/lit/ - Literature

I'm trying to cope with the fact that I will probably never be well-read. I keep trying to make this list, a kind of condensed list of the bare minimum I need to read in order to have a good foundational understanding of literature, but the list is never complete–always changing and shifting, its never perfect or even satisfactory.

So I decided to put together a smaller list, a list of core authors whose works I could keep coming back to year after year, a list of authors whose works would help shape and define my own. I stumbled onto Bloom's 'School of Melville,' consisting of Melville, Faulkner, Nathanael West, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy, Pynchon, and Toni Morrison. I was already a fan of McCarthy, Faulker and Melville so finding a set to which all three belonged was nice, so I could round out my reading. But then, there were so many more authors I had to read or wanted to read. I wanted to read Tolstoy but then I had to read Dostoevsky and Chekov. Flannery O'Connor was an obvious bridge between Faulkner and McCarthy. And so on.

The list never ends, it keeps going and going. There is so much to read and even though I'm only 19, I feel I will never reach a point where I'm comfortable with all that I have read; I will always be playing 'catch-up' with the greats.