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.