List of "essential" works of fiction (another one)

[Ioruach]

This appeared in the Minneapolis StarTribune today. It was written, and the list prepared, by a couple law professors, Robert Delahunty of the University of St. Thomas and John Radsan of Mitchell Hamline School of Law. An Editor's note says, "Below is the authors' provisional list of the first 39 essential fictional works they agree upon (in alphabetical order). They invite readers to comment online at startribune.com, recommending substitutions and nominations for a 40th work."

I know! I know! I'm sure all of us at Bookoholics have seen several such lists in our lifetimes. I certainly have. And probably every one of the books listed has appeared in at least one of them. I have read some of the books, but by no means all. Nevertheless, I'm just not going to fret about my omissions at this late date.

The full article appears in the Opinion Exchange section of the December 23 edition, if anyone is interested. It was too long to reprint here.

Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Antigone, Sophocles
Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Emma, Jane Austen
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Iliad, Homer
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
King Lear, William Shakespeare
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Odyssey, Homer
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

[Ursula]

Interesting list!!  Don't know why I am so intrigued by all the lists people make; maybe I should make one of my own.  Sad to say I haven't read them all, but there is still time.  My novella group read Kafka's The Metamorphosis last year and I am still wondering why it is considered essential....it is a very strange story!