Bold indicates I’ve read/watched the work.
Poetry
- Auden, W.H. “Musee des Beaux Arts.” “In Praise of Limestone.”
- Crane, Hart. The Bridge.
- Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Waste Land.
- Frost, Robert. “After Apple Picking.” “The Woodpile.” “Out, Out-.” Mowing.”
- Heaney, Seamus. “Bogland.” “Clearances.”
- Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven.”
- Yeats, William Butler. “The Lake of Isle of Innisfree.” “Easter 1916.” “The Wild Swans at Coole.”
- Shakespeare, William. Sonnets.
Short Stories
- Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.”
- Boyle, T. Coraghessan. “The Overcoat II.”
- Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.”
- Coover, Robert. “The Gingerbread House.”
- Gass, William H. “The Pedersen Kid.” “In the Heart of the Country.”
- Hardy, Thomas. “The Three Strangers.”
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” “The Man of Adamant.”
- Hemingway, Ernest. “Big Two-Hearted River.” “Indian Camp.” “The Battler.” “Hills like White Elephants.” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
- James, Henry. “Daisy Miller.”
- Joyce, James. Dubliners.
- Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis.” “A Hunger Artist.”
- Lawrence, D. H. “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.” “The Fox.” “The Rocking-horse Winner.”
- Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “The Mystery of the Rue Morgue.” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “The Cask of Amontillado.”
- Roethke, Theodore. “In Praise of Prairie.”
- Thomas, Dylan. “Fern Hill.”
- Updike, John. “A&P.”
Plays
- Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot.
- Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. Julius Caesar. Macbeth. King Lear. Henry V. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Much Ado About Nothing. The Tempest. A Winter’s Tale. As You Like It. Twelfth Night.
Novels
- Boyle, T. Coraghessan. Water Music. World’s End.
- Brookner, Anita. Hotel du Lac.
- Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass.
- Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. Nights at the Circus. Wise Children.
- Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Lord Jim.
- Dexter, Colin. The Remorseful Day.
- Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield. Bleak House. Great Expectations.
- Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime.
- Durrell, Lawrence. The Alexandria Quartet.
- Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine.
- Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. As I Lay Dying. Absalom, Absalom!
- Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary (abandoned).
- Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
- Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier.
- Forster, E.M. A Room With a View. Howards End. A Passage to India.
- Fowles, John. The Magus. The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
- Green, Henry. Blindness. Living. Party Going. Loving.
- Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon.
- Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. The House of Seven Gables.
- Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. A Farewell to Arms. The Old Man and the Sea.
- James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw.
- Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
- Kafka, Franz. The Trial.
- Kingslover, Barbara. The Bean Trees. Pigs in Heaven. The Poisonwood Bible.
- Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. Women in Love. Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The Virgin and the Gypsy.
- Murdoch, Iris. A Severed Head. The Unicorn. The Sea, the Sea. The Green Knight.
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita.
- O’Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. The Things They Carried.
- Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49.
- Roethke, Theodore. The Far Field.
- Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
- Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Master of Ballantrae.
- Stoker, Bram. Dracula.
- Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. The Accidental Tourist.
- Walcott, Derek. Omeros.
- Weldon, Fay. The Hearts and Lives of Men.
- Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse.
Really Old Classics
- Beowulf (Seamus Heaney)
- Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
- Homer. Iliad. Odyssey.
- Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
- Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Oedipus at Colonus. Antigone.
- Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queen.
- Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty. Snow White. Hansel and Gretel. Rapunzel. Rumpelstiltskin.
Movies
- Citizen Kane.
- The Gold Rush.
- Modern Times.
- Notorius. North by Northwest. Psycho.
- O Brother, Where Art Thou?
- Pale Rider
- Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
- Shane.
- Stagecoach.
- Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. Return of the Jedi.
- Tom Jones.
Secondary Sources
- Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms.
- Ciardi, John. How Does a Poem Mean?
- Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel.
- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism.
- Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life.
- Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction.
- Pinsky, Robert. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
- Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Master Class
- Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.
- Joyce, James. Ulysses.
- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
- Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon.