Reading Lists

For some of you, this post will be the most boring thing you could possibly read. So if you read the title and thought, "Gross, I thought I was done with those," then please do yourself a favor and skip it! My feelings won't be hurt!

Others of you, however, have indicated interest in learning what I've been assigned to read in my various classes. So without further ado, here are my reading lists. (I've also included links to anything I've reviewed, so you can check those out if you want.)


*Only reading parts of the work, sometimes very small selections

American Literature 1914-1960

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Short stories: 
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
The Ice Palace
"The Sensible Thing"
Two Wrongs
"What a Handsome Pair!"
The Swimmers
Babylon Revisited
A New Leaf
Essays:
Echoes of the Jazz Age
Early Success

Langston Hughes
Essay: 
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (read alongside George Schuyler's "The Negro-Art Hokum")
Poems: 
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Negro
Poem [1]
The White Ones
Lament for Dark Peoples
I, Too
Danse Africaine
The Weary Blues
America
Cross
Harlem Night Club
Mulatto
Translations: 
poems by Nicolas Guillen: 
Last Night Somebody Called Me Darky
Chop it with the Cane Knife!
Sensemaya
Little Ode
Song of the Cuban Drum
Ballad of the Two Grandfathers
play by Federico Garcia Lorca: 
Blood Wedding (Boda de sangre)

Nella Larsen
Passing (novel)
(we also read a few contemporary reviews of Passing and some of Larsen's personal correspondence, but I don't know which ones)

William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom!
Other works: 
Nobel Prize "Banquet Speech"
A Letter to the North

Katherine Anne Porter
Stories:
Maria Concepcion
Flowering Judas
Hacienda
The Martyr
Noon Wine
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Rope
He
The Grave
Other works:
Why I Write About Mexico
Blasco Ibanez on "Mexico In Revolution"

Americo Paredes
George Washington Gomez
A Texas-Mexican Cancionero*

Flannery O'Connor
Stories
Good Country People
A Good Man is Hard to Find
The River
The Lame Shall Enter First
The Displaced Person
Greenleaf
The Comforts of Home
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Revelation
Other works: 
Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction
The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

Masterpiece of World Literature 2 (Renaissance to the present)

Michel de Montaigne
Essays (translated by M.A. Screech):
That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities
On the Cannibals
On cruelty
We reach the same ends by discrepant means
On idleness
On punishing cowardice
On fear
To philosophize is to learn how to die
On educating children

William Shakespeare
King Lear

Moliere
Tartuffe

Voltaire
Candide

William Wordsworth
Poems:
Intimations of Immortality
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
The World is Too Much With Us

William Blake
Poems (from Songs of Innocence):
Introduction
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
Holy Thursday
The Chimney Sweeper
(from Songs of Experience):
Introduction
Earth's Answer
The Tyger
The Sick Rose
London
The Chimney Sweeper
Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau
And Did Those Feet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poems:
Kubla Khan
Dejection: An Ode

John Keats
Poems:
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on Melancholy

Heinrich Heine
Poems (translated by Hal Draper): 
[A Pine Is Standing Lonely]
[A Young Man Loves a Maiden]
[Ah, Death Is Like the Long Cool Night]
The Silesian Weavers

Giacomo Leopardi
Poems (translated by Ottavio M. Casale): 
The Infinite
To Himself
To Sylvia
The Village Saturday

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
Poems (translated by Bruce Phenix):
[I Know a Strange, Gigantic Hymn]
[Nameless Spirit]

Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary*

Fyodor Dostoevsky
"The Grand Inquisitor"

Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species*
The Descent of Man*

Karl Marx
Manifesto of the Communist Party*

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land

Jorge Luis Borges
Selected fictions (I don't know yet what those will be)

So, that's it! The other classes I'm taking are Physical Science, Writing and Tutoring, and World Religions, so the readings aren't worth listing here (I know World Religions sounds like it might be interesting, but all the reading is out of textbooks). Somebody asked for reading lists from past semesters as well. Last semester, I offered up two of my reading lists in a comment on a blog post, so if you're interested, I've just copied and pasted the lists from that post. (They're not nearly as organized or as detailed as the lists I've given from this semester.) I also had a 19th-century British literature class that I didn't write a comment for, but unfortunately I don't have the reading list for that anymore.

Masterpieces of World Literature 1 (Ancient times through the Renaissance)--(most of these are not the full text, so I've noted which ones are)

Creation stories (from Egypt, the Bible, etc.--I don't remember exactly which ones)
The Book of Genesis
The Book of Job
The Epic of Gilgamesh (full text)
Oedipus the King (Sophocles--full text)
Aesop's Fables
The Aeneid (Virgil)
The Bhagavad-gita
Classic of Poetry and Analects (Confucius)
The Daodejing
Zhuangzi
The New Testament
Confessions (Augustine)
Inferno (Dante)
The Qur'an
Song of Roland
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (full text)
The Thousand and One Nights
The Tale of Genji (Shikibu)
Don Quixote
Orlando Furioso (Ariosto)

Restoration and 18th-century British Literature (I read the full text of all the following. Except for Pamela and Evelina, they are all plays)

All for Love (Dryden)
The Country Wife (Wycherley)
The Man of Mode (Etherege)
The Rover (Behn)
The Conscious Lovers (Steele)
She Stoops to Conquer
Pamela (novel)
Evelina (novel)

All the reading lists from semesters before last fall are long gone by now. However, I did write blog posts for many of the major works I read for my classes. Here are a few of those: 

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville (short story)

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare

Richard III by Shakespeare

Henry V by Shakespeare

Hamlet by Shakespeare

Well, you asked for it! There's my obscenely long post about my school reading. I hope it was interesting for at least some of you. Feel free to comment if you have questions about authors, translations, or anything else. Or, if you're at all interested in seeing my opinions on any of the smaller works (poems, short stories, etc.), let me know! I can't post about all of them, so I would be happy to know what might actually be of interest to someone. I do my level best to read every single one of my readings in its entirety.