Steven's List

I struggled a bit over this list because I don't focus on a particular genre of literature. So I consulted various sources for those works that are most basic to world literature as a whole. My Fill-in-the-Gaps list consisted exclusively of prose fiction, included no re-reads, and was limited to one work per author. It included many works that would be considered "basic," but many modern ones as well. This list does not duplicate any of the FITG entries, but focuses on older works that have had an indelible impact on modern literature. I've included some works that I read in college or earlier that need to be revisited. The chances are slim to none that I will ever finish this list, but even just sampling some of the collections should be worthwhile.

Epic Verse to Re-Read

1 Beowulf
2 Homer - The Iliad
3 Homer - The Odyssey
4 Virgil - The Aeneid

Major Works in Verse

5 Byron, George Gordon, Lord - Don Juan
6 Camoes, Luis Vaz de - Lusiads
7 Chaucer, Geoffrey - Canterbury Tales
8 Ovid - Metamorphoses
9 Pushkin, Alexander - Eugene Onegin
10 The Bhagavad Gita
11 The Bible
12 The Niebelunenlied
13 The Quran
14 The Poem of the Cid
15 The Song of Roland
16 Valmiki - The Ramayana

Poetry Collections

17 Blake, William - Complete Poetry
18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Complete Poems
19 Dickinson, Emily - Collected Poems
20 Donne, John - Complete Poems
21 Frost, Robert - The Poetry of Robert Frost
22 Horace - Odes
23 Keats, John - Poems
24 Ovid - The Arts of Love
25 Pindar - Odes
26 Rilke, Rainer Maria - Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
27 Sappho - Poems
28 Shelley, Percy Bysshe - Poetical Works of Shelley
29 Stevens, Wallace - Collected Poems
30 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord - Idylls of the King
31 Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
32 Yeats, William Butler - Collected Poems

Shakespeare to Re-Read

33 Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
34 Shakespeare, William - King Lear
35 Shakespeare, William - Macbeth

Plays

36 Aeschylus - Complete Tragedies
37 Beckett, Samuel - Krapp's Last Tape
38 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro - Life is a Dream
39 Corneille, Pierre - Cid, The
40 Euripides - Complete Tragedies
41 Ibsen, Henrik - Hedda Gabler
42 Ibsen, Henrik - The Master Builder
43 Ibsen, Henrik - Peer Gynt
44 Ibsen, Henrik - When We Dead Awaken
45 Jonson, Ben - Volpone
46 Marlowe, Christopher - Doctor Faustus
47 Miller, Arthur - Death of a Salesman
48 Moliere - Don Juan
49 Moliere - Imaginary Invalid
50 Moliere - The Miser
51 Moliere - School for Wives
52 O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
53 O'Neill, Eugene - The Iceman Cometh
54 Pirandello, Luigi - Six Characters in Search of an Author
55 Racine, Jean Baptiste - Phedre
56 Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
57 Shaw, George Bernard - Back to Methuselah
58 Shaw, George Bernard - Heartbreak House
59 Shaw, George Bernard - Major Barbara
60 Sophocles - Complete Tragedies
61 Strindberg, August - Miss Julie
62 Wilde, Oscar - The Importance of Being Earnest
63 Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
64 Williams, Tennessee - A Streetcar Named Desire

Non-Fiction

65 Adams, Henry - Education of Henry Adams, The
66 Augustine, Saint - Confessions
67 Beauvoir, Simone de - The Second Sex
68 Boswell, James - The Life of Samuel Johnson
69 Confucius - The Analects
70 Darwin, Charles - The Origin of the Species
71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Essential Writings
72 Freud, Sigmund - Interpretation of Dreams, The
73 Gibbon, Edward - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
74 Hobbes, Thomas - Leviathan
75 James, William - The Varieties of Religious Experience
76 Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
77 Milton, John - Areopagitica
78 Montaigne, Michel de - Essays
79 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm - Basic Writings
80 Pascal, Blaise - Pensees
81 Paz, Octavio - Labyrinth of Solitude
82 Plato - Symposium and Phaedo
83 Plutarch - Parallel Lives
84 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - Confessions
85 Sun-Tzu - The Art of War
86 Tacitus - The Annals

Novels to Re-Read

87 Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
88 Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
89 Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
90 Twain, Mark - Huckleberry Finn
91 Voltaire - Candide

