Eliot, Emerson, William Empson, Freud, Hemingway, Henry James, D.H. You might want to remove it and simply focus on the fiction.īeyond this rather narrow list, any canonical reader will have to have a knowledge of Blake, Coleridge, Dostoevsky, T.S. I have left Boswell’s Life of Johnson in the list because of its importance, and how it gives us Johnson and the poets all in one.
Bloom also used wide swaths of nonfiction writers Michel de Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Freud, which I haven’t included. Johnson’s huge Lives of the Poets-something I will read in the next few years. To Bloom’s list I have added Virgil and Homer because of frequent references in the text. My goal is to complete it by 2025, but a strong reader could complete the list in a year. I think it makes a wonderful reading list. Instead, I focussed on the books that Bloom himself thought were good examples to draw out of the canon.
It is a good 50 years of bedtime reading, and at least 20 years of professional reading. If you would like to be overwhelmed, simply turn to Bloom’s 40 page appendix of canonical works. His treatise is a huge romp through a culture of books. I discussed some cautions about the project and some limitations in his list on Monday. Likewise, this list can help you to prepare to read The Western Canon–or a literary course like it–with your primary work complete. I have tried here to include the entire list so that you will not need to read his Western Canon in its entirety before you begin reading great books. Taking the books that Bloom focusses on in each chapter and putting them into list form provides us a good decade of reading, and an excellent introduction to the main features of our Western Euro-American literary heritage. I decided to create a “canonical list” in today’s blog for those who are inclined to try to soak in this great radition. On Monday I introduced Harold Bloom‘s 1994 bestseller, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.
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