Books for the Weighty Imagination

I don't like the whole 'genre' obsession. The books I like or find inspiring come from a variety of places. Some are there because they leave me in a state of bliss or ruffle my feathers to the point that I might have to change my wicked ways. These books listed below happen to be the ones that I own and still flip through when I need some manna from heaven or hell or anywhere else in between.

If anyone wants to borrow any of these, just ask.




In no order:


The Bible (Old and New Testaments, preferably in the original languages)

The Republic, Plato

The Odyssey, Homer

Theogony, Work & Days, Hesiod

Sappho

Beowulf, any translation

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Divine Comedy, Dante

The Grimm Fairytales

Straw for the Fire, Theodore Roethke (poetry)

The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (poetry)

Til We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (his best)

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

The Innkeeper's Song, The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Watchmen, Dave Gibbons & Alan Moore

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter W. Miller

Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath (poetry)

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman (poetry)

The Complete Poetry and Plays, T.S. Eliot, (poetry)

Poetry and Prose, Gerard Manley Hopkins, (poetry)

The Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz (poetry)

The Lion in Winter, James Goldman (play)

J.B., Archibald MacLeish (play)

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett (play)

St. Joan, George Bernard Shaw (play)

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (poetry)

The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

view with a grain of sand, Wislawa Szymborska (poetry)

Song of the Sky, translated by Brian Swann

The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Children of Hurin, JRR Tolkien

Gerald's Game, Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King

The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

Marius the Epicurean, Walter Pater

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Angry Candy, Harlan Ellison

Grendel, John Gardner

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Wicked, John Mcguire

The Blue Sword, The Hero & the Crown, Robin McKinley (YA)

Birth of the Firebringer, Meredith Ann Pierce (YA)

The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman (YA)

The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper (YA)

Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb

The Seventh Son, Orson Scott Card

She, H. Rider Haggard

Grimus, Salman Rushdie

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Book of the Dunn Cow, Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Dragon Path: Collected Stories of Kenneth Morris

Modern Classics of Fantasy, Edited by Gardner Dozois

Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig

Paradise Lost, John Milton

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (nonfiction)

13 Things That Don't Make Sense, Michael Brooks (nonfiction)

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris (nonfiction)

Night, Elie Wiesel

Cosmos, Carl Sagan

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (nonfiction)