There have been lots of fascinating lists of personal canons of great books among lit bloggers and I’ve succumbed to peer pressure and made my own list. As I was thinking about my list I realized that the ancient authors are embarrassingly predictable. So I’ve broken my canon into two parts, ancient and everything else.
Ancient Authors:
Homer, Iliad
Presocratic Philosophers, The Main Fragments in Ancient Greek
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Euripides, Trojan Women, Medea
Sopocles, Oedipus, Antigone
Plato, Symposium
Aristotle, Poetics
Catullus, poems
Vergil, Aeneid
Seneca, everything he wrote, especially The Trojan Women
Cicero De Senectute, Pro Caelio
Ovid Metamorphoses, Heroides
Propertius, Elegies (Many read Catullus and Ovid and unfortunately bypass Propertius. But his poems are just as good and important.)
Lucan The Civil War (A very underappreciated epic from the Latin Silver Age)
Everything Else:
James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad
Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows and The Sexual Night
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus and Coming
John Wiliams, Augustus and Stoner (Stoner is his more popular novel, but Augustus is brilliant!)
Anne Carson, Nay Rather, The Bakkhai (This is being published in the US in the fall and it is stunning.)
Christopher Logue, War Music
Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight
Christa Wolfe, Medea
Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Sandford Friedman, Conversations with Beethoven
Derek Walcott, Omeros
Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow
Sergei Lebedev, Oblivion and The Year of the Comet
Stuart Shotwell, Edmund Persuader, Tomazina’s Folly (a little know author, both books are 1500 pages each and some of the best modern writing I’ve ever encountered)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Jane Austen, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice
Teffi, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me
Of course all of this is subject to change according to the year, my mood, the weather, etc. What are the books on your personal canon?
The Book Binder's Daughter 
Interesting list! I have literally just discovered Anne Carson and your reference to Nay Rather, The Bakkhai really piques my interest. If you had to pick just one of those books, which would be your favourite?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am not sure if I could choose! And I have so much of Carson’s work yet to explore. But the Bakkhai is stunning!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d include Bernhard Henry Green. Somerset Maugham Waugh Hesse Böll on mine
LikeLiked by 1 person
All excellent choices Stu. I’ve really been enjoying Henry Green!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes nice see nyrb bring out new editions I did a Henry Green week five years ago as I felt then he’d gone out fashion
LikeLiked by 2 people
I remember you hosting Henry Green week, Stu! Good times! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fascinating to read your list, Melissa. So pleased to see Logue’s Homer there.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is a great list and also a great idea (I’m copying down book titles from them all!)
I wish you’d suggested translations for all your classics (a lot of work I know). I just saw Charlotte Mendelson on Twitter placing Gavin Douglas’ Aeneid on her list – I would never have thought of that!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was actually thinking of the ancient authors I’ve translated myself and not considering the translations. I like Fitzgerald and Fagles translations of the Aeneid. I also love Seamus Heaney’s translation of Aeneid VI.
LikeLike
What a fascinating list! I would have trouble with mine as it would constantly change – but it would include Mervyn Peake, Virginia Woolf, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Calvino, Perec and a whole host of Russians too numerous to mention…. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I would have trouble keeping the list down to a respectable size, I think.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, it was hard to get it down to this size.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As others have said, a very interesting list, suitably eclectic given the diversity of your reading. As for my own personal canon, I would probably veer towards writers ahead of specific books – Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Taylor would almost certainly feature, possibly Javier Marias too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wonderful list, Melissa! From your modern list I have read only Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. So there are a lot of new books for me to read. I am adding all of them to my TBR list. On the ancient ones, I have a question. Why Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and not The Oresteia? 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Of the trilogy The Agamemnon is my favorite by far. I am a bit luke warm on The Electra and The Libation Bearers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Melissa. Thanks so much for your list! I can’t wait to read some of the books there!
LikeLike
I just finished reading Agamemnon from The Oresteia trilogy, Melissa! So beautiful! Loved the imagery, beautiful sentences and the inspiring and stylish dialogue! Thanks so much for inspiring me! Looking forward to reading Libation Bearers and Eumenides tomorrow. I discovered that Sophocles and Euripides have written plays called Electra which is on the same topic. Have you read them? (Of course, you have 🙂 ) What do you think about them?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I actually prefer Sophocles Electra but both are great! I hope you enjoy the rest of the Oresteia! The Agamemnon was one of the best pieces of literature I have ever translated from the Greek!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, Melissa! I will read Sophocles’ Electra next after finishing the Oresteia. So wonderful to know that you translated the Agamemnon! Is it possible for me to read? Can you share it please, if it is okay?
LikeLike
I would love to share it with you but I no longer have the translation I originally did. It was quite a few years ago and I wish I had kept it. But maybe I ought to work on a new one and post it on my blog a little at a time. I’ve been translating a little Latin poetry so I ought to throw some Greek into the mix too! Tj assnks for the inspiration!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sorry to know that you no longer have that translation. But so nice to know that you are thinking of translating it again! Looking forward to reading it! This is so cool!
LikeLike
Very intriguing mix of familiar and unknown here! I’m very interested to read Augustus — I enjoy fiction set in the ancient world. On my list I would definitely put Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Robertson Davies, and Ursula K. LeGuin.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have a couple of signed first editions of Thornton Wilder. My grandfather knew him when he lived in New Haven.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jealous!
LikeLike
Glad to see Antal Szerb in there. And wondered if you’d read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, which I think knocks spots off Jane Eyre, as well as being the first novel I’m aware of with an open/ alternative ending…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I liked Villette and The Professor but Jane Eyre is still my favorite Bronte book! The cliffhanger ending drove me crazy!
LikeLike
Pingback: A Personal Canon | John Pistelli
Funny, I was on a long walk yesterday and it occurred to me that it’s been awhile since I did one of these lists (I used to make one every few years but it’s been more than 10 now) and I started thinking of the possbilities and, today, find your list! I hadn’t heard of Edmund Persuader (I must have missed your post, or it was before I was following your reading) but have marked it TBR now; it sounds very Middlemarch-y and because that’s pretty much the only favourite title we have in common otherwise *grins*,I’m doubly interested in it now!
LikeLike
Pingback: An Addendum to my Personal Canon |
Pingback: Book Review – The Oresteia by Aeschylus | Vishy's Blog
Pingback: What’s in your personal canon? – The Emerald City Book Review
Pingback: A Personal Canon | vogliodio
I was looking to expand my WP reader list, typed in ‘Szerb,’ and got your blog. I see you’ve read Journey By Moonlight. Whose translation did you read? I read it last year, and it didn’t change the way I feel about life. I just finished The Pendragon Legend, which I loved.
LikeLike
I read the translation that was published by the New York Review of Books. I wouldn’t say it changed the way I feel about life, but I thought the plot was full of clever twists that I didn’t expect and that’s why I liked the story.
LikeLiked by 1 person