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What Hacker News says
- What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):
Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey
Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)
Plato: The Apology of Socrates
Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)
Dante: Inferno
Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"
John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed
Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")
T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"
Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place
Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"
Stendahl: Red and Black
James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).
- The "More from A.O. Scott" at the bottom of the article links to:
• "Life Isn’t Perfect. But This Poem Might Be." March 21, 2025 (“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” by Adrienne Rich, 1951) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/21/books/adrienn...
• "I Would Follow This Poem to Hell and Back" Feb. 21, 2025 (“my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” from SELECTED POEMS, copyright ©1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/21/books/gwendol...
• "I Swear This Poem Didn’t Make Me Cry" Jan. 23, 2025 (“From a Photograph,” from NEW COLLECTED POEMS, copyright ©1962 by George Oppen) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/24/books/george-...
• "Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did." Dec. 18, 2024 (“Romantic Poet,” by Diane Seuss, 2024) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/books/romanti...
• "A Poem About Waiting, and Wishing You Had a Drink" Nov. 1, 2024 (“Party Politics,” from “The Complete Poems,” by Philip Larkin. originally 1984?) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/01/books/philip-...
• "A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date" April 11, 2024 (“Having a Coke With You,” by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/11/books/frank-o...
So it appears that this one is part of a series (previously called "Close Read" as in the last link above: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/arts/close-read.htm...): every few weeks / months, A. O. Scott writes about some poem he's liked, in this format (all of them say "Produced by Aliza Aufrichtig, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Emily Eakin").
