Books meme with a Classical twist

[primsong]

I noted the 100+ title "what books have you read" meme going by and wondered if I might find somewhere a comparable sort of list to use that focused instead on titles considered a part of being classically educated or similar. Here's a compilation of gleanings from three such lists.

As is commonly done with such things, I've put the ones I've read in bold, the ones I intend to read in the reasonably near future in italics (in my case, this means I now own a copy and it is literally waiting in a pile). Feel free to pass it on, or adjust as needed.  Some of these I don't think I would ever read, but who knows? Perhaps.

Novel

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
Le Morte d'Arther (Sir Thomas Malory)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) (pick a Dickens, any Dickens...)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (never liked this book, but I can say it's been read)

Autobiography, Memoir and Essays

The Confessions (Augustine)
The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne)
In Praise of Folly (Desiderius Erasmus) (I love his Enchiridion also)
Letters (Marcus Tullius Cicero) (I would add *any* of Cicero's essays, esp. the one on old age)
Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis)
Meditations on First Philosophy (Rene Descartes)
Orthodoxy (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) (this was excellent)
Walden (Henry David Thoreau) (boring and supercilious, but I did read it)

History

The Bible
The Histories (Herodotus)
The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
The Republic (Plato)
Lives (Plutarch)
City of God (Augustine)
The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
Utopia (Sir Thomas More)
The Social Contract (Jean Jaques Rousseau)
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon)
Democracy in America (de Tocqueville)

Drama

Agamemnon (Aeschylus)
Oedipus the King (Sophocles)
Medea (Euripides)
The Birds (Aristophanes)
Poetics (Aristotle) (want to read this one too, but don't have a copy yet)
Richard III (Shakespeare)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Tartuffe (Moliere)
The Way of the World (William Congreve)
A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen)
Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
No Exit (Jean Paul Sartre)

Poetry

The Iliad (Homer)
The Odyssey (Homer)
Odes (Horace)
Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Sonnets (William Shakespeare)
Paradise Lost (John Milton)
Idylls of the King (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Selected Poetry (William Wordsworth)
The Complete Poems (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
(note - why was Coleridge singled out by listmakers, I wonder? I've an entire shelf of other poets)

Comments

[archersangel]

i've never read any of those. i've read a few things in the Bible though.

[primsong]

Sounds like you have a lot of good reading to enjoy in the future, then! :-) I know most folks will run into some of them, like The Scarlet Letter and Huck Finn via assignments in English Lit. classes in high school or college, but depending on the teachers you land it can vary quite a bit. My English teacher in HS gave us Le Morte d'Arthur and Canterbury Tales as reading assignments, I don't know if I would've read them otherwise. Canterbury has moments, but I don't think I would read it through again, the other is Arthurian legends and quite interesting. I'm reading Plutarch's Lives now, not quite done with it, and it's very enjoyable.