[beppe]

For what concern my list of must-haves:

Odysseus for the ancient times, in Italian as I am not agile with Ancient Greek as with Latin, with whatever translation and commentary there is, as I know it very well inside out. It might be the best story ever written in Western culture. Man struggles against opposing forces, both
natural and supernatural, escapes from the traps set by his enemies and by
his own mind, to return to his beloved. Final show down. Happy ending. Big lessons to learn and meditate. Models to imitate. All passions and all virtues are chanted. Everything. Very realistic.

La divina Commedia by Dante (in Italian, with the commentary of De Santis).

5 works of Shakespeare at choice, why not all, if on e-book same thing for
Moliere. In original.

I jump directly to
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in Italian as I do not even recognize all the letters in Russian. War and Peace? why not. It's such a masterpiece.

And what happened with Swift, Goethe and Weltliteratur? Everybody has those. Francisco de Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca,Miguel de Cervantes. At home.

And that's it for the 19th century. Tolstoy died in the 20th but wrote those books in the previous one.

Then things become less easy. Me and my friends have read almost everything of the serious Western Literature, up to the 50's. What to keep? I know

The Master and Margarita of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov in Italian. Why should I have read it in an other language. OK, if I would have been stranded in a French mountain hut (or in some wild place in Quebec) for few days and the only book was Le Maître et Marguerite, I would have read it in French. If I put in the list that, I have also to put one of the strongest book I have ever read, that is Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel. In Italian l'Armata a Cavallo. A must. When I looked up wikipedia for the title in English I stumbled on this:
"Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of Red Cavaly,
The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of
certain scenes. One of the stories, -- Salt -- enjoys a glory seemingly
reserved for poems and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by
heart."

I keep Hemingway, and only one if I must travel lightly and that will be the 49 stories.

Then, the fun starts with these that were in fashion when I started to read
good stuff and not only the old stuff that I found at home. These books I had to buy or borrow and then to buy, and loose them and then to buy them again.
La Peste de Albert Camus !
La Cognizione del dolore of Carlo Emilio Gadda. Not only because we studied in the same school (of course I am many decades his junior)!
Italo Calvino. I take him all except the last two of the ancestors trilogy that I find stuffy. But the first one! What a marvel. He was only few decades my senior.

No Moravia (no soul), for the same reason no Eco.

But many English/American writers.

First of all the one I loved first: Rohald Dahl (the adult stuff, all).
Then Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
The French Lieutenant's Woman by J. Fowles

All those wonderful jewish american books distilled in the one and only
Good Bye Columbus by Philip Roth. It is my theory that the only thing that P.Roth knows well is his youth.

Nobody should complain: I chopped Mann, Bohl, Max Frisch, the other Roth,
Joyce, Faulkner, and many others.even my beloved Mordekai Richler. No, this one I keep.

Mordecai Richler St. Urbain's Horseman
Cormac McCarthy. I take the Border trilogy. The road I have not read it yet, just few pages, and I was transfixed. I have a young child and I want to keep my mind on the sunny side.

I want to add, although it is a fake,
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński. Comme les Habitant de "La belle province" , je me suviens.

And the last but not least, the great, the unsurpassed, the unique
D. F. Wallace that I am carefully drinking sip by sip as slowly as I can.

Because what he wrote is what we got.