The American (and possibly British, but I know less about that really) school system does have a very heavy literature component. By my standards, anyway, which of course are based on my Flemish school system. The amount of required books in HS was very small indeed for me, and most of them weren't even really the classics. Might have something to do with English obviously having a rather larger canon to choose from than Dutch, and with our needing to have more room for foreign languages. And also that we simply read more excerpts, including in the foreign language classes - I've read some Romeo & Juliet in school, alright, but not remotely all of it, and the only entire book I had to read in English was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In French, I don't think we even read a single whole book, just excerpts and short stories. Same in Latin and Greek class - one obviously doesn't have enough time to read even as much as a quarter of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, De Bello Gallico, and so on, so it's just a number of excerpts.

And then a fair amount of the books we *did* have to read were actually freely chosen (well, from a list of options). So classics that were required reading... if I get to three it'll be much.


No real definition, just the books that are generally considered to belong in the canon, I guess. Some are unquestionably so, others are less generally agreed upon. No doubt there are some differences between countries - more local books, perhaps lacking books that are so strongly connected to a given country that they're less relevant elsewhere, etc. Nathaniel Hawthorne for instance strikes me as an author who is very important in the US, but all but ignored elsewhere. To Kill a Mockingbird no doubt has more success abroad, but is still less relevant to non-Americans.

I'm always terrible at choosing a single favourite, so bear with me here... I can't have a longer list than Camilla, surely, so it's all good.

From Antiquity: Antigone, Medea, Iliad and Odyssey, Tacitus' works in general even if I've read pitifully little of them, poetry by Sappho and Catullus.

Middle Ages and early modernity: some Shakespeare plays, the Racine plays I've read (Phèdre and Andromaque), Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah with the same remark as with the Tacitus (so I should probably read them entirely before listing them... but then again, one cannot create enough publicity for the overlooked brilliance of the Muqaddimah), the little I've read of Paradise Lost, the poetry of Hooft and Vondel (in Dutch, so doubt anyone else here will have read them...)

"Modern" classics: P&P, S&S and Emma by Austen, essentially everything by Poe, various works by Dumas, Age of Innocence by Wharton, Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde, a few books by Leroux, Maupassant's short stories, Brideshead Revisited by Waugh, LotR by Tolkien, Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak, some stories by Borges, poetry by Yeats and Achterberg, To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee, 1984 by Orwell. And I'm going to add a complete unknown who kicks ass, just so perhaps some day someone will read him and I won't be the only person I know who does: James Elroy Flecker. Love his poems.

And as for books too recent to be called classics, but still generally considered to be the future canon: Possession by Byatt, Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, Love in Times of Cholera by Marquez, Pynchon's books even though I've never finished any (this is a bit of a recurring theme here...), and poetry by cummings, 't Hooft (Flemish, that one), and probably others I'm not thinking of now.

Well, I've probably forgotten lots in all time periods, but oh well.

Really depends on the person I make the suggestion to, no? But generally I recommend 1984 to anyone who hasn't read it yet, as it's really kind of a must-read imho, one has to think about those things. Several other works on that list kind of fit that description too, though.

Hm. I don't know I'd go that far... but I have somewhat unreasonable prejudices against (and now I'm going to infuriate two people in this thread, so I better go run and hide) the Aeneid and Dickens' works in general.

Eh, I'll read them eventually, but as for the cause of my views: with the Aeneid I think it's just a little too much "Roman literature is nothing compared to Greek literature, Virgil just ripped off Homer" propaganda in my school days. For Dickens, not sure, I guess I just have a bleak and depressing impression of his works.

Yes, this place can be quite sobering that way...