The Classics as seen through my eyes....

[acdntlpoet]

So, here's a new meme, one I gakked and modded from elmunadi as evidenced in the thread here. - Mark any of these you own a copy of in bold, and any you've read, but don't have a copy of in italic.

The Most Significant bits of Classic Literature over the Last 500 Years, 1507-2007

* Hamlet, William Shakespeare
* The Tyger, William Blake
* The Black Cat, Edgar Allen Poe
* Walden, Henry David Thoreau
* O' Captain, My Captain, Walt Whitman
* To The Virgins to Make Much of Time, Robert Herrick
* Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Joyce Carol Oates
* I Felt a Funeral, In My Brain, Emily Dickinson
* A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway
* Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
* The Pearl, John Steinbeck
* A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner
* The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
* Dubliners, James Joyce
* Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats
* Beowulf, As Translated by Seamus Heaney
* The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
* Irish Faerie Tales, William Butler Yeats
* 95 Poems, e.e. cummings
* A&P, John Updike
* The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
* 1984, George Orwell
* Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
* The Wild Duck, Henrik Ibsen
* The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
* Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata
* The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
* Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne
* Beloved, Toni Morrison
* Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
* Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
* Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson
* A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
* Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
* The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
* Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
* The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
* The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Mark Twain
* The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
* Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
* The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson

I'd add to that list: (Feel free to add up to two)

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Comments

[elmunadi.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... Nice selection! A few of your choices are authors/poets that I'd solidly place in the list, but are stories/poems that I've not read by those authors. Herrick, Jackson, and Gilamn are authors/poets I've not read at all.

I'd add -
if leaning towards the modern edge:
The First Circle, Aleksandr Solhenitsyn
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

or, if leaning towards the midrange:
Faust (Pt I & II), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen

Indecisiveness rules until I get on the plane this evening.

(BTW - I think I see an interesting possibility in the list - a game of matching the authors and their works with diametrically opposed in terms of style/method/angle/etc... - Hemingway vs Faulkner, Lewis vs Thompson.

I think that's a game I'd lose qucikyl, but interesting nonetheless.

[siobhan-genie.livejournal.com]

We own Beloved? I've been wanting to read that! And we do own a very nice copy of Lolita, in hardback.

I would add these, as a shout-out to classic horror/mystery:

Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
Dark Carnival, Ray Bradbury (I know Ray is already represented, too bad)