Being an English teacher, this was the hardest list to write. I would recommend nearly all the classics of Western Literature if asked about any of them. But the following are books that have especially influenced my character and understanding of life:
- Homer, The Odyssey
- Virgil, The Aeneid
- Beowulf (Chickering or Heaney translation)
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- Dante, The Divine Comedy, esp. Purgatorio
- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
- John Donne, poems
- George Herbert, poems
- William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing; The Merchant of Venice; The Tempest
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamozov
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, poems
- T. S. Eliot, poems and essays
- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia; The Space Trilogy; Till We Have Faces
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; “Leaf, by Niggle” and “Farmer Giles of Ham”
- G. K. Chesterton, Manalive; Father Brown stories
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
- Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows
- Flannery O’Connor, everything but especially her short stories
- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
