reading (modern) classics

My mom has this theory that my syllabi in school, especially high school, were determined largely by my teachers' fear of cheating. This is the only way that she can think of to explain the fact that, for example, when we read Mark Twain, we read Puddinhead Wilson and not Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, and when we read Steinbeck, we read Cannery Row, not Of Mice and Men. I don't know if she's right, but I do know that it has produced me, a literature nerd who is constantly being asked "What, you didn't read that in school?"

This is not improved by the fact that, left to my own devices, I read a lot of poetry and a lot of more contemporary science fiction. I do read some "classics" but mostly the Greco-Roman ones, so I've read Aeschylus' Agamemnon in probably three different translations at least but when it comes to the English canon, I've got nothing.

Well, no, I do have a few areas pretty well covered. I took an excellent Jane Austen class in college[1] so I've read everything of hers and my dad is a massive fan of both Dickens and audiobooks so I have listened to all the Great Expectations and David Copperfield that I ever intend to,[2] though I'm thinking of giving A Tale of Two Cities a try. I also read a lot of the classics of African-American literature in middle and high school (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, etc.).

So I've solicited books recommendations from my parents, my friends, my Aunt Gina, and lists like PBS's "Great American Read". I don't have much in the way of rules, only that the book must have been written in English and I won't include more than one book per author. I'm prioritizing (a) books that are highly influential on later authors and (b) books that I've gotten the most shit for not having read and (c) books that seem to align with my interests.[3]

Here's what I've got so far:

  1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
  2. I, Robot, Isaac Asimov
  3. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  4. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  5. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  6. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  7. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
  8. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  9. Rebecca, Daphne du Marier
  10. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  11. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  12. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  13. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
  14. Maurice, E. M. Forster
  15. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  16. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  17. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  18. Ulysses, James Joyce
  19. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  20. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
  21. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  22. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  23. Paradise Lost, John Milton
  24. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  25. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  26. 1984, George Orwell
  27. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
  28. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  29. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  30. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  31. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
  32. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

I think this is a good place to start. Some of these books I've simply never gotten around to, but I can already tell that my primary problem is going to be the handful of books that I've been deliberately avoiding for a variety of reasons: I know that Beloved, for example, is going to be rough going because of its subject matter and then there's Ulysses, which is, well, Ulysses. But I guess in the end this is pretty much entirely aspirational, so there's very little pressure. I am absolutely not putting a time limit on this; I'm not even going to commit myself to actually finishing any of these books if I really hate them, but I do want to give it a try.

  1. It was an introduction to critical theory by way of Austen, so we read all six of her complete novels with a new style of critical theory each week: Sense and Sensibility with queer theory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Pride and Prejudice with Marxist critiques by Raymond Williams, Mansfield Park with psychoanalytic theory by Shoshonna Feldman. It was a brilliantly constructed class that I took on a whim and it's maybe my favorite thing I did in college.^
  2. Said father is currently throwing all his social capital behind convincing me to read his all-time favorite book, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, a shockingly miserable novel that it seems no one in the history of the world save him has ever enjoyed.^
  3. Beloved, for example, is frequently discussed in the context of trauma theory; for another, my dad told me that The Red Badge of Courage reminds him of Star Trek. (It's a pretty nebulous criterion.)^