Recommended Reading

"Hello, Professor Pearce,

I am hesitant to ask you this question, as it is a very large one, but I cannot think of anyone else I know of who is qualified to answer it, and whose taste and ethical standards I would reasonably trust.

Several other Thomas Aquinas College graduates and I were recently discussing that we'd like to broaden our experience with literature, but we're uncertain where to begin. I myself have noticed, while thumbing through the items I catalog for the library, that there seems to be a massive amount of literature not worth the paper it's printed on. Do you have a list of works, from various periods and styles, that you might recommend to us?

In Christ,
Mrs. Emily"

In reply:

"Dear Emily,

This is a particularly frenetic time for me so please forgive the relative brevity of this response. I hope that the following cursory list will suffice for your present purposes. If you'd like something more detailed, please write to me again in a couple of months when, hopefully, I'll have more time at my disposal. Any way, here goes, roughly chronologically:

Homer: The Iliad and Odyssey (of course!)
Aeschylus: Oresteia
Sophocles: Oedipus Cycle
Virgil: The Aeneid
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
Augustine: Confessions, and The City of God
Anonymous: Beowulf (Tolkien or Heaney translations)
Other Anglo-Saxon Poems: The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Seafarer
Dante: Divine Comedy (Penguin Classics edition for Dorothy L. Sayers' superb Thomistic notes)
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Anonymous: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien translation)
Anonymous: The Song of Roland
Thomas More: Utopia
Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare: All! But begin with Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, etc.
Robert Southwell: Poems
Donne: Poems
Herbert: Poems
Crashaw: Poems
St. John of the Cross: Poems
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Milton: Paradise Lost
Dryden: Religio Laici, and The Hind and the Panther
Boswell: Life of Johnson
Gray: Elegy in a Country Churchyard
Goldsmith: The Deserted Village
Mazzoni: Il Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)
Blake: Poems
Wordsworth: Poems
Coleridge: Poems
Byron: Poems
Shelley: Poems
Keats: Poems
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
Huysmans: A Rebours, La Bas, and En Route (La Bas has an horrifically sordid depiction of a Black Mass which is not for the squeamish)
Newman: Loss and Gain, Apologia pro Vita Sua, and his Poems
Hopkins: Poems
Stevenson: Jekyll and Hyde
Dickens: A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Dostoevky: Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and Notes from Underground
Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Earnest
Chesterton: The Man Who was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Ball and the Cross, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, and his poem, Lepanto.
Belloc: The Path to Rome, The Four Men, Belinda and his Poems
Baring: Robert Peckham, Cat's Cradle, C, and many of his Poems
R.H. Benson: Come Rack! Come Rope!, Lord of the World, and his Poems
Wilfred Owen: Poems
Siegfried Sassoon: Poems
T.S. Eliot: All of his Poems but particularly The Waste Land and Four Quartets, also his play, Murder in the Cathedral
Roy Campbell: Poems
Greene: The Power and the Glory
Waugh: A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited
Orwell: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Animal Farm
C.S. Lewis: All of his fictional works are marvellous
Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, his essay On Fairy Stories, his short story Leaf by Niggle and his poem Mythopoeia
Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago
Bolt: A Man for All Seasons

This should keep you busy for a while!

God bless,

JP"

While a good number of these works are already included the TAC Great Books program, there's still a great many works that aren't, so I thought I'd share the wealth. :)