A personal treasury of great books, organised rather artificially by category. This is a work in progress, with the genres and selection liable to sudden change. I plan to add blurbs at some point.

Modern

• The Ruined Map (Kobo Abe)
• Surfacing (Margaret Atwood)
• The New York Trilogy (Paul Auster)
• Molloy (Samuel Beckett)
• 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
• The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolaño)
• Labyrinths (Jorge-Luis Borges)
• The Master and Margerita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
• If on a winter’s night a traveller (Italo Calvino)
• Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
• The Aegypt Cycle (John Crowley)
• Little, Big (John Crowley)
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
• The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
• As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
• The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
• The Unvanquished (William Faulkner)
• A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)
• Demian (Herman Hesse)
• The Glass Bead Game (Herman Hesse)
• Steppenwolf (Herman Hesse)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
• Dubliners (James Joyce)
• Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
• Ulysses (James Joyce)
• The Castle (Franz Kafka)
• The Complete Short Stories (Franz Kafka)
• The Trial (Franz Kafka)
• The Leopard (Giuseppi di Lampedusa)
• Blue Highways (William Least Heat-Moon)
• Prairyerth (William Least Heat-Moon)
• Desert Notes (Barry Lopez)
• Monsieur De Bougrelon (Jean Lorrain)
• Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
• Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann)
• Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
• Outer Dark (Cormac McCarthy)
• The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
• Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami)
• A Wild Sheep Chase (Haruki Murakami)
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami)
• The Plains (Gerald Murnane)
• Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
• Bluets (Maggie Nelson)
• Thus Spake Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche)
• The Third Policeman (Flann O’Brien)
• Gormenghast/Titus Groan (Mervyn Peake)
• The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Katherine Anne Porter)
• Maiden Castle (John Cowper Powys)
• Wolf Solent (John Cowper Powys)
• The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
• Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
• V. (Thomas Pynchon)
• Pedro Paramo (Juan Rulfo)
• The Street of Crocodiles (Bruno Schulz)
• The Rings of Saturn (W. G. Sebald)
• Vertigo (W. G. Sebald)
• I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein)
• Confessions of Zeno (Italo Svevo)
• Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
• Miss Lonelyhearts (Nathaniel West)
• To The Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)

Classics

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous)
• Emma (Jane Austen)
• Mansfield Park (Jane Austen)
• Persuasion (Jane Austen)
• Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
• Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
• Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
• Villette (Charlotte Brontë)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
• Don Quixote (Cervantes)
• The Odyssey (Homer, tr. George Chapman)
• The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
• Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
• Inferno (Dante)
• Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
• The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
• Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
• The Devils (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
• The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
• Faust (Goethe)
• Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Nikolai Gogol)
• The Sandman (E. T. A. Hoffman)
• The Lord Chandos Letter (Hugo von Hofmannsthal)
• Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans)
• Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
• Paradise Lost (John Milton)
• Hamlet (Shakespeare)
• Henry IV (Shakespeare)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)
• King Lear (Shakespeare)
• The Tempest (Shakespeare)
• Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
• Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)
• Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
• War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
• The Aeneid (Virgil)

Science Fiction

• Tau Zero (Poul Anderson)
• Timescape (Gregory Benford)
• The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester)
• Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke)
• The Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C. Clarke)
• Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke)
• Babel-17 (Samuel Delany)
• A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick)
• The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Philip K. Dick)
• VALIS (Philip K Dick)
• Diaspora (Greg Egan)
• Incandescence (Greg Egan)
• Permutation City (Greg Egan)
• Schild’s Ladder (Greg Egan)
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein)
• Dune (Frank Herbert)
• Ice (Anna Kavan)
• The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin)
• The Call of Cthulu (H. P. Lovecraft)
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
• The Red Mars Trilogy (Kim Stanley Robinson)
• Contact (Carl Sagan)
• Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
• Roadside Picnic (Boris and Arkady Strugatsky)
• Rainbow’s End (Vernor Vinge)
• Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut)
• The Chrysalids (John Wyndham)

Poetry

I’ve sometimes listed particularly strong collections or poems, but otherwise just look out for selections.

• Anna Akhmatova
• Emily Dickinson
• The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)
• Douglas Dunn
• Cat Town (Sakutarou Hagiwara)
• Federico García Lorca
• Ferenc Juhász
• Robert Lowell
• Janos Pilinszky
• Ariel (Sylvia Plath)
• Salvator Quasimodo
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Yannis Ritsos
• Anne Sexton
• Wallace Stevens
• Under Milk Wood (Dylan Thomas)
• R. S. Thomas
• Tomas Tranströmer
• Sándor Weöres
• Song of Myself (Walt Whitman)