/lit/ - Literature

>>12132004
Here is what I have read

>>12132004
Up to the letter M

0% completition lol

86.2%

>>12132004
Damn, I own the same set. I bought the whole 54 book set for $27. It was the best purchase I made in years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

>>12133257
>$27
wtf how?

>>12133281
They were at a used book sale. They were 50 cents a piece. First edition and barely used.

>>12133299
too bad they're all garbage

>>12133299
I need to go to more used book sales.

>>12132023
Tenho isso tudo em um só volume.

>>12133305
Some of the translations are horrible, and there are no commentaries and notes.

Still, I own a lot of volumes.

Recently, I've made a list of all the truly essential books which I have not yet read, and I will try to read them all next year. I am 22.

- Plato's Republic
- Nicomachean Ethics and Politics
- Thucydides and Herodotus
- Any of the Roman historians
- Cicero
- Caesar
- The Confessions
- Viking sagas; any of the chansons de geste
- Scholastic philosophy
- The Arabian Nights
- Il Decamerone
- Tasso and Ariosto
- Most of Shakespeare's Histories
- Marlowe
- Rebelais
- Racine, Moliere and Corneille in the original
- Balzac
- Madame Bovary
- I Promessi Sposi
- Tolstoy (only read Ivan Ilitch)
- Sterne, Austen, Bronte, Eliot
- Full Proust
- Machiavelli, Hobbes, Erasmus, Morus, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Humbe, Berkeley, Diderot, Rousseau, Smith, Burke, the Federalist, Gibbon, Tocqueville, Soljenitsin
- Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, Jakobson, Chomsky, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre

Outside of those, pretty much all others which I haven't read are not truly essential ('essential' in the sense that you cannot live live your life without having read them at least once). Authors like Epicurus and Cortazar might be extremely important, but it's not like you truly need to read them as soon as possible. I can wait until my 30's.

>>12133305
ow the edge

>>12133305
For the price I got them they're pretty good. Some books within the set I might eventually buy again with notes, commentaries, and better translations.

Also they make for a pretty shelf.

>>12133505
I should make a list of essentials. I'm really not quite sure where to even start with them.

>>12133551
Bloom's Western Canon is very imperfect, but follow it anyway.

Is English your first language? If it isn't, look for books in your language too. My first language is Portuguese.

Scaruffi has very good timelines of world literatures, it contains all the essential stuff.

This list here is surprisingly complete: https://www.scaruffi.com/fiction/portugue.html

Very few authors are lacking there.

>>12133505
You are absolutely retarded if you think you will read those in a year

Umm sweetie I don't believe in such patriarchal white male constructs as "the" western canon ?

How many black women are on it? Toni Morrison? What about gay Asian men?

>>12133575
I know I won't!

I will most definitely try to, however. I always set myself goals which I know I won't be able to achieve, because even if I achieve one half of it this is still a lot.

Also, I will not read their complete works. I will only read one or two books in order to get an idea of the style and thought of the author. Thus, I won't read George Eliot's Middlemarch (1000 pages), but most likely just her Silas Marner (260). If I really enjoy S.M., then I will read Middlemarch, but only in a couple of years from now. S.M.can probably be read in a single day, just like Eugenie Grandet or the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes.

>>12133582
D’accord!

>>12132004
I have read nothing in the western canon, nor do I plan to.

>>12133505
>Some of the translations are horrible, and there are no commentaries and notes.
I agree. I own some volumes even though I'm not native english speaker, so unless the book was written in english I get a better edition from public library.
Still nice to have the works at home for referencing and quickly rereading some passages, since I paid dirty cheap for them

>>12133450
Photo?

>>12132004
>implying anyone on earth could come up with a list of every book in the western cannon and have people agree with him

>>12132004
I've probably read 60-70 books in the "canon." I have read around 270 books, but only 180 or so are classics and of those probably less than half are canon

>>12133567
Yes, English is my first language. I am Korean and I would like to find some equivalent of the Western Canon for Asian literature and philosophical work. For now, I'm going to start reading through some of the Western Canon.

Thanks for the link. The lists there are pretty interesting.

>>12132004
>>12133505
>canon
YIKES

>>12132004
Exactly 0%

>>12135575
>would like to find some equivalent of the Western Canon for Asian literature and philosophical work
what are considered to be great works of Korean philosophy and literature? there's a surprising dearth of it in my library

>>12132004
I still need to work on reading so many of those.

>hurrr i read outdated books so i'm smarter

The absolute state of /lit/ brainlets. Skinny neckbeards posing with granddad's table leveler paper brick, taking pictures with the thing, never reading it. So dialectical!

Bunch of losers.

>>12140222
stale bait but excellent digits

>>12132004
Whose Western canon? Bloom's? Give me a link or list to check (I can't read those spines). I've read at least one work by everyone on his basic 26 list, aside from Pessoa:
William Shakespeare
Dante Alighieri
Geoffrey Chaucer
Miguel de Cervantes
Michel de Montaigne
Molière
John Milton
Samuel Johnson
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
William Wordsworth
Jane Austen
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Leo Tolstoy
Henrik Ibsen
Sigmund Freud
Marcel Proust
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
Franz Kafka
Jorge Luis Borges
Pablo Neruda
Fernando Pessoa
Samuel Beckett

Diving into his ages:
http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
I've read a reasonable amount of them, but by no means a majority.

>>12133450
Mentiroso.