Why Study Literature?

An hour filled with reading is an hour well spent. An hour filled with studying and analyzing the Great Books (or classics) is an hour spent building your worldview. Some may ask, why should a Christian study pagan works like The Odyssey or works such as Mein Kampf that caused so much evil? These are books that changed history, books that reflected on the then current flow of civilization. These are books that brought the world to where it is today.

Any time you pick up a book, it should not be for entertainment alone. Every sentence read should be analyzed by the culture the work was written in, by what the author meant, by what our culture has to say about the topic addressed, and most importantly, by what Scripture says.

When we take the time to study the literature of the ages, we no longer have to succumb to politically incorrect accounts of history. When the great books are analyzed, surrounding culture may not be any more bearable, but, we at least understand why we are where we are. When the great books are lined up with Scripture's standard, the culture that the Bible was written in is much more understandable and we find yet more layers to God's Holy Word. The study of literature provides connections, mental tags for putting everything in its place.

I started my journey through great literature about four years ago. I found the following list of classics that I thought I would share.

You may find that you've read a few of these. If so, choose one of the authors that you liked and read another one of their works. Or, pick up again the one you have read, and pick it apart, analyze it. Books are meant to be read over and over.

Or, you can choose to do what I am doing this year. Start at the beginning with the Ancients. I'm taking a whole year to work through some of the most important works with an online class. But, you could do an overview, choosing a few from each major time period.



Analyzing literature is a worthy (I believe necessary) yet daunting pursuit. I have found the Omnibus study guides and online classes very helpful.


But, if you can only get one book to help you, I suggest, The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. Although this resource does not explain analyzing literature in relation to Scripture (which the Omnibus courses do), Bauer does a wonderful job of explaining how to critically analyze the literary aspects and pull out the themes of the work by yourself. She explains how to analyze novels, plays, poetry, autobiographies, and historical works. After using her analyzing process, you could then take the list of themes you have pulled from the work and use them as keywords for searching Bible concordances, dictionaries, commentaries, etc... If you don't have a shelf full of Biblical resources, Desiring God and the Online Parallel Bible offer wonderful, free online help.


Ok, now for that list of books I promised. Now, understand that this is by no means an exhaustive reference. The resources I discussed above have similar lists, but no two are the same. Allright, I'll hush, here we go:

1. The Iliad, Homer
2. The Odyssey, Homer**
3. The Aeneid, Virgil**
4. Beowulf, Unknown
5. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
6. The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo
7. Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
8. Don Quixote, Cervantes
9. Paradise Lost, John Milton
10. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan*
11. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
12. Noll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
13. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift*
14. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
15. Candide, Voltaire
16. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge*
17. The Tragedy of Faust, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
18. The Lady of the Lake, Sir Walter Scott
19. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
20. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen*
21. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley*
22. The Red and the Black, Stendahl
23. The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper***
24. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
25. Carmen, Porsper Merimee
26. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte*
27. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
28. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
29. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
30. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens*
31. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens*
32. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne*
33. Camille, Alexandre Dumas Fils
34. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
35. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
36. Idyls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson
37. Silas Marner, George Eliot*
38. Middlemarch, George Eliot
39. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
40. Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgeney
41. Crime and Punishment, Feodor Dostoyevsky
42. The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoyevsky
43. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott*
44. Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
45. Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain*
46. The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain*
47. Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, Mark Twain
48. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain*
49. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
50. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
51. The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
53. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James***
    
54. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
55. Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson***
56. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
57. The Time Machine, H. G. Wells
58. Dracula, Bram Stoker
59. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
60. Call of the Wild, Jack London
61. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
62. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
63. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
64. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
65. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
66. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
67. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
68. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck***
69. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
70. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
71. The Republic, Plato** (The Last Days of Socrates)
    
72. The Prince, Machiavelli
73. The Social Contract, Jean Jacques Rousseau
74. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
75. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
76. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
77. The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler
78. Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus**
79. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles**
80. The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare** (Julius Ceasar)
    
81. Macbeth, William Shakespeare
82. The Tempest, William Shakespeare
83. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
84. Othello, William Shakespeare
85. Tartuffe, Moliere
86. Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen
87. A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen*
88. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde*
89. Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
90. The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
91. Our Town, Thornton Wilder
92. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
93. The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
94. Mediatations, Rene Descartes
95. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
96. The World as Will and Idea, Artur Schopenhauer
97. Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson
98. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
99. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
100. How We Think, John Dewey

*I have read
**I am reading, or plan to read this year
***I have not read this specific work, but I have read other works by the same author.
**( ) I plan to read another work by this author this year.