From the classics and Winnie-the-Pooh to poetry, biographies and books that changed the way we view the world… we at SWA present to you our literary recommendations to enlighten, engross and entertain.
POETRY
18th/19th centuries. Some poets worth getting to know:
Alexander Pope, P.B. Shelley, G.M.Hopkins, Lord Byron, John Keats, Elizabeth Browning, William Blake, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, W.Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman
20th century:
Wilfred Owen, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Elliot, R.S. Thomas, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats, Philip Larkin, Douglas Dunn, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Simon Armitage, Stephen Spender, Derek Walcott, Liz Lochhead, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, e e cummings, Langston Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Allen Ginsberg
DRAMA
Shakespeare’s time: Shakespeare! Marlowe, Jonson,Webster
19th century:Wilde, G B Shaw (spans both centuries)
20th century: Brian Friel, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Sean O’Casey, Arnold Wesker, Alan Bennett, John Osborne, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourne, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepherd, Tennessee Williams
NOVELS BY OLD, DEAD FOLK, BUT STILL WICKED
Thomas Hardy – Jude The Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
W.M. Thackeray – Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens – Great Expectation, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
George Elliot – Middlemarch, Silas Marner
Henry Fielding – Tom Jones
Elizabeth Gaskell – Mary Barton etc.
Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Jane Austen – Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Mark Twain – Huckleberry Finn
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Bram Stoker – Dracula
Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Daniel Defoe – Robison Crusoe
Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo
Anthony Trollope – The Way We Live Now
Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes etc.
Homer – The Iliad, The Odyssey
Virgil – The Aeniad
NEWER STUFF THAT IS GENERALLY AWESOME
Arnold Bennett – The Old Wives’ Tale
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
E.M. Forster – Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End
D.H. Lawrence – Sons & Lovers
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist
Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Virginia Woolf – Moments of Being
Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence
Graham Greene – Power & the Glory, Brighton Rock
George Orwell – 1984, Animal Farm
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited, The Sword of Honour Trilogy
William Golding – The Lord of the Flies
Jack Kerouac – On the Road
John Le Carre – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim
Ian McEwan – Atonement
Alice Walker – The Colour Purple
Paul Scott – Staying On
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Margaret Drabble – The Millstone
Fay Weldon – Life & Loves of a She-Devil
John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong
Nick Hornby – High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, About A Boy, Juliet, Naked
Tony Parsons – Man and Boy
Carlos Ruiz Zafon – Shadow of the Wind
J R Tolkien – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
A A Milne – Winnie-the-Pooh
C S Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters
Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns
John Boyne – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Yann Martel – Life of Pi
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
Russell Hoban – Riddley Walker
Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections
Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy, Leviathan, The Book of Illusions
Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
Ken Kesey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
William Burroughs – Naked Lunch
GRAPHIC NOVELS (Grown up picture books)
Alan Moore – Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Batman: The Killing Joke, From Hell
Frank Miller – 300, The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One
Harvey Pekar – The American Splendour Series
Daniel Klowes – Ghost World
PHILOSOPHY
Plato – The Republic, The Death of Socrates
Aristotle – Poetics, The Nichomachean Ethics,
David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES BY COOL FOLK
Ranulph Fiennes – Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
Patrick Hennessey – The Junior Officers’ Reading Club
Bradley Wiggins – My Time
Mark Oliver Everett – Things the Grandchildren Should Know
Andy Behrman – Electroboy – Memoir of a Mania
William Burroughs – Junky
Hunter S Thompson – Hell’s Angels
TEACHER RECOMMENDATION
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (Mr Hetherington)
Pat Barker – Regeneration (Mr Price)
Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers (Mr Morris)
John Kennedy-Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces (Mr Fothergill)
STUDENT RECOMMENDATION
Stephen Chbosky – The Perks of Being A Wallflower
John Green – The Fault in Our Stars
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