From: http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/what-language-shall-i-borrow/
…I'm wanting to compile a list of suggested novels, plays and collections of poetry as assigned reading for theology students and pastors. And to this end I am soliciting the help of readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem. I'm thinking of work by Geraldine Brooks, John Updike, John Steinbeck, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Jim Crace, Thomas Carlyle, Francine Prose, Kenzaburō Ōe, Thomas Lynch, George MacDonald, A.S. Byatt, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and poets like William Blake, John Donne, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova and John Ciardi.
Here's some additional suggestions to kick us off:
Novels
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
- François Charles Mauriac, The Knot of Vipers
- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
- Doris May Lessing, This Was the Old Chief's Country
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
- Albert Camus, The Fall
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
- Richard Lischer, Open Secrets
- Elie Wiesel, Night
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
- Anton Chekhov, The Party and Other Stories
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
- Liam O'Flaherty, Famine
- Liam O'Flaherty, The Puritan
- Fred D'Aguiar, The Longest Memory
- Bryce Courtenay, April Fool's Day
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club: A Novel
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
- Marilynne Robinson, Home
- John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- Patrick White, Voss
- Patrick White, The Vivisector
- Bo Giertz, Hammer of God
Poetry/Plays
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem
- Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: a Poetics of Work
- Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh
- T.S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays,: 1909-1950
- W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
- James K. Baxter, The Collected Poems of James K. Baxter
- Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged
- Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
- Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- W.B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1: The Poems
- Les Murray, Learning Human: Selected Poems
- Les Murray, The Biplane Houses: Poems
- C.K. Stead, Collected Poems, 1951-2006
- W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius
- Micheal O'Siadhail, Globe
- Micheal O'Siadhail, The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust
Some Comments:
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Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, the stories of Borges, Twaine's Huckleberry Finn, Melville's Moby-Dick, all of Dickens, all of Kafka, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, Beckett's Molloy…
And for poetry, I couldn't live without George Herbert, Milton, Blake, Hopkins, R. S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas — and of course Homer's epics, which are amazing and indispensable… And for contemporary poets, I'd have to include Rowan Williams, Kevin Hart, Geoffrey Hill.
For drama, I'd also add all of Beckett's major plays: I reckon it's impossible to understand the 20th century without Beckett. (Plus, he's not only one of the greatest playwrights who has ever lived: he's also the funniest.)
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Though almost all Flannery O'Connor novels are quality, try the little book The Violent Bear it Away, a lesser known and not over-quoted O'Connor piece.
Perhaps such classics as Don Quixote (supposedly Faulkner's favorite) and Les Miserables.
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I would also include under novels: Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'The Idiot'; Alan Patton, 'Cry, The Beloved Country'; Georges Bernanos, 'Diary of a Country Priest'; Anonymous, 'The Way of a Pilgrim'
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