Brenton’s at it again. He has made a manageable list of canonical works, “for those who are inclined to soak in this great tradition.” I’m all for that. Let a hundred Harolds bloom. But it seems like missing the point of (a) lists of canonical works and (b) the World-Wide Web, if you make one without making a way to keep score.

Click the appropriate button for whether you’ve read the work (1 point), read part of it (half a point), or haven’t read it at all (no points).  I scored 12.5. I resisted the temptation to give bonus points for reading things in their original languages.

Read Partly Nope
Foundational Work (Theocratic Age)
Homer
• The Iliad (Greek, 8th BCE)
• The Odyssey (Greek, 8th BCE)
Virgil, The Aeneid (Latin, 29-19 BCE)
The Bible
Late Medieval and Renaissance (Aristocratic Age)
Dante Alighieri, Comedia/The Divine Comedy (Italian, 1308-1320)
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (English, 1475)
Shakespeare
• Love’s Labour’s Lost (English, 1597)
• Hamlet (English, 1603)
• Othello (English, 1604)
• King Lear (English, 1606)
• Macbeth (English, 1611)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Spanish, 1605)
Moliere, The Misanthrope (French, 1666)
John Milton, Paradise Lost (English, 1667)
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (English, 1791)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (German, 1772-1790)
19th Century+
William Wordsworth
• ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (English, 1800)
• ‘Tintern Abbey’ (English, 1798)
Jane Austen, Persuasion (English, 1818)
Walt Whitman,
• Leaves of Grass (English, 1855)
• ‘Song of Myself’ (English, 1855)
Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (English, 1800s)
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (English, )
George Eliot, Middlemarch (English, 1874)
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt (Norwegian, 1876)
Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad (Russian, 1896-1904)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time = Remembrance of Things Past (1913)
James Joyce, Ulysses (English, 1922)
Virginia Woolf
• Orlando (English, 1928)
• A Room of One ‘s Own (English, 1929)
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (German, 1917-1919)
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (Spanish, 1941)
Pablo Neruda, Canto General (Spanish, 1938-1950)
Samuel Beckett
• Endgame (English, 1957)
• Murphy (English, 1938)
• Waiting for Godot (English, 1953)