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# So You Want to Be Well Read?
- URL: https://goodoil.news/so-you-want-to-be-well-read/
- Published: 2020-09-13T04:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2020-09-13T04:44:35.000Z
- Author: Cam Slater
- Tags: Books, General, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-17 03:00

“The West,” as **Gavin McInnes** says. “Is the best.”

That statement might trigger the wokesters, but, on almost any measure you can think of, it’s true. Human rights? A Western invention, dating back to at least **John Locke**. Women’s rights? Ditto. Gay rights? Tick, also. Science? Also a Western invention – one, in fact, which could **only** have emerged in the West.

Even the ideology most hell-bent on denigrating and destroying the Western tradition, Marxism, is a Western invention.

That is why, in a wiser age, it was taken as a given that to be a cultured, indeed **civilised** human, one had to be familiar with the Western Canon: that corpus of Great Books that once constituted the gold standard of education.

But what is the Western Canon? **C. S. Lewis**, in his *Experiment in Criticism*, provided a handy list. Experiment itself is a relatively short work, but Lewis covers a vast range of references to the Western Canon.

Of course, Lewis was one of the most widely-read people in history. “I am the product,” he wrote. “Of endless books…books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic”. Few of us could ever hope to be as well-read as Lewis. Nonetheless, a list compiled from *Experiment* gives us a good idea of what to aspire to. As one commenter on *Experiment* notes, “most of the critics reading Lewis’ *Experiment* in the 1960s won’t have read all these books and poems, but they will have read many of them and have a passing knowledge of the rest”.

I’ll confess that I’ve read only a fraction of them myself, but at least I know what to look for next at the library or on Amazon.

