Chinese Author Cao Xueqin (1715-1763)
TBR is a real bookworm’s term: It’s an acronym for To Be Read. We all have our TBR piles. Here is a look at mine, consisting mostly of Asian classics (some of which are multi-volume) and various Medieval and Ancient Greek and Roman classics. Here are some 22 classics which I will attempt, in my own desultory fashion, to read while I am able:
- Anonymous, The Mahabharata (India)
- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (Italy)
- Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (Austria)
- Cao Xueqin, The Dream of the Red Chamber (aka The Story of the Stone) (China)
- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (England)
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Raw Youth (aka The Adolescent) (Russia)
- Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (USA)
- William Faulkner, A Fable (USA)
- Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum (Germany)
- João Guimarães Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Brazil)
- Henry James, The Bostonians (USA)
- Kalidasa, The Shakuntala (India)
- Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain (Japan)
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (Ancient Rome)
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Complete Essays (France)
- Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale of Genji (Japan)
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Germany)
- Ovid, Metamorphoses (Ancient Rome)
- Plato, The Republic (Ancient Greece)
- Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (Russia)
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (India)
- Valmiki, Ramayana (India)
Some of the above works are major; others are relatively minor. The Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, for instance, are there only because they are the only novels by the two authors I have not read. I have already picked up a copy of Henry James’s The Bostonians to read next month.
