Do-It-Yourself Canon

[truepenny]

melymbrosia led me to the slippery slope. lnhammer gave me a push.

I've tried to abide fairly strictly by two criteria: admiration and liking. So, for example, while I will admit that Ulysses is a great novel, I will also admit cheerfully that I hate it. Thus, it is not on my list.

Other than that, I don't know. You tell me.


1. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
2. Villette, Charlotte Brontë
3. Dracula, Bram Stoker
4. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
6. Beloved, Toni Morrison
7. Watership Down, Richard Adams
8. Foe J. M. Coetzee
9. The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
10. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
11. The Dead Zone, Stephen King
12. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
13. Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree, Jr.
14. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
16. Sandman, Neil Gaiman
17. Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
18. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
19. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
20. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
21. Wild Life, Molly Gloss
22. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
23. 1984, George Orwell
24. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
25. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
26. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
27. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
28. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
29. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad