Literature
Thirty seven works that shaped our views on literature.
Homer, The Odyssey (c. 725-675 BCE)
Skip Iliad if you want, but anyone can read the Odyssey.
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (458 BCE)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 430 BCE)
Master of tragedy and the plot twist.
Euripides, Medea (431 BCE)
Psychological realism.
Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603)
Masterpiece of drama. For the rest of Shakespeare, you can just watch the Kurosawa movies.
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)
Very funny satire. You don't have to read the whole thing.
Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
What does it mean to be?
Turgenev, A Sportsman's Sketches (1852)
Short story collection in the Russian realist tradition.
Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Just jump straight into it.
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)
A good starting point for Dosto.
Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879)
Another great play.
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
Another literary giant who needs no introduction. Read this before you jump into the longer novels.
Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Russian master dramatist.
Souseki, Sanshirou (1909)
Japanese bildungsroman. Themes of old vs new.
Joyce, Dubliners (1914)
Kafka, Metamorphosis (1915)
Another weird and funny satire.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
Dark novel that keeps it real.
Fante, Ask the Dust (1939)
No-bullshit writing style. You'll like him if you like Bukowski.
Camus, The Stranger (1942)
Can't have a reading list without this one.
Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1948)
Kawabata, Snow Country (1948)
Probably the greatest Japanese novelist.
Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)
One of the great American novels. All his books are good.
Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
His best work.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952)
Another weird and existentialist play.
Miller, The Crucible (1953)
One of the most dramatic plays ever.
Borges, Fictions (1956)
More weird short stories.
Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
If you've ever wondered what it's like to have major depression and be on your period...
Williams, Stoner (1965)
A celebration of normal peoples' lives.
Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
Funny take on Hamlet.
Ryu Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue (1976)
Don't remember what it's about, just that it was cool.
Bukowski, Ham on Rye (1982)
You probably know him as a poet, but his starving artist novels are entertaining.
Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
Boundary crossings in India.
Vasquez, The Secret History of Costaguana (2010)
The Empire writes back.
Why are the authors overwhelming white, male Europeans or imperialists?
▼As materialists, we must examine the material conditions of literary production. European men held greater economic power (colonialism and slavery) and greater freedoms than women, giving them the marge de manœuvre to write literature. Tolstoy could not have written Anna Karenina if he was a countryside peasant. Plath would never have written The Bell Jar if her parents weren't wealthy enough to send her to Smith College.
While there are outliers, women were systematically excluded from literary circles. It has only been less than a hundred years since Beauvoir and Lorde smashed essentialist ideas about women being biologically inferior to men. Women creating art is not a new phenomenon. But it is an emerging one.
We must note that the subaltern CAN speak. We believe that the Global South and all oppressed peoples are better represented in the film medium (WIP), as literature has turned towards academia in the 20th century.
Who to Avoid
▼David Foster Wallace & Assorted Postmodernists
PoMo literature is all style and zero substance. You can throw Joyce's later work in here. It's all written for academia. Essentially intellectual masturbation. if literature is "words charged with meaning", you would find more meaning making conversation with the homeless in your area.
Yukio Mishima
We've read and studied many of his works in the original language. And come to the conclusion that he is an ethno-nationalist fascist and a self-hating pederast. Despite his self-professed love of the Japanese samurai tradition, this coward dodged the draft because he was too afraid to die for his beloved fascist overlords. He spent the rest of his life LARPing as a Gravy Seal with young boys on Mishima Island. Release the list, Mr Trump!
Haruki Murakami
Atrocious depiction of humans (why does he have to describe every time his male protagonist swims and washes his foreskin...?) His novels are best described as Nouvelle Vague adapted for a Marvel movie audience.
Medieval Literature (Beowulf, Gawain etc)
There is a notable thousand year gap between Shakespeare and Sophocles in the list. That's because medieval literature had huge constraints regarding Christian orthodoxy. It was a huge step backwards from the Greeks. A lot of this chivalric novel trash was satirised by Cervantes. In short, you are better off reading literature from the Islamic Golden Age.
George Orwell
A propagandist and a traitor. Animal Farm bizarrely equates the Nazis with the USSR, alleging corruption and mistreatment. A relic of Cold War propaganda, it exaggerates all the bad of the USSR and none of the good. Naturally, it is taught in all neoliberal countries. After the Spanish Civil War, he also created a list of Communist sympathisers and assisted in persecuting them.
JK Rowling
An old racist hag who hit it big. We read and reread your books when we were kids. You practically taught us English when we reread Goblet of Fire 7 times. You're a billionaire now. Why in the world are you harassing trans people online?
Ezra Pound
A fascist hack who licked Mussolini's boots.
HP Lovecraft
Another European racist who couldn't comprehend non-whites being better than him.
TS Eliot
If the average IQ keeps increasing, maybe we'll stop seeing antisemitic writers.
Any video game recommendations?
▼Planescape: Torment
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2
Mass Effect 1-3
Metro and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series
Outer Wilds
Pentiment
Return of the Obra Dinn
The Case of the Golden Idol
Civilization VI
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Baldur's Gate 3
Fallout 1 and 2, New Vegas
Shadowrun Series
Atom RPG
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Cyberpunk 2077
Disco Elysium