Cyril Connolly’s 100 Key Books of The Modern Movement 1880-1950

Connolly was a waspish critic, an acquired taste, but those books on this list that I have read have been game changing. I propose, over time, to read through the majority of these:
Gustav Flaubert – Bouvard et Pecuchet
Henry James – Portrait of a Lady
Villiers De L’Isle-Adam – Contes Cruels
J.K. Huysmans – A Rebours
Guy de Maupassant – Bel Ami
Arthur Rimbaud – Les Illuminations
Charles Baudelaire – Oeuvres Posthumes
Stephane Mallarme – Poesies
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt – Journal (1887-96)
J.K. Huysmans – La-Bas
Alfred Jarry – Ubu Roi
Henry James – The Awkward Age
Andre Gide – The Immoralist
Joseph Conrad – Youth
Henry James – The Ambassadors
George Moore – Memoirs of My Dead Life
Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent
J.M. Synge – The Playboy of the Western World
E.M. Forster – The Longest Journey
Norman Douglas – Siren Land
D.H. Lawrence – Sons and Lovers
Guillaume Apollinaire – Alcools
Marcel Proust – Du Cote de Chez Swann
W.B. Yeats – Responsibilities
Thomas Hardy – Satires of Circumstance
Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier
Ezra Pound – Lustra
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Norman Douglas – South Wind
T.S. Eliot – Prufrock and Other Observations
Paul Valery – Le Jeune Parque
Percy Wyndham Lewis – Tarr
Guillaume Apollinaire – Calligrammes
Gerard Manley Hopkins – Poems
Arthur Waley – One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems
Lytton Strachey – Eminent Victorians
Ezra Pound – Mauberley
Wilfred Owen – Poems
D.H. Lawrence – Sea and Sardinia
Aldous Huxley – Crome Yellow
Katherine Mansfield – The Garden Party
W.B. Yeats – Later Poems
James Joyce – Ulysses
T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land
Paul Valery – Charmes
Raymond Radiquet – Le Diable au Corps
Ronald Firbank – The Flower Beneath the Foot
Wallace Stevens – Harmonium
E.E. Cummings – Tulips and Chimneys
E.M. Forster – A Passage to India
Ernest Hemingway – In Our Time
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
B.E. Cummings – Is 5
Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
Andre Gide – Si le Grain Ne Meurt
William Plomer – Turbott Wolfe
W. Somerset Maugham – The Casuarina Tree
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
Andre Breton – Nadja
W.B. Yeats – The Tower
D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Evelyn Waugh – Decline and Fall
W.B. Yeats – The Winding Stair
Henry Green – Living
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms
Robert Graves – Goodbye to All That
Jean Cocteau – Les Enfants Terribles
Ivy Compton-Burnett – Brothers and Sisters
T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday
Hart Crane – The Bridge
Ezra Pound – Thirty Cantos
Edith Sitwell – Collected Poems
Antoine de Saint-Exupery – Vol de Nuit
William Faulkner – Sanctuary
Virginia Woolf – The Waves
Edmund Wilson – Axel’s Castle
T.S. Eliot – Selected Essays
W.H. Auden – The Orators
Luis-Ferdinand Celine – Voyage au Bout de la Nuit
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts
Andre Malraux – La Condition Humaine
Dylan Thomas – Eighteen Poems
F. Scott Fitzgerald – Tender Is the Night
Henry James – The Art of the Novel
Marianne Moore – Selected Poems
Dylan Thomas – Twenty-Five Poems
Henri de Montherlant – Les Jeunes Filles (1936-39)
Henri Michaux – Voyage en Grande Garabagne
Jean-Paul Sartre – La Nausee
Louis MacNeice – Autumn Journal
Christopher Isherwood – Goodbye to Berlin
James Joyce – Finnegans Wake
Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory
Arthur Koestler – Darkness at Noon
W.H. Auden – Another Time
Henri Michaux – Au Pays de la Magie
Albert Camus – L’Etranger
Stephen Spender – Ruins and Visions
T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets (1943-44)
George Orwell – Animal Farm
Dylan Thomas – Deaths and Entrances
William Carlos Williams – Patterson 1, 2, 3, 4 (1946-51)
Albert Camus – La Peste
John Betjeman – Selected Poems
Ezra Pound – The Pisan Cantos
George Orwell – 1984

