Book List
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We often see such lists under the title of "Best Books of the Year" or Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon*," so I decided to assemble a list, not to recommend to others but to check my own sense of what I deem important. Some works impressed me when I was young and others as I grew older, but this list is the crème de la crème, the ones I hold most dear. Then the best adaption(s), if there is one. Also, a few comments.
| Importance | Author | Title | Adaption |
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| *** | Unknown | The Book of Job | The Coen Brothers film A Serious Man (Perhaps the best Coen Bro. movie) |
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| *** | Homer | Iliad Odyssey |
The Robert Fagles and the Stanley Lombardo translations are both great. Both the Fitzgerald and the Fagles are excellent - also the TV miniseries with Armand Assante |
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| *** | Sophocles |
Oedipus the King Oedipus at Colonus Antigone
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Jean Anouilh's play Antigone based on the original. |
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| *** | Dante Alighieri |
The Divine Comedy | Robin Kirkpatrick translation is standard. (Alan Bloom thinks Dante and Shakespeare are the Western Canon) | |
| ** | Sir Thomas Malory | Le Mort D'Arthur |
Excalibur -1981 film by John Boorman
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| *** | William Shakespeare | King Lear |
Ran - Kurosawa's epic film based on legends of Mōri Motonari as well as King Lear.
Hamlet -1990 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring Mel Gibson
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| * | Lewis Carrol | Alice in Wonderland |
Alice in Wonderland - the 1951 version by Walt Disney
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| * | Junichiro Tanizaki | The Makioka Sisters |
1983 film directed by Kon Ichikawa (The best introduction to Japanese lit.) | |
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Albert Camus
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The Stranger | 1967 film directed by Luchino Visconti | |
| * | Lawrence Durrell | The Alexandria Quartet |
Justine directed by George Cukor |
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| ** | William Faulkner | As I
Lay Dying Light in August Absalom, Absalom! The Sound and the Fury |
There are several films of Faulkner's works, but the only two I found worth watching are The Reivers and The Barn Burners, a short film of the same name with Tommy Lee Jones as Abner Snopes. |
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| ** | Nikos Kazantzakis | The Last Temptation of Christ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel Zorba the Greek |
The movie version was forgetable. Zorba the Greek film directed by Michael Cacoyannis and starring Anthony Quinn |
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| ** |
Gabriel García Márquez |
One Hundred Years of Solitude | ||
| * |
Eudora Welty |
Collected Stories & Losing Battles Delta Wedding |
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| * |
Walker Percy |
The Moviegoer & The Last Gentleman
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Flannery O'Connor
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Wise Blood | A 1979 John Huston film by the same title | |
| * | Roberto Calasso |
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony |
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| ** | Kenneth Clark | Civilisation |
(Book & TV series)
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| * |
Robert Graves
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The Greek Myths |
Haruki Murakami, Kaka on the Shore
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"Either there were aesthetic values, or there are only the over determinations of race, class, and gender. You must choose, for if you believe that all value ascribed to poems or plays or novels and stories is only a mystification in the service of the ruling class, then why should you read at all rather than go forth to serve the desperate needs of the exploited classes? The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is on the the oddest illusions ever promoted by in our schools."
-Harold Bloom, 1996
End