I made a list of my favorite books. These are works that are my favorite, but that I would also feel comfortable nominating as "great" works, either surely or potentially great classics of the Western tradition. There's little diversity among the authorship (10 males, 9 of them white--for all my progressive politics and progressive literary theory, I'm a Bloomian conservative on literature, I guess). If I had read all of Book Two I would include Don Quixote, in a different mood I might include The Odyssey, and four of my favorite authors (Hemingway, Faulkner, King, and Sartre) don't find any books on the list. A "book" is considered here to be a novel, a play, a long poem, or a collection of poetry (written as a collection).
The Brothers Karamozov (Dostoevsky)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
The Magus (Fowles)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Fowles)
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Wicked (Maguire)
Crow (Hughes)
Paradise Lost (Milton)
M. Butterfly (Hwang)
Young Man Luther (Erikson)
Since I need som projects on this blog, I will probably devote a longer post to each of these works in the future. Feel free to comment on the list or add your own. You can use any standard you'd like for "favorite," but again, my standard involves feeling comfortable replacing "favorite" with "great."
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Here is my list of great books, in no particular order:
ReplyDeleteWicked (maguire)
White Teeth (smith)
House of the Spirits (allende)
Death and the Maiden (dorfman)
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
1984 (orwell)
The Giver (lowry)
I had more the other day when I was thinking of this, but now I forget. But these ones are really good, and they changed me or affected me in some way.