A Personal Canon …
2022 Year of Aesthetics Series №14
The debate of what is canonical is interesting, since it arrives from a biblical tradition and has expanded through classical to modern texts. As a classist I have have set classics to be dated to around 600 AD or earlier. I set the boarderline of the modern at Shakespeare and Montaigne or round 1600.
In my opinion this list of books are books that will add to your life and thought, they are always ones I reread. These are the books are always in consideration after I finish a book.
I will list things as than move from what is purely canonical to less and less so. This list intentionally is as short as possible and I will have holes the reader can fill. I just find I would have no problem recommending any of the books below. I will discuss more modern poets at a different time since I am more oriented towards individual poems than poets.
I delve into what has to be outside the canon, I am sort of limit canonical in my mind at Shakespeare and Montaigne, many of the stared * to early to be canonical books in the list are my very favorite. Again this is a personal canon and the exercise is to have others think this way.
PRECLASSICAL
Gilgamesh
Emuna Elish
Biblical ( I am half way on the journey through)
Old Testament Hebrew → St. Jerome's Vulgate Latin → Douay - Rheims (English) → KJV (English ) → Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible (English)
Coinea New Testament (Greek)→ St. Jerome’s Vulgate Latin → Douay → Rheims (English) → KJV (English )
CLASSICAL
Religious /Mythological
Homer: Iliad (Fables in English) / Odyssey (Fitzgerald in English)
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Virgil’s Aeneid ( Lewis in English)
Rules of St Benedict
The code of Hammurabi
Early Dramatic -Classical
The Complete Greek Tragedy
(Selection: Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Oedipus at Clonus ~ Sophocles, The Oresteia ~ Aeschylus, Medea & Helen, 2 Iphigeneia plays, Bacchae, Alcestis~ Euripides) (Green and Latimore editors in English)
A sampling of Seneca since he influenced the Elizabethans
The Birds & Lysistrata ~Aristophanes
Classical Poets
Sappho
Tang Poets ~ Du Fu, Wang Wei and Li Bao
Philosophy (a large hole in my reading) -Classical
The Republic, Symposium & Apologia ~ Plato
Diogenes
MODERN
Elizabethan Drama
The Complete Shakespeare (Selection: First and Second Henriad, Othello, Lear, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It)
Faust ~Marlowe
(Note I have read plays from this era but not much poetry)
Essays
The Complete Essay’s of Montaigne
The Virginia Statue On Religious Freedom ~Jefferson
Romances
Tristan and Isolde
El Cid
Maxims
François de La Rochefoucaul -Maxims
Plays and Librettos
The Figaro Trilogy~ Beaumarchais
Mozart& De Ponte - Cosi Fan Tutti and Don Giovanni
Cavalleria Rusticana &Pagliacci
Strauss Salome & Der Rosenkailver
Don Carlo ~ Verdi
The Ring Cycle ~ Wagner
Cyrano De Bergerac~ Rostand
Games of Love and Chance Marivaux
Modern Novels (* too new to be considered canonical but I have highest of hopes for them)
War and Peace and Anna Karenina
Dostoyevsky: Brother Karamazov, The Idiot, Crime and Punishement, The Double and Notes from Underground
EM Forester: Room with A View, Passage To India, Howards End, Where Angels Fear To Tread *
Camus, The Stranger & The Plague *
Love in Time of Cholera ~ Marquez *
Snow ~Pamuk *
The Savage Detectives & 2666~Bolano *
Short Stories
The Exile and The Kingdom -Camus
The Fictions ~Borges (all are canonical according to Bolano, which is good enough for me, and if Borges is not canonical than maybe we should have no canon)
Welcome to the Monkey House ~ Vonnegut*
The Lemon Table ~ Barnes*
To Much Happiness ~ Alice Monroe *
PERSONAL HOPES FOR THE CANON AS IT EXPANDS
Popper *
The Open Society and It’s Enemies
Logic of Scientific Discovery
The Poverty of Historicism
Myth of The Framework
Taleb*
Bed of Procrustes ~ Maxium
Incerto
Modern Plays*
Street Car Named Desire ~ Williams
The Crucible ~ Miller
Uncle Vanya
Faustus~ Mamet
Becket, The Lark, Antigone & The Rehearsal ~ Anouilh
Screen Plays*
Woodie Allen: Hannah and Her Sisters, Stardust Memories, Manhattan
Sci-fi *
Six Dune novels Herbert
Flatland
2001 Space Odyssey
Around the World in 80 days
FAVORITES *
Thousand Autumn of Jacob de Zoet, and the other novels of David Mitchel
The Plays Of Annie Baker
Plays of David Mamet