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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3612 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

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What's a reasonable base/canon of Western literature to be familiar with to call oneself "educated" like a man from the early 20th century? I want to read in chronological order the great works and ideas of western civilization and am hoping Mottizens can help me fill in some gaps. I'm mainly interested in literature but of course there is room for philosophical works as well. Obviously this can be a really wide range of works, but I'm looking for the absolute indisputable foundation, things you cannot skip at all.

What I have so far (very basic in rough chronological order):

Iliad/Odyssey by Homer

Dialogues by Plato

Metamorphoses by Ovid

The Bible (King James version for the literary value?)

Beowulf (already read this one)

Summa Theologica by Aquinas? (Not sure how foundational this is)

Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

Divine Comedy by Dante

Shakespeare's Works

Paradise Lost by Milton

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Moby-Dick by Melville

In Search of Lost Time by Proust

Thoughts? Please help me fill in some gaps!

That's a whole shelf of doorstoppers you've got right there. I think I've read only a few of them:

  • Moby-Dick (and it feels like it's the odd one out), everything else I can only claim partial credit for:
  • Iliad (War Nerd's version)
  • The New Testament (thanks Gideon), gave up on the Old one somewhere around the 25% mark
  • Don Quixote (it was in the children's library, no idea why, got bored to death, maybe I should revisit it as an adult)

If you want more doorstoppers, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I've read both, but I prefer writers that can get on with it. Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are recommended.

If you want something like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron is probably a better pick, the former being more of an Anglo-specific work. Or just go all the way back to The Golden Ass.

I will reaffirm reading War Nerd's version of the Iliad. The novel format communicates the humor, frustrations, and desires very clearly for anyone who isn't already intimately familiar with a more formal translation. It is simply fun to read.

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