Over at John Kass News, guest poster Pat Hickey writes Must Reads for Young People in a Stupidly Woke World:
The current secondary school English canon is dumbed down. It seems to me that everything of value went to hell when we politely considered the opinion of dim bulbs who interrogate with “Well, who’s to say?” People who know something, Karen.
The Who’s to Sayers have screwed up religion, politics, and sports. Keep reading, gentle folks, because at the end of my jeremiad I post a list of essential works of literature.
So of course I took his list as a challenge/quiz.
Here’s his list, with the ones I’ve read in bold (and with a link to the book report if one exists on this blog). I have underlined the books that I have on the shelves here but have not yet read.
- The N*****of the Narcissus Joseph Conrad
- The Secret Sharer Joseph Conrad
- Lord Jim Joseph Conrad
- The Man Who Would be King Rudyard Kipling
- Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
- Barnaby Rudge Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre Emily Bronte
- Paradise Lost John Milton
- The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer (although I have read some of them and did have a class at the university in Chaucer)
- Henry V William Shakespeare
- Sonnets by John Donne (I don’t know if I got all of the ones he’s talking about when I read Selected Poems)
- Moby Dick Herman Melville
- Bartleby the Scrivener Herman Melville
- Red Badge of Courage Stephan Crane (actually, I’m working on this one now in between Star Trek collections)
- The Virginian Owen Wister
- The Big Blonde Dorothy Parker
- Poems of Emily Dickinson (sweet Christmas, all 1775+ of them? I’ve read some and I’ve started through the whole collection, but I’m not anywhere near finished after 30 years)
- Man Without a Country Edward Everett Hale
- Aeneid Virgil (although I did just listen to an audio course on it)
- The Odyssey Homer
- The Greek Passion Nikos Kazantzakis
- The Informer Liam O’Flaherty
- Short Stories of Brett Harte
- Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
- U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos
- The Day of the Locusts Nathaniel West
- Catch 22 Joseph Heller
- The Caine Mutiny Herman Wouk
- The Continental Op Dashiell Hammett
- The Little Sister Raymond Chandler
- The Sign of Four Arthur Conan Doyle
- Napoleon of Notting Hill G.K. Chesterton
- A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
- Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor
Well, I guess that is 12 out of 34 with some asterisks. I always think I’m doing well when I’m styling the ones I’ve read, but when it comes time to sum up, I am disappointed. Fortunately, I am still young, so I have a chance to improve this score before I get old. Especially as I won’t have any Rowling offerings cluttering up my reading.
You know, I went through the university right at the last gasp of the Great Books/Canon movement in the 1980s, so I got exposed to a lot of real literature before the big shift thereafter to rap lyrics and brain droppings poetry. Although I still read both classic literature and brain droppings poetry today.
