This page is for people who like to explore when they read. Who aspire to be a little less ignorant when they put down a book than they were when they picked it up. Who want to read a difficult book because of, and not in spite of, its difficulty.
If your idea of a great novelist is Alice Walker or Tom Clancy, you should probably click somewhere else. But if you aspire to something better, keep scrolling.
Great Books
"The New Lifetime Reading Plan," by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major, is a pretty good place to start if you'd like to start reading serious literature. I don't agree with everything they say, and find some of their omissions pretty appalling (where's Gibbon, for Chrissake?), but it's the best introduction to what used to be called The Great Conversation that I know about.
Would you like to be liberally educated? Then check out:
St. John's College Reading List.
Want some more? Then try:
Brown University's Classics Ph.D. Reading List.
Or you could just buy:
The Loeb Classical Library.
Two reprint series I like:
Everyman's Library
Modern Library
And if you can't find that out-of-print book you're dying to read, check out
Interloc
Bibliofind
There are an enormous amount of what they call e-texts on this site:
Project Gutenberg - Links
This is a great site for classics:
The Internet Classics Archive
And if it's really bothering you that you've never read Tasso, you can check him out at:
The Online Medieval and Classical Library
The Modern Library's Best 100 List
I have a page on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels (in English) of the 20th Century:
Modern Library 100 Best Novels
The Modern Library's list inspired me to come up with my own list of the 100 Best Novels Written in English in this Century:
My Best 100 Novels List
And if you're interested in why I picked what I picked:
Notes on the Novels List
My Author Pages
I've put up the two following pages in tribute to two of my favorite authors:
The Rabelais Page
The Edward Gibbon Page
Authors
This is a tribute to a great poet's classic poem:
John Milton's Paradise Lost
This is the greatest novel of the 20th Century:
Ulysses
(If you're interested in Ulysses, you have more options than you used to -- Oxford's World Classics recently put out a paperback edition that is a photographic reprint of the first edition, and Penguin is finally able to put out a paperback edition in America. Everyman's Library has published the most typographically pleasing edition available in the States so far. But keep an eye peeled for the long-awaited John Kidd edition from Norton.)
This is the best site available on Joyce:
The James Joyce Centre
My favorite poet:
Yeats Society of New York Home Page
William Butler Yeats
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
My favorite Victorian novelist (these guys are publishing an impressive edition of the Complete Novels of this prolific writer -- all 47 of them):
The Trollope Society
Another great (and prolific) novelist -- one I've been reading since I was a teenager:
Honore de Balzac
Is there a writer out there as funny as Chaplin? Surprisingly, yes (and they were both knighted on the same day). But be careful -- he can be habit-forming:
P. G. Wodehouse Appreciation Page
This is a very politically incorrect -- but wonderfully funny -- novelist. His early novels ("Decline and Fall," "Vile Bodies," "Black Mischief," "A Handful of Dust" and "Scoop") are the best:
Evelyn Waugh
A much-neglected Irish genius:
Flann O' Brien
A great writer (and not just the subject of a famous biography):
Samuel Johnson
The Johnson Society of London
But just in case you want to read the biography:
Boswell's Life of Johnson
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