Novels

92 Balzac, Honore de - Cousin Bette
93 Balzac, Honore de - A Harlot High and Low
94 Conrad, Joseph - Under Western Eyes
95 Dickens, Charles - Hard Times
96 Dickens, Charles - Little Dorrit
97 Diderot, Denis - Rameau's Nephew
98 Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Possessed, The
99 Gide, Andre - Immoralist, The
100 Hardy, Thomas - Far from the Madding Crowd
101 Malory, Thomas - Le Morte d'Arthur
102 Woolf, Virginia - Waves, The
103 Zola, Emile - L'Assommoir
104 Zola, Emile - Nana
105 Zola, Emile - Thérèse Raquin

Short Story Collections

106 Borges, Jorge Luis - Ficciones
107 Cheever, John - The Stories of John Cheever
108 Chekhov, Anton - Stories and Short Novels (trans Pevear & Volokhonsky)
109 Faulkner, William - Collected Stories
110 Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Twice-Told Tales
111 Hemingway, Ernest - Complete Short Stories
112 James, Henry - Collected Stories and Short Novels
113 Kafka, Franz - Complete Short Stories
114 Mann, Thomas - Collected Stories
115 Maupassant, Guy de - Short Stories
116 Melville, Hermann - Complete Short Fiction
117 O'Connor, Flannery - Complete Stories
118 Poe, Edgar Allan - Complete Tales
119 Porter, Katherine Anne - Collected Stories
120 Pushkin, Alexander - Complete Stories
121 Thousand and One Nights - Thousand and One Nights
122 Tolstoy, Leo - The Collected Short Fiction
123 Turgenev, Ivan - A Sportsman's Notebook
124 Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories

iasa's list

I guess the ideal novel, that i've yet to write, would be I Moved to the Caribbean and Found Someone Had Killed P.G. Wodehouse in My Kitchen.  So for the basics challenge, i've focused on mysteries, making sure i've included internationally written and set novels,  and comedic novels, along with a Groucho autobiography.  After all who can resist Groucho? 

