In September 2018 I decided to try and broaden my knowledge of “world literature” by reading more classics. Which is a loaded term with many problems, but I figured I had to start somewhere.

I came across this list of 100 works and have decided to at least try them, hopefully one a month although I may not stick to that exact timeframe.

1. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
2. Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales and Stories
3. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
4. Honore de Balzac, Old Father Goriot
5. Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
6. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
7. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
8. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
9. Albert Camus, The Stranger
10. Paul Celan, Poems
11. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
12. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
13. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
14. Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories; Thousand and One Nights
15. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
16. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
17. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
18. Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
19. Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
20. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
21. George Eliot, Middlemarch
22. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
23. Euripides, Medea
24. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
25. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
26. Federico Garcia Lorca, Gypsy Ballads
27. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
28. Anon, The Epic of Gilgamesh
29. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
30. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
31. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
32. Joao Guimaraes Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
33. Knut Hamsun, Hunger
34. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
35. Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey
36. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
37. Anon, The Book of Job
38. James Joyce, Ulysses
39. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle
40. Kalidasa, The Recognition of Sakuntala
41. Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain
42. Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
43. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
44. Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
45. Giacomo Leopardi, Complete Poems
46. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
47. Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
48. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
49. Anon, Mahabharata
50. Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi
51. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain
52. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
53. Michel de Montaigne, Essays
54. Elsa Morante, History
55. Toni Morrison, Beloved
56. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji – READ Sept 2018.
57. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
58. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Njal’s Saga
59. George Orwell, 1984
60. Ovid, Metamorphoses
61. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
62. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales
63. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
64. Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
65. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
66. Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi
67. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
68. Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz, The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)
69. Tayeb Salih, A Season of Migration to the North
70. Jose Saramago, Blindness
71. William Shakespeare, Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
72. Sophocles, Oedipus the King
73. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
74. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
75. Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno
76. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
77. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
78. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
79. Valmiki, Ramayana
80. Virgil, The Aeneid
81. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
82. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
83. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

The list was produced by the editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, who asked a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.”