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Boosk, of the classic persuasion
Years ago, Kathryn Cramer saw a yard-sale sign which proudly proclaimed the sale of "Toys--Furniture--Boosk". She decided that once "books" reach a certain critical mass, they transform into masses of "boosk".
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supergee pointed out the College Board list of "101 Great Books". Mentally, I've added many of these to the to-be-read boosk pile in my head.
Books in bold I've read; authors in italics I've read other major works by the same writer not on this list, but not that particular book.
(I've actually never read Hamlet, but I've seen two abridged productions and one complete production. Also, it is the water in which English-language literature swims, so I've inhaled a lot while drowning.)
supergee pointed out the College Board list of "101 Great Books". Mentally, I've added many of these to the to-be-read boosk pile in my head. Books in bold I've read; authors in italics I've read other major works by the same writer not on this list, but not that particular book.
| Anonymous | Beowulf |
| Achebe, Chinua | Things Fall Apart |
| Agee, James | A Death in the Family |
| Austen, Jane | Pride and Prejudice |
| Baldwin, James | Go Tell It on the Mountain |
| Beckett, Samuel | Waiting for Godot |
| Bellow, Saul | The Adventures of Augie March |
| Brontë, Charlotte | Jane Eyre |
| Brontë, Emily | Wuthering Heights |
| Camus, Albert | The Stranger |
| Cather, Willa | Death Comes for the Archbishop |
| Chaucer, Geoffrey | The Canterbury Tales |
| Chekhov, Anton | The Cherry Orchard |
| Chopin, Kate | The Awakening |
| Conrad, Joseph | Heart of Darkness |
| Cooper, James Fenimore | The Last of the Mohicans |
| Crane, Stephen | The Red Badge of Courage |
| Dante | Inferno |
| de Cervantes, Miguel | Don Quixote |
| Defoe, Daniel | Robinson Crusoe |
| Dickens, Charles | A Tale of Two Cities |
| Dostoyevsky, Fyodor | Crime and Punishment |
| Douglass, Frederick | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass |
| Dreiser, Theodore | An American Tragedy |
| Dumas, Alexandre | The Three Musketeers |
| Eliot, George | The Mill on the Floss |
| Ellison, Ralph | Invisible Man |
| Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Selected Essays |
| Faulkner, William | As I Lay Dying |
| Faulkner, William | The Sound and the Fury |
| Fielding, Henry | Tom Jones |
| Fitzgerald, F. Scott | The Great Gatsby |
| Flaubert, Gustave | Madame Bovary |
| Ford, Ford Madox | The Good Soldier |
| Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Faust |
| Golding, William | Lord of the Flies |
| Hardy, Thomas | Tess of the d'Urbervilles |
| Hawthorne, Nathaniel | The Scarlet Letter |
| Heller, Joseph | Catch 22 |
| Hemingway, Ernest | A Farewell to Arms |
| Homer | The Iliad |
| Homer | The Odyssey |
| Hugo, Victor | The Hunchback of Notre Dame |
| Hurston, Zora Neale | Their Eyes Were Watching God |
| Huxley, Aldous | Brave New World |
| Ibsen, Henrik | A Doll's House |
| James, Henry | The Portrait of a Lady |
| James, Henry | The Turn of the Screw |
| Joyce, James | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
| Kafka, Franz | "The Metamorphosis" |
| Kingston, Maxine Hong | The Woman Warrior |
| Lee, Harper | To Kill a Mockingbird |
| Lewis, Sinclair | Babbitt |
| London, Jack | The Call of the Wild |
| Mann, Thomas | The Magic Mountain |
| Marquez, Gabriel García | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| Melville, Herman | Bartleby the Scrivener |
| Melville, Herman | Moby Dick |
| Miller, Arthur | The Crucible |
| Morrison, Toni | Beloved |
| O'Connor, Flannery | A Good Man is Hard to Find |
| O'Neill, Eugene | Long Day's Journey into Night |
| Orwell, George | Animal Farm |
| Pasternak, Boris | Doctor Zhivago |
| Plath, Sylvia | The Bell Jar |
| Poe, Edgar Allan | Selected Tales |
| Proust, Marcel | Swann's Way |
| Pynchon, Thomas | The Crying of Lot 49 |
| Remarque, Erich Maria | All Quiet on the Western Front |
| Rostand, Edmond | Cyrano de Bergerac |
| Roth, Henry | Call It Sleep |
| Salinger, J.D. | The Catcher in the Rye |
| Shakespeare, William | Hamlet |
| Shakespeare, William | Macbeth |
| Shakespeare, William | A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| Shakespeare, William | Romeo and Juliet |
| Shaw, George Bernard | Pygmalion |
| Shelley, Mary | Frankenstein |
| Silko, Leslie Marmon | Ceremony |
| Solzhenitsyn, Alexander | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich |
| Sophocles | Antigone |
| Sophocles | Oedipus Rex |
| Steinbeck, John | The Grapes of Wrath |
| Stevenson, Robert Louis | Treasure Island |
| Stowe, Harriet Beecher | Uncle Tom's Cabin |
| Swift, Jonathan | Gulliver's Travels |
| Thackeray, William | Vanity Fair |
| Thoreau, Henry David | Walden |
| Tolstoy, Leo | War and Peace |
| Turgenev, Ivan | Fathers and Sons |
| Twain, Mark | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
| Voltaire | Candide |
| Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. | Slaughterhouse-Five |
| Walker, Alice | The Color Purple |
| Wharton, Edith | The House of Mirth |
| Welty, Eudora | Collected Stories |
| Whitman, Walt | Leaves of Grass |
| Wilde, Oscar | The Picture of Dorian Gray |
| Williams, Tennessee | The Glass Menagerie |
| Woolf, Virginia | To the Lighthouse |
| Wright, Richard | Native Son |
(I've actually never read Hamlet, but I've seen two abridged productions and one complete production. Also, it is the water in which English-language literature swims, so I've inhaled a lot while drowning.)
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I finally got around to reading To Kill a Mockingbird after hearing a bit of it read aloud at a Passage Party. (Basically, a party in which people take turns reading all kinds of short passages aloud to one another for several hours. Also, there's food. An excellent practice.) I carried the book around for about a week, during which people who noticed it -- waitresses, friends, strangers on the street -- kept stopping to say how much they loved that book. The public is better-read than we think.
You really must read Hamlet. How else can you properly enjoy Tom Stoppard plays?
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