the Dead (1895)
  • The Figure in the Carpet (1896)
  • The Awkward Age (1899)
  • The Tree of Knowledge (1900)
  • The Sacred Fount (1901)
  • The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
  • The Jolly Corner (1908)

  • Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
  • Heart of Darkness (1902)

  • Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
  • Easter Night (1886)
  • At Christmas Time (1890)
  • Rothschild's Fiddle (1894)
  • The Student (1894)
  • Anna on the Neck (1895)
  • Uncle Vanya (1897)
  • Three Sisters (1900)
  • The Cherry Orchard (1904)

  • Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
  • Gitanjali (1913)

  • Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
  • The Way through the Woods (1910)

  • William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
  • When You Are Old (1892)
  • The Second Coming (1920)
  • Leda and the Swan (1924)
  • The Circus Animals' Desertion (1939)

  • Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
  • Swann's Way (1913)

  • Robert Frost (1873-1963)
  • North of Boston (1914)
  • • A Servant to Servants
  • • After Apple-Picking
  • • Home Burial
  • • Mending Wall
  • • Pasture
  • Mountain Interval (1916)
  • • An Old Man's Winter Night
  • • Birches
  • • Out, Out-
  • • The Oven Bird
  • • The Road not Taken
  • New Hampshire (1923)
  • • Fire and Ice
  • • For Once, Then, Something
  • • Nothing Gold can Stay
  • • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
  • West-Running Brook (1928)
  • • Acquainted with the Night
  • • Spring Pools
  • • The Rose Family
  • Unharvested (1936)

  • Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917)
  • The Snow Man (1921)
  • Sunday Morning (1923)
  • The Idea of Order at Key West (1936)
  • The Creations of Sound (1944)
  • The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm (1945)
  • The Rock (1954)

  • James Joyce (1882-1941)
  • The Dead (1914)
  • Ulysses (1922)

  • Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
  • The Prophet (1926)

  • D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
  • Introduction to Harry Crosby's Chariot of the Sun (1928)

  • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
  • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
  • Portrait of a Lady (1915)
  • The Hollow Men (1925)
  • The Journey of the Magi (1927)
  • Four Quartets (1943)

  • E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)
  • pity this busy monster, manunkind (1944)

  • Isaac Babel (1894-1940)
  • Crossing the River Zbrucz (1923)
  • Salt (1929)

  • Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
  • A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1926)

  • James Hilton (1900-1954)
  • Random Harvest (1941)

  • Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
  • I do not love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz (1957)
  • I don't love you only because I love you (1959)
  • Should I die, survive me with a force so pure (1959)

  • Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
  • Geography III (1976)
  • • In the Waiting Room
  • • Night City
  • • One Art
  • • Poem

  • Philip Kapleau (1912-2004)
  • The Three Pillars of Zen (1965)

  • Charlotte Beck (1917-2011)
  • Everyday Zen: Love and Work (1989)

  • Richard Wilbur (1921)
  • The Writer (1976)

  • Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
  • If on a winter's night a traveler (1979)

  • Marcella Hazan (1924)
  • Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (1992)

  • Harper Lee (1926)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

  • Christopher Logue (1926)
  • Come to the Edge (1961)

  • Gabriel García Márquez (1927)
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

  • Jacqueline Osherow (1956)
  • Villanelle from a Sentence in a Poet's Brief Biography (1999)
Author Comments: 

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh," he whispered.

"Yes, Piglet?"

"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw, "I just wanted to be sure of you."

Zacharyyy05/20/2010

Remidns me that I need to make a list or two like this.
also GOOD TASTE.
and I really really need to get on reading The Sacred Fount and The Golden Bowl.

Marquee05/20/2010

Thanks yo. I've actually been having the urge to return to The Sacred Fount, perhaps once I'm done with Middlemarch, which has been stunning so far. The Golden Bowl is deserving of its reputation, although the suffocating detail does drag in some places. A minor complaint. He's still one of my favorites, along with Dostoevsky, Frost, Emerson, Coetzee, et al. Oh, and Proust. Jesus Christ Proust.

Zacharyyy05/21/2010

"Jesus Christ, Proust" is the understatement of forever.

Elston05/29/2010

I read a little of Swann's Way, not a favorite but an undeniably great writer. What I liked best was probably his ability to write about such ineffable things, like what it feels like to fall asleep into a dream, or slowly wake up in a place you're unsure of, and he did it in such vivid detail. God knows how. Sartre did a similar thing is Nausea, talking about these strange feelings we get that are totally unexplainable and frightening. I really admire these guys for chronicling stuff that is so mysterious and confounding and doing it with such precision. Proust's writing is so consistently airy and dreamy, parts were just plain gorgeous like when the kid is waiting for his mum to tuck him in. Fellini must have read him. Also I agree, Winnie the Pooh is deep.

Zacharyyy05/25/2010

That header text is the most adorable thing <3

Zacharyyy04/03/2011

I love that Van Gogh quote. ;O;

Also somewhere in this there is a hanging italics-marker so everything after it is italicized!

Marquee08/21/2011

It probably doesn't belong on a list like this, but it would be remiss not to mention Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which has become immeasurably important to me... Shakespearean proportions, really.

Zacharyyy09/04/2011

What noble truths are imparted within the leaves of "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking"?

Marquee09/06/2011

"Sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable—look at the narrow range of it which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval. No detail is spared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at Port Arthur, and we grow old and die in the process." -- William James

The quote could probably be twisted into an endorsement of cooking! Food -- both the eating, and preparing of, defy abstraction. Experiential truth. Although there's nothing intolerable about it.

AfterHours12/20/2012

That's quite a way to bookend this list - from Cohen's quote at the top, to Winnie the Pooh at the bottom. Both are great in opposite ways :)

I just started a handful of film polls (with some more on the way). Definitely want lots of involvement. Feel free to take a look and make some submissions.

Zacharyyy03/10/2013

Just the Miller's Tale because you like that one best or because you've only read that one?
(in any case, the Miller's Tale is rad.)

Marquee03/10/2013

I, sadly, have barely read any Chaucer. Just The General Prologue, and the Miller's, Knight's (yawn!), and Pardoner's Tales. I've been dying to read Troilus and Criseyde. Any of his works youre particularly fond of?

I waste too much time I should dedicate to reading =(.

Zacharyyy03/29/2013

I enjoy the Miller's Tale a whole lot. Been meaning to read the Wife Of Bath's Tale forever. The only other Chaucer thing I'm all that familiar with is a short poem of his that is basically just "oh wallet, why you so empty?" http://www.literatureproject.com/canterbury-tales/canterbury-tales_40.htm

I HEAR YA, BUDDY...

Zacharyyy03/29/2013

A friend's summary of Mayor of Casterbridge:

"It is the dumbest most bombastic soap opera in the history of stories, but no other novel will make you so sincerely weep for the human condition."