Recommended Reading

If you ever wondered how well read you are, here’s the mother of all recommended-reading lists. Legendary literary critic Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Age (1994) is the complete list of essential writers and books. Bloom (right) divided his list into four chronological ages: Theocratic, Aristocratic, Democratic, and Chaotic.

To make this list manageable, we present a few highlights of books or authors for each age, with links to the full lists. So fire up that library card and settle in for a really big read!

Part I: The Theocratic Age

Gilgamesh, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Holy Bible (Authorized King James Version), The Bhagavad-Gita, Homer, Aristotle, Plutarch, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, St. Augustine, The Koran, Beowulf

Part II: The Aristocratic Age

Dante, Miguel de Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Moliere, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Part III: The Democratic Age

Victor Hugo, Henrik Ibsen, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker, Jacob and Willhelm Grimm, Leo Tolstory, James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott

Part IV: The Chaotic Age

Federico Garcia Lorca, Marcel Proust, Colette, Marguerite Duras, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Seamus Haney, Edna O’Brien, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Boris Pasternak, Sigrid Undset, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Peter Carey, Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Edward Hirsch, Tony Kushner

As we said, there is much, much more, so see the whole list starting here.