Poets

• Sylvia Plath
• Emily Dickinson
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Robert Frost

Essay Collection

•  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments – David Foster Wallace (Individual essays: E Unibus Pluram )
• Farther Away -Jonathan Franzen (Individual Essay: “Farther Away”)
• The View From the Cheap Seats – Neil Gaiman (Essay on Libraries)
• “The American Scholar,” “Nature,” “Self-Reliance“- Emerson

Short Stories:

• “Souls Belated” – Edith Wharton
• “Hills Like White Elephants” – Ernest Hemingway
• “The Kreutzer Sonata” – Leo Tolstoy
• “Bobok” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “Poor Folk” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” – Perkins
• “Library of Babel” Jorge Luis Borges
• “The Machine Stops” – E.M. Forster
• “The Death of the Moth” – Virginia Woolf
• “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” – Philip K. Dick
• “When She is Old and I am famous” – Julie Orringer

Classics:

• The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) – Hermann Hesse
• Lord of the Flies– William Golding
• Walden – Thoreau
• Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
• Robinson Crusoe– Daniel Defoe
• East of Eden – John Steinbeck
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• Today I Wrote Nothing – Daniil Kharms (Russian Absurdist)
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Classical:

• Lysistrata – Aristophanes
• Poems– Sappho
• The Republic – Plato
• The Odyssey – Homer
• Fables – Aesop

Children’s Literature

• Peter Pan  (Peter and Wendy specifically) – J.M Barrie
• Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, Charles Perrault Fairy Tales, Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales
• The Swiss Family Robinson – Wyss
• The Arabian Nights
• A Little Princess – Burnett
• A Monster Calls– Patrick Ness
• The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains – Neil Gaiman

Plays

• The Rabbit Hole– David Lindsay-Abaire
• No Exit – Jean-Paul Sartre
• Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw

Memoirs/Biography/Reflections

• George Sand (Aurore Amantine Lucile Dupin)
• George Eliot (Mary-Ann Evans)
• Embers-Richard Wagamese (reflections)
• Memoirs, Dreams, and Reflections – Carl Jung
• Words (Les Mots) – Jean-Paul Sartre

Medieval

• Beowulf
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
• Le Morte D’Arthur – Malory
• Mankind – a cycle play
• The Kalevala  – A Finnish Epic

New Literary Fiction that is Good

• The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
• Ocean Sea – Alessandro Baricco
• If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things-Jon McGregor

Books  I like because of what they are experimenting:

• S.– J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (as print culture)
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (themes, experimentation, post-avant-garde)
• Tree of Codes – Jonathan Safran Foer
• Nox – Anne Carson

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.