**Happy reading!**

Homer: *Iliad* (c. 8th BCE), *Odyssey* (c. 8th BCE)  
Unknown: *Book of Jonah* (8th-4th BCE)  
Pindar: *Olympian Odes* (early 5th BCE), *Pythian Odes* (early 5th BCE), *Fragments* (early 5th BCE)  
Aeschylus: *The Eumenides* (5th BCE)  
Sophocles: *Oedipus Rex* (c. 429 BCE)  
Aristotle: *Poetics* (335 BCE)  
Virgil: *The Georgics* (29 BCE), *The Aeneid* (29-19 BCE)  
Lucian: *Vera Historia* (2nd)  
Apuleius: *Metamorphoses*/*The Golden Ass* (late 2nd)  
Unknown: *Beowulf* (8th-11th)  
Unknown: *The Song of Roland* (11th-12th)  
La?amon: *Brut* (c. 1190-1215)  
Unknown: *Huon of Bordeaux* (c. 1216-1268)  
Snorri Sturluson: *The Prose Edda* (early 13th)  
Dante: *Divine Comedy* (1308-20)  
Geoffrey Chaucer: *The Canterbury Tales* (late 14th), *Troilus and Criseyde* (1380s)  
Unknown: *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* (late 14th)  
Sir Thomas Malory: *Le Morte Darthur* (1485)  
Ludovico Ariosto: *Orlando Furioso* (c. 1516)  
Arthur Brooke: *The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet* (1562)  
Sir Philip Sidney: *Arcadia* (late 16th)  
Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene (1590s)  
William Shakespeare: *Romeo & Juliet* (1591-5), *Twelfth Night* (1601-2), *The Winter’s Tale* (1611), *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* (1590-7), *Henry V* (c. 1599)  
John Donne: “The Apparition” (early 17th)  
Michael Drayton: “The Shepherds Sirena” (1627)  
Thomas Browne: *Urn Burial* (1658)  
Jean Racine: *Andromaque* (1667), *Phèdre* (c. 1677)  
John Milton: *Paradise Lost* (1667-74), *Samson Agonistes* (1671)  
Alexander Pope: *The Rape of the Lock* (1712-4)  
Jonathan Swift: *Gulliver’s Travels* (1726, 1735)  
Voltaire: “Micromégas” (1752), *Candide* (1759)  
Samuel Johnson: *The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia* (1759)  
William Beckford: *Vathek, an Arabian Tale* (1782)  
James Boswell: *Life of Johnson* (1791)  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner* (1798)  
William Wordsworth: “Michael” (1800), *The Excursion* (1814)  
Jane Austen: *Pride & Prejudice* (1813)  
Walter Scott: *Guy Mannering* (1815)  
Benjamin Constant: *Adolphe* (1816)  
John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)  
James Hogg, *The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner* (1824)  
Percy Bysshe Shelley: *The Witch of Atlas* (1824)  
Elias Lönnrot: *The Kalevala* (1835-49)  
Alexandre Dumas: *The Count of Monte Cristo* (1844)  
Charles Dickens: *The Pickwick Papers* (1836), *Great Expectations* (1861)  
William Makepeace Thackeray: *Vanity Fair* (1848)  
Edward Fitzgerald: *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* (1859-89)  
Anthony Trollope: *Barchester Towers* (1857)  
Leo Tolstoy: *War and Peace* (1869)  
George Eliot: *Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life* (1871-2)  
Samuel Butler: *Erewhon* (1872)  
Lewis Carroll: “The Hunting of the Snark” (1874-6)  
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: *The Brothers Karamazov* (1880)  
Robert Louis Stevenson: *Treasure Island* (1883), *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* (1886)  
Edwin Abbott: Flatland: *A Romance of Many Dimensions* (1884)  
John Ruskin: *Praeterita* (1885)  
Henry James: *The Turn of the Screw* (1898)  
H.G. Wells: *First Men in the Moon* (1901), “The Door in the Wall” (1911)  
Beatrix Potter: *Tales* (1902-1930)  
Joseph Conrad: *Nostromo* (1904)  
E.R. Burroughs, *Tarzan* (1912-1965)  
Kenneth Grahame: *The Wind in the Willows* (1908)  
Arnold Bennett: *The Old Wives’ Tale* (1908)  
James Stephens: *The Crock of Gold* (1912)  
D.H. Lawrence: *Sons and Lovers* (1913)  
Gertrude Stein: “Sacred Emily” (1913)  
James Branch Cabell: *Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice* (1919)  
Franz Kafka: *The Castle* (1926)  
Mervyn Peake: *Titus Groan* (1946)  
J.R.R. Tolkien: *Lord of the Rings* (1954-5)

**Lewis also mentions many authors by name – “people one simply knows”.**

Homer (c. 9th BCE), Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Virgil (70-19 BCE), Lucretius (c. 99-55 BC), Ovid (c. 43 BCE-18 CE), St. Paul (c. 5-66 CE), Horace (65-8 BCE), Dante (c. 1265-1321), Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), Malory (c. 1415-1471), Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), Montaigne (1533-1592), Tasso (1544-1595), Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), Sir Phillip Sidney (1554-1586), Donne (1572-1631), Rabelais (c. 1483-1553), Natalis Comes (1520-1582), Marlowe (1564-1593), Shakespeare (1564-1616), Milton (1608-1674), Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Dr. Johnson (1709-1784), Ossian (=James MacPherson) (1736-1796), Wordsworth (1770-1850), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Charles Lamb (1775-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Balzac (1799-1850), Tennyson (1809-1892), Dickens (1812-1870), Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), John Ruskin (1819-1900), Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), R.M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), George Meredith (1828-1909), Jules Verne (1829-1905), Walter Pater (1839-1894), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Henry James (1843-1916), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Brunetière (1849-1906), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Rider Haggard (1856-1925), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), William Morris (1859-1896), A.E. Housman (1859-1936), Bergson (1859-1941), W.W. Jacobs (1863-1943), Kipling (1865-1936), Walter De La Mare (1873-1956), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), E.R. Burroughs (1875-1950), D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965).

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