Alberto Manguel – Recommended Reading

Alberto Manguel writes wise books about literature and the importance of reading. I’ve always found that I enjoy the books he recommends. This list [PDF] is taken off his website. I am unlikely to read everything on his list but it is here for inspiration:
Aeschylus, The Orestaeia
Akhmatova, Anna, The Complete Poems
Albee, Edward, A Delicate Balance
Andalusian Poems (edited by Middleton and Garza-Falcon)
Arciniegas, Germán, Biography of the Caribbean
Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death
Asimov, Isaac, I, Robot
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale
Aubrey, John, Brief Lives
Auden, W. H., Collected Poems
Augustine, The Confessions
Barker, Pat, The Regeneration Trilogy
Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Beckett, Samuel, Happy Days
Beckford, William, Vathek
Biedma, Jaime Gil de, Selected Poems
Bioy Casares, Adolfo, The Invention of Morel
Blake, Nicholas, The Beast Must Die
Blake, William, The Complete Poems
Bonnefoy, Yves, New and Selected Poems
Borges, Jorge Luis, Fictions
Bouvier, Nicholas, The Scorpion-Fish
Bradbury, Ray, The Martian Chronicles
Breton, Andre, Nadja
Browne, Sir Thomas, Religio Medici
Buchan, James, Frozen Desire: The History of Money
Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress
Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange
Burroughs, William, The Naked Lunch
Byron, George Gordon, Don Juan
Byron, Robert, The Road to Oxiana
Calasso, Roberto, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Calvino, Italo, If On a Winter’s Night A Traveller
Camus, Albert, The Outsider
Carpentier, Alejo, Kingdom of this World
Carr, J. L., A Month in the Country
Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Carson, Anne, The Beauty of the Husband
Cary, Joyce, The Horse’s Mouth
Catullus, The Complete Poems
Celan, Paul, Selected Poems and Prose
Celine, Louis Ferdinand, Voyage to the End of the Night
Cercas, Javier, Soldiers of Salamis
Cernuda, Luis, Selected Poems
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote
Chateaubriand, François René de, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
Chesterton, G. K., The Man Who Was Thursday
Collodi, Carlo, The Adventures of Pinocchio
Conrad, Joseph, Victory
Dante, Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Denevi, Marco, Rose at Ten
Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend
Dickson Carr, John, The Black Spectacles
Diderot, Denis, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Dinesen, Isak, Seven Gothic Tales
Döblin, Alfred, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Donne, John, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Essays
Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth
Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury
Findley, Timothy, The Wars
Fitzgerald, Penelope, The Blue Flower
Flaubert, Gustav, Bouvard and Pécuchet
Ford, Richard, Wildlife
Forster, E. M., A Passage to India
Fuentes, Carlos, The Death of Artemio Cruz
Gallant, Mavis, From the Fifteenth District
García Lorca, Federico, Poet in New York
García Lorca, Federico, The House of Bernarda Alba
Garner, Alan, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Genet, Jean, Our Lady of the Flowers
Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibson, William, Necromancer
Goethe, J. W. von, Faust
Golding, William, Lord of the Flies
Gombrowicz, Witold, Ferdydurke
Gosse, Edmund, Father and Son
Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows
Greene, Graham, The Power and the Glory
Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob, Household Tales
Hawkes, John, Second Skin
Hazm, Ibm, The Ring of the Dove
Hedayat, Sadegh, The Blind Owl
Heine, Heinrich, Germany, A Fairy Tale
Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea
Hernández, Miguel, Selected Poems
Hersey, John, Hiroshima
Hsueh-Chin, Tsao, Dream of the Red Chamber
Huggan, Isabel, The Elizabeth Stories
Hughes, Robert, A High Wind in Jamaica
James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James, Ulysses
Kadare, Ismail, The File on H.
Kafka, Franz, Diaries
Kafka, Franz, The Trial
Kawabata, Yunishiro, The House of Sleeping Beauties
Kinglake, A. W., Eothen
Kipling, Rudyard, Kim
Labé, Louise, Complete Poetry and Prose
Lagerkvist, Pár, The Dwarf
Lampedusa, Giuseppe di, The Leopard
Larkin, Philip, Poems
Las Casas, Bartolomé, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Lawrence, D.H., Women in Love
Le Carré, John, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Word For World Is Forest
Lear, Edward, The Complete Nonsense Book
Lem, Stanislaw, Solaris
Lessing, Doris, Briefing For a Descent Into Hell
Levi, Primo, The Periodic Table
Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams
Maalouf, Amin, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
Machado de Assis, J. M., Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Magris, Claudio, The Danube
Malouf, David, An Imaginary Life
Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain
Marai, Sandor, Embers
Matthiessen, Peter, The Snow Leopard
Maugham, Somerset, Cakes and Ale
McEwan, Ian, Enduring Love
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
Menocal, Maria Rosa, The Ornament of the World
Miles, Rosalind, A Woman’s History of the World
Mishima, Yukio, The Sea of Fertility
Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance
Montaigne, Michel de, The Essays
Moore, Brian, Cold Heaven
Morris, Jan,Venice
Munro, Alice, The Progress of Love
Nabakov, Vladimir, Pale Fire
Nooteboom, Cees, In the Mountains of the Netherlands
Novalis, Fragments
Nuwas, Abu, Diwan al gazal: Love Poems
O’Brien, Flann, The Third Policeman
O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Orwell, George, 1984
Orwell, George, Down and Out in Paris and London
Outram, Richard, Selected Poems 1960-1980
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Oz, Amos, A Tale of Love and Darkness
Ozick, Cynthia, The Messiah of Stockholm
Pavese, Cesare, Disaffection: Complete Poems
Pessoa, Fernando, The Book of Disquiet
Petronius, Satyricon
Pirenne, Henri, Medieval Cities
Plato, Timaeus
Pliny the Younger, Letters
Plutarch, Parallel Lives
Pogue Harrison, Richard, The Dominion of the Dead
Pound, Ezra, The Cantos
Powys, T.F., Mr. Weston’s Good Wine
Prescott, William H., History of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time
Purdy, James, The Nephew
Quevedo, Francisco de, Selected Poetry
Racine, Jean, Phèdre
Rankin, Nicholas, Dead Man’s Chest
Read, Herbert, The Green Child
Rendell, Ruth, Judgement in Stone
Richler, Mordecai, Barney’s Version
Rilke, Rainer Maria, The Selected Poetry
Rimbaud, Arthur, Complete Works
Rolfe, Frederick, Hadrian the Seventh
Roth, Joseph, The Radetzky March
Rulfo, Juan, Pedro Páramo
Saki, Short Stories
Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye
Saroyan, William, The Human Comedy
Schama, Simon, Citizens
Schulz, Bruno, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Schwob, Marcel, Imaginary Lives
Sebald, W. G., Austerlitz
Shakespeare, William, King Lear
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
Simenon, Georges, The Wedding of Monsieur Hire
Skvorecky, Josef, The Engineer of Human Souls
Sophocles, Ajax
Sophocles, Antigone
Spark, Muriel, Memento Mori
St. John of the Cross, Collected Works
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath
Steiner, George, After Babel
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Stone, I. F., The Trial of Socrates
Tom Stoppard: The Invention of Love
Sturgeon, Theodore, More Than Human
Svevo, Italo, The Conscience of Zeno
Szabo, Magda, Katerina Street
Tabucchi, Antonio, Declares Pereira
The Lazarillo of Tormes (Anonymous)
The Thousand and One Nights (Anonymous)
Thomas, Dylan, The Poems
Thoreau, Henry David, Walden
Toibin, Colm, The Master
Tranströmer, Tomas, New Collected Poems
Trevor, William, Collected Stories
Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror
Tunstrom, Goran, The Christmas Oratorio
Tutuola, Amos, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Time of the Hero
Verlaine, Paul, One Hundred and One Poems
Verne, Jules, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex
Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr Moreau
White, Patrick, Voss
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass
Wilbur, Richard, Collected Poems
Wilde, Oscar, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest
Williams, Tennessee, Suddenly Last Summer
Yourcenar, Marguerite, Memoirs of Hadrian
Zola, Emile, L’Assomoir

