A Recommended Reading List – from C.S. Lewis

Over at the blog A Pilgrim in Narnia, Brenton Dickieson has done something kind of cool.

He has taken C.S. Lewis’ book An Experiment in Criticism—in which Lewis attempts to answer the question “what makes a great book?”—and listed in chronological order all of the great books that Lewis references.

The list serves not only as a window into the knowledge-base of one of the great authors of our time, but also as a reading program for those interested in preserving a Western tradition that is in danger of being forgotten.

Here’s the list:

A Canon List from An Experiment in Criticism

Homer
- Iliad (c. 8^th BCE)
- Odyssey (c. 8^th BCE)
Unknown, Book of Jonah (8^th-4^th BCE)
Pindar
- Olympian Odes (early 5^th BCE)
- Pythian Odes (early 5^th BCE)
- Fragments (early 5^th BCE)
Aeschylus, The Eumenides (5^th BCE)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE)
Aristotle, Poetics (335 BCE)
Virgil
- The Georgics (29 BCE)
- The Aeneid (29-19 BCE)
Lucian, Vera Historia (2^nd)
Apuleius, Metamorphoses/The Golden Ass (late 2^nd)
Unknown, Beowulf (8^th-11^th)
Unknown, The Song of Roland (11^th-12^th)
Layamon, Brut (c. 1190-1215)
Unknown, Huon of Bordeaux (c. 1216-1268)
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda (early 13^th)
Dante, Divine Comedy (1308-20)
Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Canterbury Tales (late 14^th)
- Troilus and Criseyde (1380s)
Unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14^th)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (c. 1516)
Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562)
Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (late 16^th)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590s)
William Shakespeare
- Romeo & Juliet (1591-5)
- Twelfth Night (1601-2)
- The Winter’s Tale (1611)
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590-7)
- Henry V (c. 1599)
John Donne, “The Apparition” (early 17^th)
Michael Drayton, “The Shepherds Sirena” (1627)
Thomas Browne, Urn Burial (1658)
Jean Racine
- Andromaque (1667)
- Phèdre (c. 1677)
John Milton
- Paradise Lost (1667-74)
- Samson Agonistes (1671)
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735)
Voltaire
- “Micromégas” (1752)
- Candide (1759)
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)
William Beckford, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1782)
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
William Wordsworth
- “Michael” (1800)
- The Excursion (1814)
Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice (1813)
Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (1815)
Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (1816)
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1824)
Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala (1835-49)
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
Charles Dickens
- The Pickwick Papers (1836)
- Great Expectations (1861)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859-89)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
George Eliot, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-2)
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark” (1874-6)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Robert Louis Stevenson
- Treasure Island (1883)
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
John Ruskin, Praeterita (1885)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
H.G. Wells
- First Men in the Moon (1901)
- “The Door in the Wall” (1911)
Beatrix Potter, Tales (1902-1930)
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
E.R. Burroughs, Tarzan (1912-1965)
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908)
James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912)
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily” (1913)
James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919)
Kafka, The Castle (1926)
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946)
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1954-5)