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?