1. The Leavenworth Case                            Anna Katharine Green
2. The Scarlet Pimpernell                            Baroness Orczy
3. The Man Who Was Thursday                  C.K. Chesterton
4. The Innocence of Father Brown              C.K. Chesterton
5. The Haunted Bookshop                           Christopher Morley
6. The Great Impersonation                         E. Phillip Oppenheimer
7. Meet Mr. Mulliner                                   P.G. Wodehouse
8. The Footsteps at the Lock                       Ronald A. Knox
9. Red Harvest                                            Dashiell Hammet
10. Malice Aforethought                              Francis Iles
11. Keeper of the Keys                                 Earl Derr Biggers
12. Death Under Sail                                    C.P. Snow
13. Darkness at Pemberly                             T.H. White
14. Was It Murder                                         James Hilton
15. An Oxford Tragedy                                J.C. Masterman
16. The Mystery of Cape Cod Tavern           Phoebe Atwood Taylor
17. The Chinese Orange Mystery                 Ellery Queen
18. Wax                                                       Ethel Lina White
19. Death from a Top Hat                            Clayton Rawson
20. No Orchids for Miss Blandish                James Hadley Chase
21. The Mysterious Mickey Finn                  Eliot Paul
22. Footprints on the Ceiling                        Clayton Rawson
23. A Pinch of Poison                                  Richard & Francis Lockridge
24. The Ministry of Fear                             Graham Greene
25. Holy Disorders                                     Edmund Crispin
26. The Red Right Hand                             Joel Townley Rogers
27. The Double Take                                   Roy Huggins
28. The Daughter of Time                          Josephine Tey
29. The Ivory Green                                   Rocc Macdonald
30. Watcher in the Shadows                      Geoffrey Household
31. The Rose of Tibet                                Lionel Davidson
32. The Zebra Striped Hearse                    Ross Macdonald
33. The Night of the Generals                   Hans Helmut Kirst
34. This Rough Magic                              Mary Stewart
35. The Death of the Detective                 Mark Smith
36. The Plot Against Roger Ryder            Julian Symons
37. The Mobius Strip                               William Gardner
38. Shibumi                                                Trevanian
39. A Woman Called Scylla                      David Gurr
40. Dolly and the Bird of Paradise            Dorothy Dunnet
41. Yellowthread Street                             William Marshall
42. The Fire Engine That Disappeared      Sjowall & Wahloo
43. Still Life                                               Louise Penny
44. Jar City                                                 Arnaldur Indriðason
45. The Faceless Killers                            Henning Mankell
46. Whatever i can find by                         Janwillem L. van de Wetering
47. The Saturday Morning Murder            Batya Gur
48. The Silence of the Rain                        Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
49. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow          Peter Hoeg
50. Raven Black                                        Ann Cleeves
51. Water-Blue Eyes                                  Domingo Villar
52. Blood on the Saddle                             Rafael Reig
53. One Helluva Mess                                Jean-Claude Izzo
54. Sergeant Studer series                          Friedrich Glauser
55. A Florentine Death                              Michele Giuttari
56. The Shape of the Water                        Andrea Camilleri
57. Zone Defence                                       Petros Markaris
58. The Widow Killer                               Pavel Kohout
59. Happy Birthday Turk                          Jakob Arjouni
60. Death in Breslau                                 Marek Krajewski
61. Blackwater                                           Kerstin Ekman
62. Havana Blue                                         Leonardo Padura
63. The Shadow of the Shadow                Paco Ignacio Taibo IIis
64. Tattoo                                                  Manuel Vazquez Montalban
65. The Final Bet                                      Abdelilah Hamdouchi
66. Double Blank                                       Yasmina Khadra
67. Sacred Games                                      Vikram Chandra
68. The Eye of Jade                                   Diane Wei Lang
69. The Coroner’s Lunch                          Colin Cotterill
70. The Broken Shore                                 Peter Temple
71. Devil’s Peak                                           Deon Meyer
72. A Lonely Place to Die                         Wessel Ebersohn
73. Memoirs of a Mangy Lover                 Groucho Marx
74. Elementary, My Dear Groucho             Ron Goulart
75. The Time Machine Did It                     John Swartzwelder
76. The Dog of the South                           Charlie Portis
77. Infinite Jest                                            David Foster Wallace
78. Nobody Move                                        Denis Johnson
79. Adolf Hitler:My Part in His Downfall   Spike Milligan
80. Three Men in a Boat                              Jerome K. Jerome
81. The Gun Seller                                      Hugh Laurie
82. Cold Comfort Farm                                Stella Gibbons
83. Lake Wobegon Days                              Garrison Keillor
84. The Queen and I                                    Sue Townsend
85. Scoop                                                     Evelyn Waugh
86. A Scanner Darkly                                  Phillip K. Dick
87. Colony                                                    Rob Grant
88. An Evening of Long Goodbyes            Paul Murray
89. The Crying of Lot 49                            Thomas Pynchon
90. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman     Laurence Sterne
91. The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove      Christopher Moore
92. Sweet Silver Blues                                  Glen Cook
93. Straight Man                                             Richard Russo
94. Nice Work                                                 David Lodge
95. Deal Breaker                                         Harlan Coben
96. Malice in Maggody                                   Joan Hess
97. The Bottle Factory Outing                       Beryl Bainbidge
98. Zuleika Dobson                                    Max Beerbohm
99. A Good Man in Africa                          William Boyd
100. Death and the Penguin                            Andrey Kurkov
101. The Restraint of Beasts                             Magnus Mills
102. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf            Victor Pelevin

My Fantasy Basics List

Ok So here is my fantasy basic list - a combination of recomendations and the 'best of' lists. Most of these are part of a series - (which i'll also read). Some of those listed i've read before when i was much younger so i plan to reread them.

SF and historical fiction list to come soon (I'm a masochist i know)

1. The Swan's War, Sean Russell
2. Elantris, Brandon Sanderson
3. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
4. Earthsea Series, Ursula Le Guin
5. Wheel of Time Series, Robert Jordan
6. A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
7. Acacia, David Durhams
8. The Briar King, Greg Keyes
9. The Darkness that comes before, R. Scott Bakers
10. Shadowmarch, Tad Williams
11. The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erickson
12. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
13. The Farseer Trilogy, Robin Hobbs
14. Tigana, Guy Gaveriel Kay
15. The Summer Tress, "
16. The first Law Trilogy, Joe Abercrombie
17. The Sun Sword, Michelle West
18. The Death Gate Cycle, Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weiss
19. Magician, Raymond E. Feist
20. Codex Alera, Jim Butcher
21. The Runelords, Dave Farlands
22. The Way of Shadows, Brent Weeks
23. Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock
24. American Gods, Neil Gaimen
25. The Stolen Child, Keith Donohue
26. Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
27. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
28. The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
29. The Abhoreson Trilogy, Garth Nix
30. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Jonathon Stroud
31. Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
32. Lies of Lock Lamora, Scott Lynch
33. Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R Donaldson,
    
