*Cracks knuckles in preparation* ;)
First a Top 10 List of Shakespeare Plays to read/watch (not books, so won't count them specifically) and then a Top 20 for the books. So, first a Bard Top 10 (not a tricky lsit to make at all...) ;)
1. Hamlet (Cracks Top 10s for English & WORLD Lit...I'd rank it #1 for Eng Lit myself)
2. King Lear (Shaw said a better tragedy will never be written...he may be right)
3. Macbeth (If I do become a professor, THIS is the tragedy I'd introduce the Bard with)
4. Henry V ("ENGLAND--FUCK YEAH!" before "AMERICA--FUCK YEAH!" was a thing) ;)
5. Twelfth Night (Best Comedy and an EXCELLENT examination of gender roles)
6. Richard III (I can't give a quick answer why this one's so great it just sort of...is...)
7. Othello (Best Shakespeare villain in Iago, and just a plethora of fantastic features)
8. The Tempest (Shakespeare's last solo play, fantastic, and BOY in a post-colonial world...)
9. The Merchant of Venice (So much in here...Shylock and Portia ALONE make it Top 10)
10. The Taming of the Shrew (A tough choice here, but this wins for enduring popularity and one of Shakespeare's most memorable, vocal, vibrant female leads)
And this could easily be a Top 10, but we'd best stop there or I'll be here forever. :)
And now onto the books, four things before we begin:
I. I'll count epic poems and novels alike, I think that's fair,
II. I'll note that this is a list with at least two notable exceptions--Cervantes' Don Quixote and Tolstoy's War and Peace--as while I've read parts of both I don't think I've read enough to adequately "rank" them against the others here...so consider them as honorary picks, and,
III. No scripture included here...not that they're not great literature, but that's a whole other discussion, so to avoid controversy, I'm just leaving them all to the side, and
IV. One work per author--so, here we go then...
20. The Fall, Albert Camus (Probably less well-known than The Stranger or the Plague, but it's the one I personally prefer, and an excellent example of French Existentialism)
19. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterly's Lover and Women In Love could go here, but this is the most representative of all of Lawrence's social and sexual ideals)
18. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (Arguably the first great American novel really dealing with American life, it remains one of our most important novels)
17. Tess of the D'Urbervillles, Thomas Hardy (A masterpiece of English literature dealing with everything from class to history to spirituality, all with a great, tragic heroine)
16. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (A great example of both 20th century feminism and the Modernist movement, not to mention Woolf's skillful use of style and psyche)
15. Moby Dick, Herman Melville (Another great examination of nature, this time coupled with a look at revenge, man's will, and a classic archetype in Captain Ahab)
14. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (Not even my favorite Bronte SISTER, let alone my favorite Bronte novel, but its early feminism and huge influence is unmistakable)
13. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (The perfect encapsulation of both an entire generation's state as well as the tragic, erm, "impotence" of the human condition)
12. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (One of the most ambitious novels of ever &the pinnacle of Magical Realism and Latin-American Lit)
11. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House also deserve recognition, but this, Dickens' final final full work, wins out atop his great canon)
10. THE GREAT GATSBY, F. Scott Fitzgerald (With Huck Finn, the quintessential "Great American Novel," and a great look at love, capitalism, and hypocrisy in modernity)
9. ULYSSES, James Joyce (The mother of all Modernist novels--a movement I love, if you haven't guessed--with too many innovations and plays on "the Canon" and culture to name)
8. 1984, George Orwell (I maintain it's the single most-important novel of the last century, certainly at least in the Anglosphere, for literature, press, and politics alike)
7. BEOWULF, Anonymous (The first great work in the English language...even if it is "Old English"...great on its own, the Canon it will help create catapults it in importance)
6. PARADISE LOST, John Milton (Milton combines Homeric epic form and the Bible to produce an anti-hero Satan and a great examination of the Judeo-Christian ideology)
5. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Jane Austen (Regardless of my own personal taste, Austen is arguably the most important female novelist ever and this is her masterpiece)
4. LES MISERABLES, Victor Hugo (One of the longest, most complex and immaculate pieces of fiction ever can't be summed up in a parenthetical...and I won't even try)
3. THE DIVINE COMEDY, Dante (Probably the single-most influential work of religious fiction period...so much of what people even think about in religion traces here...)
2. THE ILIAD, Homer (The Old and New Testaments collectively form the foundation for half of all Western culture...and Greco-Roman ideals, exemplified here, form the other half)
1. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Maybe War and Peace or Don Quixote or something else will displace it, but for now, this is my choice for the single greatest fiction book out there...it feels as though Dostoyevsky not only touches on nearly ALL of the ideas and themes expressed in the other 19 in this work, but does so such an attention to psychology, theology, literary expression and philosophy alike that it really does seem as if Freud, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and the Bible are all somehow or another rolled into one here...in terms of exploring the interiority of characters in particular, only Shakespeare himself and MAYBE Woolf and Joyce can compare...if you're Christian, you'll hear a great counter-argument for Atheism and maybe respect it more, and if you're an Atheist like myself you'll see one of the best put rationals for Atheism as well as one of the most persuasive cases against--even if I'm obviously not convinced enough to convert--and it just goes on and on...I can't recommend it enough...and I can't recommend Dostoyevsky enough, who along with Lawrence and Woolf is my favorite novelist...from this to Crime and Punishment to Notes From the Underground to The Idiot and on and on, he really is the pinnacle of the novel format in my opinion, and my pick for the #1 Novelist/Epic Poet of all-time)
Where has the Mediterranean Gone?
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