Calling on my literary friends list

[velvetpage]

I have a lot of very literary people on my friends list, so surely we can manage this amongst us.

I want to rewrite that meme I posted this morning.  Not edit it, but completely rewrite it.  I don't want to go with bestsellers, or any other arbitrary appeal to authority when it comes to what books should be on it and what should be left off.  I also don't want to include a certain laundry list of the "best" books by certain authors, while leaving out books by other, equally good authors.  I'd like to, for example, ask people to give themselves one point for each book they've read by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or Mark Twain.  I'd like to develop a sub-list for young adult literature.  In the interests of brevity, I'm limiting this to novels, which means many well-read people will not see themselves in it.  That's a cultural bias I'll acknowledge and address some other time.

So, if you were to make a list like that, what books or authors would you keep from the old list, and what ones would you add?

I'll start.

Under the authors category, I'd let people give themselves points for any book written by the following authors that were left out of the first list:
Madeleine L'Engle
Arthur C. Clarke
Carl Sagan
Mark Twain
Margaret Lawrence
Michael Ontdaatje
Robertson Davies

Your thoughts?

Comments

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

Regardless of the approach you take (see previous reply) I think there are some other categories that I'd throw out there for consideration:

Regionality:
-British Isles Literature
-American English Literature
-Canadian English Literature
-Other Primarily English-speaking countries I have not listed (Austrailian, New Zealand, India, etc)

Of course there are many sub-regions that bear consideration such as Canadian Prairie Fiction vs Canadian Maritime Fiction, New England Fiction vs Mid-West Fiction not to mention the important differences between Irish, Scottish, and Welsh Fiction one from each other.

I would consider great non-English works that have made their way into English Literature as well, Tolstoy, Hugo, Kuroshima.

Time period is also an important factor, having read a lot of Shakespeare is good but what about Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson? Have you read only modern or post-modern writers? What coverage has been given to Romantics, Victorian, Colonial and pre-WWII literature?

This is where I'd start.