Below is the reading list from Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan. Items I’ve read are in bold, with links to reviews on Rebecca Reads where appropriate.
The Iliad – Homer (thoughts here, here, and here)
The Odyssey – Homer (thoughts here and here)
The Old Testament — The Bible
The New Testament — The Bible
The Aeneid — Virgil
Metamorphoses — Ovid
Beowulf — Anonymous (thoughts here)
Inferno — Dante Alighieri (thoughts here)
Paradiso — Dante Aligheiri
The Decameron — Giovanni Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer
The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spencer
Hamlet — William Shakespeare
King Lear — William Shakespeare (thoughts here)
Macbeth — William Shakespeare (thoughts here)
Don Quixote — Miguel De Cervantes (thoughts part 1, part 2)
Paradise Lost — John Milton (thoughts here, multiple posts)
Tom Jones — Henry Fielding
Faust I & II — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Eugene Onegin — Alexander Pushkin
Pere Goriot — Honore De Balzac (thoughts here)
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte (thoughts here)
Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte
Moby Dick — Herman Melville
Bleak House — Charles Dickens
Great Expectations — Charles Dickens (thoughts here)
Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert (thoughts here)
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (thoughts here)
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy (thoughts here)
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch — George Eliot (thoughts here)
The Wings of the Dove — Henry James
Remembrance of Things Past — Marcel Proust
Ulysses — James Joyce
The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
The Trial — Franz Kafka
To The Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf (thoughts here)
The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
A Farewell To Arms — Ernest Hemingway
Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller
Native Son — Richard Wright
The Man Without Qualities — Robert Musil
Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin
One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez (thoughts here)
Gravity’s Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon
Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy
Beloved — Toni Morrison (thoughts here)