Checkov (Not Depicted)’s Post

I mentioned yesterday when I finished Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition that I would do a roll-up post of the authors/works in the lecture series as a quiz style list to highlight which authors/works I’ve read (in bold) and whose works are in my stacks to read (underlined).

I will throw the list under the fold because it’s an 80+ bulleted list with some comment.

• The Epic of Gilgamesh. Certainly not before the blog (or was it?), but I don’t see a book report on it.
• Genesis and the Documentary Hypothesis I’ve read the Protestant bible, so of course I can bold all lectures on it.
• The Deuteronomistic History (ibid.)
• Isaiah
• Job
• Homer–The Iliad At least once, in some form or another, although more likely an adaptation and not a direct translation, although I have one or more of those around as well.
• Homer–The Odyssey (ibid.)
• Sappho and Pindar–last October, no less.
• Aeschylus–I think so, but I cannot be certain. So no bolding here.
• Sophocles–see The Oedipus Cycle, which I read in 2015.
• Euripides–I read The Cyclops/Heracles/Iphegenia in Tauris/Helen in 2020.
• Herodotus–I have some of his histories around here somewhere.
• Thucydides I also have one or more volumes of his work around here I think.
• Aristophanes— I read The Birds, The Clouds,, and The Wasps in 2021 and The Birds previously in 2005.
• Plato–a couple of dialogues–The Republic? Phado? I have a Classics Club edition I started working my way through a couple years back but didn’t finish it.
• Menander and Hellenistic Literature
• Catullus and Horace–I might have a volume of Horace around somewhere.
• Virgil–I have a copy of The Aeneid that I’ve thought of picking up from time to time after listening to The Aeneid of Virgil.
• Ovid–some of The Metamorpheses in college, and I have a Penguin paperback om the stacks.
• Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch–I have two of the three in the stacks for sure, and maybe also Tacitus. My stacks are deep.
• Petronious and Apuleius
• The Gospels
• Augustine I have at least one copy of The Confessions and a couple volumes of his other writings. Again, I think about picking them up since listening to Augustine: Philosopher and Saint and Saint Augustine
• Beowulf
• The Song of Roland
• El Cid
• Tristan and Isolt–although I did see the James Franco movie, and we did have a cat named Tristan for a while.
• The Romance of the Rose
• Dante Alighieri — Life and Works
• Dante Aligheieri — The Divine Comedy–well, I’ve read part of it–my beautiful then-girlfriend and I read part of it to each other back in the days before our marriage.
• Petrarch–I’ve read some of his poetry and tend to favor the Italian sonnet when I do that sort of thing.
• Giovanni Boccaccio–I’ve bought two copies of The Decameron in 2021 and in 2024 which, presumably, doubles my chances of reading it.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I think I read this in high school or college.
• Geoffrey Chaucer — Life and Works I did have a college class in him, after all, with Dr. Bodden.
• Geoffrey Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales–I bought a better reading copy in 2019 than the old used paperback I read in college (but only select tales).
• Christine de Pizan
• Erasmus
• Thomas More
• Michel de Montaigne–I have started the Classics Club edition of it, but sent it back to the stacks at some point.
• François Rabelais
• Christopher Marlowe—Doctor Faustus and Edward the Second.
• William Shakespeare — The Merchant of Venice
• William Shakespeare — Hamlet–one or more times starting in high school.
• Lope de Vega
• Miguel de Cervantes–I presume I have a copy of Don Quixote around here somewhere.
• John Milton—Milton’s Minor Poems and Milton’s Comus, Lycidas, Etc. in 2020.
• Blaise Pascal–I got in 2022.
• Molière
• Jean Racine
• Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz–as I mentioned, I read one of her poems in Spanish in high school or the university.
• Daniel Defoe–I read Robinson Crusoe in middle school or high school.
• Alexander Pope–as I mentioned, Pope is the first author whom I read when prompted by this series. I read The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems earlier this month.
• Jonathan Swift–I “just” read Gulliver’s Travels in 2016.
• Voltaire–my beautiful then-girlfriend and I read Candide together at the end of the last century.
• Jean-Jacques Rosseau–oh, I have something of his around here somewhere.
• Samuel Johnson–not sure if I have his work around, but I hope I do.
• Denis Diderot
• William Blake–some of his works, but only Drawings of William Blake is on the blog.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• William Wordsworth–I have read some of his works, but I need to get on with reading “The Prelude” and others.
• Jane Austen—Emma in 2006 and Sense and Sensibility in 2008.
• Stendahl
• Herman Melville Moby Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener” in college.
• Walt Whitman
• Gustave Flaubert–when looking through the stacks recently, I came across Madame Bovary, so I kinda know where it is if when I want to read it.
• Charles Dickens–I’m just going to link to the blog search for Charles Dickens book report.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky—Crime and Punishment in middle school or high school and Notes from Underground sometime this century, but it was part of a three piece omnibus, so I don’t have a book report on it.
• Leo Tolstoy—Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and A Confession and Other Religious Writings.
• Mark Twain—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but all I have a book report for is The Celebrated Jumping Frog and Other Stories.
• Thomas Hardy–c’mon, man, I’m not Kim du Toit, but I’ve read some Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles in college and Under a Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes this century. Along with the first chapter of The Return of the Native once or twice in different editions I have in the stacks.
• Oscar Wilde–I read The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2021.
• Henry James–I’m more partial to his brother, of course.
• Joseph Conrad–I read The Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer almost 20 years ago and the first pages of Lord Jim more recently on a vacation–but it proved not to be vacation reading.
• William Butler Yeats–a poem or two, but not the complete works (yet).
• Marcel Proust
• James Joyce–I have both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses around here somewhere.
• Franz Kafka–I read Collected Stories in 2006.
• Virgina Woolf—To the Lighthouse in college. I also watched Mrs. Dalloway in the theater because I was arty, briefly.
• William Faulkner–I am being a little bold with the bold here–although I was supposed to read The Sound and the Fury in college, I did not make it through the first section. I later picked it up again and made it through the first section but stalled in the second. Someday, I might make it through the novel. Which won’t help, because the copy I got for college was a Barnes and Noble omnibus edition with two or three other novels in it. I haven’t seen it recently when combing the stacks–I’ll have to look for it for curiosity’s sake.
• Bertholt Brecht
• Albert Camus–see The Stranger, The Fall, The Plague, and Caligula and 3 Other Plays. Note that The Stranger and The Plague were re-reads. I want to read The Plague (the focus of the lecture) and The Fall again.
• Samuel Beckett I read Waiting for Godot in…. college?

Well. Not as good as I’d hoped when I started the markup. But probably better than an English major from the 1990s, and most probably better than an English major today.

Of the ones that I haven’t read and don’t own, I guess the Erasmus, Thomas More, and maybe a couple of the French playwrights. Proust? Might be a stretch for me, but who knows.

Still, I’ll keep reading, and sometimes (not too often–once or twice a year), I’ll read something that would please Harold Bloom.