And don’t miss The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien!
You’re going to need a lot more than a year. There are no 52 books that get you the “Well-Read” Club’s Secret Decoder Ring. Being well-read isn’t something you do and are finished with, it’s a lifestyle. A well-read person is someone who reads all the time. Not just classics, but comtemporary works. Non-fiction, journalism, critical theory, you name it. It’s not a result, it’s a process. Read a book a week for the rest of your life, and they can put “Well-read” on your tombstone.
Miller’s right, but I’ll still mention Life of Johnson by Boswell. Interesting to read, and full of quotations you can still flatten people with today.
Miller. you’re right, I agree, but there have to be some works that are universally agreed upon to be the most important, say, forty or so works in the English language (I know the OP didn’t limit it to English, but since it would be vastly more difficult to do world lit, I’m gonna stick to the mother tongue). For instance,
You have to start with Beowulf. First great epic in the English language, and there’s a quite brilliant new translation by a Nobel laureate out, so there’s really no excuse to leave this off the list.
Then you can leap (unless you’re into Old English, which is pretty cool in its way…) to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales because it’s probably the most important work written after Beowulf. And, hey, it rhymes!
Then it gets a little muddy, because more people who spoke our language started picking up pens…
You gotta hit Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, though.
Something by Kit Marlowe belongs on the list, like Dr. Faustus or The Jew of Malta. And, if you use Marlowe to teach yourself about Elizabethan tragedy, teach yourself about comedy with something by honest Ben Jonson, like Volpone or The Silent Woman.
Then, since he’s, without a doubt, the most important figure in the history of English literature, I’d suggest at least two plays by Shakespeare (avoid the sonnets like the plague!!). My personal favorites are Measure for Measure and Macbeth, but for the sake of this list, I’d recommend Henry IV, part I (it’s funny 'cause of Falstaff, but it’s not a comedy, and comedies weren’t Shakespeare’s strong suit anyway) and King Lear.
Somewhere around this time the King James Version of the Bible was written, and that should probably be at least breezed through by any student of English literature. I wouldn’t inflict the Geneva Bible on anyone but the most studious, though…
Moving right along, we end up with some blind guy that wrote what is almost certainly the best epic ever written, Paradise Lost. Milton was a jerk, but he could write like nobody’s business.
Whew. Well, we got some of the weighty tomes outta the way (that’d be the Milton and the Spenser, for those of you keeping score), we can move on to the lighter, airier Romantics. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is probably an important landmark on your journey, and Coleridge kinda invented the whole Romantic thing (well, I suppose Wordsworth helped), so you should read it. Oh, yeah, and Coleridge had this friend with some a wife who liked to write. What was her name again? Oh, yeah, Mary Shelley. Probably a good idea to read Frankenstein, if only to understand The Munsters better.
Speaking of Romantics, though, you can’t breeze through that period without spending quite a lot of time with a certain Mister Keats. If you’re not up to a whole Collected Poems, make sure you definitely take care of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.”
Keats was pretty kooky, but the resident whacko of English literature (and this is a genre that includes the Brownings, mind you) has to be William Blake. He’s got to be required reading on the quest to become well-read, and, for a sampling of his work, I’d recommend either The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
Hmmm… Lessee, I’m sure I missed some loose ends… Jonathan Swift is probably pretty important, so be sure to check out Gulliver’s Travels and, if that gets too heavy, swing by “A Modest Proposal” for a hoot. Speaking of hoots, though, Alexander Pope is always good for one. Just so’s you can be sure that some epics had a sense of humour, read The Rape of the Lock. Oh, and, as someone else mentioned, Boswell’s Life of Johnson is probably the best and most entertatining biography I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. That could be because I like Dr. Johnson a lot, though. Hmmm… Oh, yeah, you should probably have a familiarity with Wuthering Heights, though I wouldn’t recommend it more than once.
Ooo, and that kind of brings us into the Victorians. Tennyson’s important (“Ulysses,” “Idylls of the King,” and definitely In Memoriam), as is Dickens (Great Expectations is my recommendation, but if you don’t want to read that 'un, David Copperfield’s kind of important).
Oooo, okay, I guess I’ve been ignoring American “literature” for long enough. I refuse to recommend James Fenimore Cooper or Emily Dickinson, but I will put my weight (such as it is) behind Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Ernest Hemingway rather famously said that American literature began and ended with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, exept for the “ended” part, I’m inclined to agree. If you only read one book written in America, read it. If you read two, well, read The Sound and the Fury, or, really, anything by William Faulkner. Well, anything but his poetry.
Well, I guess Faulkner brought us into consideration of the twentieth century, and it’s difficult, without the distance of history, to choose which works are going to survive. Like I said, my money’s definitely on Faulkner, but there were some other good writers in English this century. T. S. Eliot, for one. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock” would probably be best suited for the purposes of a list like this, if only because The Waste Land is too monolithic (and yeah, I realise this is the same list with Paradise Lost on it). Ralph Ellison didn’t write much, but the one novel that he published in his lifetime (Invisible Man) was worth a stack of Nobel prizes. The other important twentieth century poet (I like him better than Eliot, but just barely) is William Butler Yeats, and you should definitely check out a sampling of his work (because it changed so much over his lifetime) in a Selected or Collected Poems. Joseph Conrad was also pretty important for the last century, particularly Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness. Another person who immigrated to this language, one Vladimir Nabokov, will probably outlive his time period with Lolita or (if there’s any justice) Pale Fire.
The only other writer worthy of note that I can think of mentioning is Flannery O’Connor. The Violent Bear it Away is worth many many times its weight in gold.
Wow. That turned into a really long post, but it didn’t start out that way, I swear…
i think the best thing to do is go to a library or bookstore, pick up a book that catches your eye, read the first page. if you like the style, keep reading, if not, move on.
i’d say you have to read books from other cultures and traditions than your own as a definite.
if you don’t like a “classic” don’t force yourself to read it. read for pleasure.
an easy way in is to read all the childrens classics you never got a chance to read as a kid.
The Jungle Book
Just-So stories
Little Women
Narnia series
The Hobbit and Lotr
Gullivers Travels
Harry Potter, whatever floats your boat.
then move on to whatever you fancy.
Shakespeare
(R+J, Macbeth, As you like it, the Tempest are easy enough)
Austen and the Brontes
Dickens
Thackeray
Hardy
Trollope
Hemingway
Steinbeck
Scott Fitzgerald
Vonnegut
Heller
Toni Morrisson
Alice Walker
Arundhati Roy
Vikram Seth
Salman Rushdie
Katsuo Ishiguro
JM Coetze
personally i always take
The Sermons of Martin Luther King
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
and a book of poetry with me when i travel, as a sort of security blanket.
maybe you’d prefer factual books, biography or philosophy.
mix the old with the new, read Utopia and then Germaine Greer.
read the Comunist manifesto, something by John Maynard Keynes and then Mein Kampf (but only if you want to, i don’t).
read the things great people have written about themselves, and then what other people wrote about them.
read whatever you want to.
it all fits in somewhere in our sultural consciousness.
an intelligent comment about an obscure book, is often more welcome than a hackneyed and often-heard cliche about a “classic”.
enjoy yourself, whatever you read.
Here’s a few suggestions, that you may be able to get through quickly, but allow you to make a long step in your “well- read” goal.
Flatland by Abbot
Candide by Voltaire
The Prince by Macchiavelli
Zen and the Art of Archery by Herrigel
A Modest Proposal by Swift
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway
I estimate you could blow through these in week. Then you can get through all the great suggestions above.