Writers’s reading lists: Leo Tostoy

From Tolstoy’s Letters, under the heading “WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION,” Tolstoy divides his reading list into five distinct life-stages — and ranks each title.

CHILDHOOD – 14 

  • “Great”:
  1. Tales from The Thousand and One Nights (public library): The 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman
  2. Pushkin’s Poems (public library): “Napoleon”
  • “V. great”:
  1. The Little Black Hen (public library) by Pogorelsky
  • “Enormous”:
  1. The story of Joseph from The Bible (public library)
  2. The Byliny (public library) folk tales: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich

14 – 20

  • “Great”:
  1. The Conquest of Mexico (public library) by William Prescott
  2. Tales of Good and Evil (public library) by Nikolai Gogol: “Overcoat,” “The Two Ivans,” “Nevsky Prospect”
  • “V. great”:
  1. A Sentimental Journey (public library) by Laurence Sterne
  2. A Hero for Our Time (public library) by Mikhail Lermontov
  3. The Hapless Anton by Dmitry Grigorovich
  4. Polinka Saks (public library) by Aleksandr Druzhinin
  5. A Sportsman’s Notebook (public library) by Ivan Turgenev
  6. Dead Souls (public library) by Nikolai Gogol
  7. Die Räuber (public library) by Friedrich Schiller
  8. Yevgeny Onegin (public library) by Alexander Pushkin
  9. Julie, or the New Heloise (public library) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • “Enormous”:
  1. The Gospel of Matthew (public library): “Sermon on the Mount”
  2. The Confessions (public library) by Jean Jacques-Rousseau
  3. Emile: Or on Education (public library) by Jean Jacques-Rousseau
  4. “Viy” from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (public library)
  5. David Copperfield (public library) by Charles Dickens

20 – 35

  • “Great”:
  1. Poems (public library) by F.T. Tyutchev
  2. Poems (public library) by Koltsov
  3. The Iliad / The Odyssey (public library) by Homer*
  4. Poems (public library) by Afanasy Fet
  5. The Symposium and The Phaedo (public library) by Plato
  • “V. great”:
  1. Hermann and Dorothea (public library) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  2. Notre-Dame de Paris (public library) by Victor Hugo

35 – 50

  • “Great”:
  1. The novels of Mrs. Henry Wood
  2. The novels of George Eliot
  3. The novels of Anthony Trollope
  • “V. great”:
  1. The Iliad / The Odyssey (public library) by Homer*
  2. The Byliny (public library)
  3. Xenophon’s Anabasis (public library)
  • “Enormous”:
  1. Les Misérables (public library) by Victor Hugo

50 – 63

  • “Great”:
  1. Discourse on Religious Subject (public library) by Theodore Parker
  2. Robertson’s Sermons (public library)
  • “V. great”:
  1. The Book of Genesis (public library)
  2. Progress and Poverty (public library) by Henry George
  3. The Essence of Christianity (public library) by Ludwig Feuerbach
  • “Enormous”:
  1. The Complete Gospels* (public library)
  2. Pensées (public library) by Blaise Pascal
  3. Epictetus
  4. Confucius and Mencius
  5. The Lalita-Vistara: Or Memoirs Of The Early Life Of Sakya Sinha (public library) by Rajendralala Mitra
  6. Lao-Tzu

Writers’s reading lists: Gabriel García Márquez

From “Living to Tell the Tale” – Deckle Edge – by Gabriel García Márquez

  1. The Magic Mountain (public library) by Thomas Mann
  2. The Man in the Iron Mask (free ebook | public library) by Alexandre Dumas
  3. Ulysses (free ebook | public library) by James Joyce
  4. The Sound and the Fury (public library) by William Faulkner
  5. As I Lay Dying (public library) by William Faulkner
  6. The Wild Palms (public library) by William Faulkner
  7. Oedipus Rex (free ebook | public library) by Sophocles
  8. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (free ebook | public library) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  9. Moby-Dick (free ebook | public library) by Herman Melville
  10. Sons and Lovers (free ebook | public library) by D.H. Lawrence
  11. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (free ebook |public library)
  12. The Metamorphosis (public library) by Franz Kafka
  13. The Aleph and Other Stories (public library) by Jorge Luis Borges
  14. The Collected Stories (public library) by Ernest Hemingway
  15. Point Counter Point (public library) by Aldous Huxley
  16. Of Mice and Men (public library) by John Steinbeck
  17. The Grapes of Wrath (public library) by John Steinbeck
  18. Tobacco Road (public library) by Erskine Caldwell
  19. Stories (public library) by Katherine Mansfield
  20. Manhattan Transfer (public library) by John Dos Passos
  21. Portrait of Jennie (public library) by Robert Nathan
  22. Orlando (public library) by Virginia Woolf
  23. Mrs. Dalloway (public library) by Virginia Woolf