Donald Barthleme’s Reading List

Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two-Birds
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Isaac Babel, Collected Short Stories
Borges, Labyrinths
Borges, Other Inquisitions
Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Rudy Wurlitzer, Nog
Isaac B Singer, Gimpel the Fool
Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano,
Samuel Beckett entire
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Max Frisch, I’m Not Stiller
Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
Tommaso Landolfi, Gogol’s Wife
Thomas Pynchon, V
John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
John Hawkes, Blood Oranges
Paley, Little Disturbances
Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Susan Sontag, I, Etc.
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
John Updike, The Coup
John Updike, Rabbit, Run
The Paris Review interviews
Rust Hills (ed.), How We Live
Joe David Bellamy (ed.), Superfiction
Puschart Prize Anthologies
Sternburg (ed.), The Writer on Her Work
André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism
Motherwell (ed.), Documents of Modern Art
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World
Flaubert, Letters
Mamet, Sexual Perversity in Chicago
Joy Williams, The Changeling
Joe David Bellamy (ed.), The New Fiction
Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato
Amos Tutola, The Palm-Wine Drunkard
Ann Tyler, Searching for Caleb
Kenneth Koch, Thank You
Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems
John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains
Wesley Brown, Tragic Magic
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel
Ann Beattie, Falling in Place
William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life
Gass, The World Within the Word
Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
Kobo Abe, The Box Man
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays
André Breton, Nadja
John Barth, Chimera
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer,
Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
Peter Taylor, Collected Stories
Colette, The Pure and the Impure
Carver, Will You Please be Quiet, Please
John Cheever, Collected Stories
Leonard Michaels, I Would Have Saved Them if I Could
Eudora Welty, Collected Stories
Max Apple, The Oranging of America
Flannery O’Connor, Collected Stories
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Wayne C Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction