"The most renowned works of literature by history’s greatest authors," according to the Editorial Advisory Board of Easton Press. It is an interesting mix because it goes back to ancient times, covers the globe, and includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Easton Press sells the whole set in very fancy covers, but all of these books are available in about a zillion different editions.Those I have read are in red. I've read 63 of them, plus bits and pieces of others in high school or college, but I don't count those as finished. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue.
As always, if anyone else is reading the books on this list, please feel free to leave a comment with a link to your progress report and I will add it to this post.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Gulliver's Travels by Johnathan Swift
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (reviewed here)*
A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling*
The Odyssey by Homer
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (reviewed here)
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (reviewed here)
Candide by Voltaire
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper*
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Collected Poems by Robert Browning
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (reviewed here)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Collected Poems by John Keats
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Collected Poems by Robert Frost
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Iliad by Homer
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas*
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Aesop's Fables by Aesop
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas*
Politics and Poetics by Aristotle
The Aeneid by Virgil
Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Pygmalion and Candida by George Bernard Shaw
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe*
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Beowulf
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The History of Early Rome by Livy
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Alice's Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Dracula by Bram Stoker (reviewed here)
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Republic by Plato
Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding*
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
Silas Marnerby George Eliot
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Confessions by St. Augustine
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler*
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here)*
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain*
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
NOTES
* Marks those that I have in the fancy Easton Press edition, thanks to a lovely Christmas gift from Hubby.
OTHERS READING THESE BOOKS
(If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with your links to any progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.)
Visiting your blog could be dangerous for me--lists are too tempting. There's a lot of my favorites on there.
ReplyDeleteRose City Reader, I'm amazed at some of them that you *haven't* read -- because I know you are such a prolific reader. For instance, Crime and Punishment is one of my favorites. But I know you have about 1,000,000 lists, so...
ReplyDeleteRose City Reader, I knew you would love that list. I almost e-mailed it to you. And I know you had to e-mail Easton Press to get it because I know it's not posted on their Web site. Impressive number in blue. Stop by and say hi to Josephine, won't you?
ReplyDeleteOh, yes -- it is shameful that I haven't read C&P yet. Not that it gets me off the hook, but it is loaded on my iPog and I will get to it this year. Same with War & Peace and Swann's Way.
ReplyDeleteAll I can say is that "Books I am Ashamed I Have Not Read (Yet)" is definitely the LONGEST book list I am working on.
Oh, I'm not saying you should be "ashamed" -- you have read MANY more books than I have. You still win as most prolific reader I know in cyberspace!
ReplyDeleteI was just surprised that you got through school without reading C&P, for example. I think you'd probably like it.
I know! I can't believe I've never read C&P -- or W&P for that matter.
ReplyDeleteBut don't worry, I'm not really "ashamed" about my (better name) "Books I Regret Not Having Read Yet" list. I'll get to them someday.
Laura -- Feel free to email any lists you may think I'll like. I love that idea! I actually found this one on Lists of Bests when I didn't see it on the Easton web site. I hope it is accurate.
I have no desire to read W&P, to be honest. I blame on the movie, which was so long I kept falling asleep. I'd try again and fall asleep again. I tend to hate movies of books, so that was a mistake. Maybe someday I'll try the book....
ReplyDeleteMovies can really do terrible things to books, even changing the plots and endings sometimes! The latest version of Anna Karenina was a botch job, and I heard the ending for Jane Eyre does not leave him blind. I like how you did your list with the colors, and 49 is a great number - you've beat me by 2 at the current date.
ReplyDeleteI love lists and this one is no exception! I've been making a conscious effort to read more classics in the past five years and so I've actually read a number of titles from the list (even though I'm not reading *from* the list!)
ReplyDeleteI'm currently participating in a year-long- read-along of Tolstoy's WAR & PEACE and I have to say I'm loving it! I'm not sure what my reservations were, other than it's a gabillion pages long; but it is amazingly readable in that it's basic linear narrative, very straight-forward and conspicuously absent of esoteric or otherwise obtuse language.
dog eared copy - Glad you like this list. It is the one I turn to when I want a little inspiration to read a "classic." I'll get to War & Peace one of these days. I am sure I will like it, although it is long. Last year I read Crime & Punishment, this year I read The Count of Monte Cristo, and next year I will read War & Peace. One huge classic a year.
ReplyDelete