Since I got my e-reader I've been try to compile a literature must read list for my backpacking trip.
I found this list (a MFA prep list). Could someone tell me if this is a good place to start? It seems well rounded.
Are there any books that are missing (or a few I should remove)? If you don't want to openly suggest removing a book, pm me.
Theres a copy of the list below
Reading list for Master's Degree preparation
FIELD #1: MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Beowulf (in verse translation)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in verse translation)
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales Selections
FIELD #2: RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I
Shakespeare, King Lear
John Donne, Selections
Milton, Paradise Lost, Books I and II
FIELD #3: RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
Congreve, The Way of the World
Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”;
Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”
Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare”
FIELD #4: ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets #1, #8, and #12
Wordsworth, Selections From
Coleridge, “CristabelÓ;
Keats, Selections from
Eliot, Middlemarch
Tennyson, In Memoriam (selections from the Norton Anthology)
Browning, “Andrea del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi”
FIELD #5: TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
W.B. Yeats: Selections From
E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers OR Women in Love
T. S. Eliot: Selections
James Joyce: The Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
FIELD #6: EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Ann Bradstreet, Selections From
Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”;
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Walt Whitman, Selections
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
FIELD #7: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Robert Frost, Selections from
Alice Walker, Meridian