Book recommendations?

[Carol]

Goddlefrood:
> 
> Just who was this Shakespeare character anyway? Answers of 
> thesis length only, off list ;-)

Carol responds:

If we're recommending fiction, we could exclude his writing on the
grounds that it's drama (including several subgenres) and poetry,
right? Really, though, if you want to be culturally literate and your
native language is English, it's really a good idea (and often quite
pleasurable) to read Shakespeare's plays. Not all of them,
necessarily, but the ones that are frequently anthologized. They've
remained popular for roughly four hundred years for good reason.

Goddlefrood: 
> My personal favourites of what you describe as old would be:
> 
> 1. Anything in prose by Thomas Hardy, plus The Dynasts in 
> poetry. <snip>

Carol responds:
Hardy was undoubtedly brilliant, but his writing can be disturbing. I
do recommend "Tess of the D'urbervilles," but don't read "Jude the
Obscure" unless you're prepared for one of the most shocking scenes in
literature. (The movie "Jude" contains that same shocking scene. I'd
read the book; I knew it was coming, and, yet, I could scarcely bear it.)

My own recommendation for Kemper is to read the literary classics, at
least those written within the last few hundred years.

American lit:

"Huckleberry Finn," "Moby Dick," maybe some Hawthorne (especially if
you have an interest in the Salem witch trials and Puritan culture
(Hawthorne was descended from one of the judges; his ancestor may have
had a hand in condemning my "witch" ancestor to death).

BTW, I don't see anyone recommending nonfiction books, and I'm afraid
that my tastes (history, language, and paleoanthropology) wouldn't
match anyone else's, but while I'm suggesting classics, I should
mention that American culture (and possibly British culture as well)
seems to be suffering from the failure to appreciate great poetry. I
would at least sample the great English poets of the Renaissance and
the Romantic and Victorian eras.

I don't mean long works (I'd never inflict Spenser's "The Faerie
Queene" on anyone), but Shakespeare's sonnets; a sprinkling of
Herrick, Donne, and Marvell; and then (skipping most of the IMO
unpoetic eighteenth century) a dose of the Romantics, especially
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" and the
lyrics of Shelley (at least "Ozymandias" and "Ode to the West Wind")
and Keats ("at least "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian
Urn"). Of the twentieth-century poets, the one I'd be most likely to
recommend is Hart Crane (specifically "North Labrador"), though tastes
vary, of course. And don't ask me about anyone born after about 1920.
I may have read their poetry, but it didn't stick in my head the way
the older poetry did.

Carol, desperately hoping that these treasures aren't lost to future
generations