34. The Sword of Shadows, J.V. Jones
35. Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, Tad Williams
36. The Dragon CrownWar Cycle, Micheal A. Stackpole
37. ShadowMarch, "
38. Empire Trilogy, Feist & Janny Wurts
39. The DarkTower, Stephen King
40. Dresden Files, Jim Butcher
41. Amber Chronicles, Roger Zelazny
42. The cold Fire Trilogy, C.S. Friedman
43. Riddle of Stars, Patricia A. McKillip
44. Godless World Trilogy, Brian Ruckley,
    
45. Boreal Moon Trilogy, Julia May
46. Crown of Stars Trilogy, Kate Elliot
47. Oath of Empire Saga, Thomas Harlan
48. Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
49. Furies of Calderon, Jim Butcher
50. Liveship Traders, Robin Hobb
51. The Sevenwater Trilogy, Juliet Marillier
52. Kushiels Dart, Jacqueline Carey
53. The Lions of al Rassan, Guy G Kay
54. Archangel, Sharon Shinn
55. Exiles, Melini Rawn
56. Dragon and the phoenix, Joanne Bertin
57. Dragon Prince Trilogy, Melini Rawn
58. Rhapsody, Elizabeth Haydon
59. The Second Sons, Jennifer Fallon
60. Tales of the Otori, Lian Hearn
61. A Song for Abalion, Steven Lawhead
62. Rise of Moontide & Magic, Sean Russell
63. The Light Age, Ian McDonald
64. The Amtrack Wars, Patrick Tilley
65. Sword-Dancer, Jennifer Roberson
66. The Sword, Ring & Chalice, Deborah Chester
67. The Initiate Brother, Sean Russell
68. Talion, Revenant, Micheal A. Stackpole
69. A Curse of Chalion, Lois BuJold
70. The light ages, Ian R. MacLeod
71. Vampire Earth, EE Knight
72. Ascendents of Astoria, James Barclay
73. Black Jewel, Anne Bishop
74. God's Demon, Wayne Barlow
75. Legend, David Gemmell
76. Nation, Terry Pratchet
77. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
78. Obernewtyn Chronicles, Isobelle Carmody
79. The Disc World Series, Terry Pratchet
80. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
81. Incarnations of immortality, Piers Anthony
82. The Axis Ttrilogy, Sara Douglass
83. The Never ending story, Micheal Ende
84. Magic Kingdom of Landover, Terry Brooks
85. Dead Until Dark, Charlainne Harris
86. The Belgaird Series, David Eddings
87. The Sword of Truth, Terry Goodkind
88. Dracula, Bram Stoker
89. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle
90. The Princess Bride, William Goldman
91. Sophies World, Jostein Gaarder
92. Shannara Trilogy, Terry Brooks
93. InkHeart, Cornelia Funke,
    
94. Interview with a Vampire, Anne Rice
95. Animal Farm, George Orwell
96. Ella Enchanted, Gail Levine
97. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
98. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
99. The last unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
100. Something wicked this way comes, Ray Bradbury
101. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Bradley
102. Chronicle of Raven, James Barclay
103. DragonRiders of Pern, Anne McCaffrey
104. The Song of the Lioness, tamora Pierce
105. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

Complied from : 100 best fantasy book list and this excellent website The Best fantasy Books

Welcome to the Basics!

According to Brenton Tomlinson at Fantasty Fiction Factor, many SFF circles use a term called 'reinventing the wheel' to describe newbie fantasy and SF writers who labour over the creation of their worlds, only to find that its all 'been done before'.

According to SF Writers of America, 'reinventing the wheel' is where :

A novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a science-fictional situation already tiresomely familiar to the experienced reader. Reinventing the Wheel was traditionally typical of mainstream writers venturing into SF. It is now often seen in writers who lack experience in genre history because they were attracted to written SF via SF movies, SF television series, SF role-playing games, SF comics or SF computer gaming.

Like any genre you want to write in, it is essential to be vastly read in both that genre and others! Essentially you should have 'The Basics'.

So ladies and Gents, i'm starting 'The Basics' Challenge which is similar to the Fill-in-the-Gaps-Project except this will specifically refer to 'a genre'. In my case Fantasy with a dash of Science Fiction. BUT REMEMBER IT CAN BE ANY GENRE!

Here are some helpful links to get you started:

Absolute Write List of SFF basic books

Fantasy MasterWork Series

SF MasterWork Series

I'm currently going to post my progress/list etc. here soon! Email me if your interested in Joining!!

Here are some Badges to add to your blog!

185 x 150

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