Hooked on Classics

Hooked on Classics

Classics that Endure www.flickr.com/

…….and New Works Inspired

Regardless of how educators debate what books are best taught at the high school level, the classics of The Western Canon have stood the test of time and have inspired other high quality prize winning writing for both adults and young adults. Whether you believe in the expanding definition of the canon….

Thinking Outside the Canon

A librarian offers a fresh perspective on introducing great literature to teens

By Holly Koelling -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2005

….or you believe in the canon as described by Bloom or your passion for books lies somewhere in between the two, there should be some great book choices listed here for you and for your students.

The Western Canon
by Harold Bloom

Compiled by Robert Teeter

time...

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A. The Theocratic Age

Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran....

"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
(Bloom, p. 531)

The Ancient Near East

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh the King

Arabian Nights and Days

By Naguib Mahfouz From Library Journal
The latest translation of Mahfouz (winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature) is a clever, witty concoction that begins on the day following the Thousand and One Nights, when the vizier Dandan learns that his daughter, Shahrzad, has succeeded in saving her life by enthralling the sultan with wondrous tales. But Shahrzad is miserable and distrusts her husband, who, she suspects, is still capable of bloody doings. All is not well outside the palace either, where a medieval Islamic city teems with anxious souls. Many of them, like the devout Skeikh Abdullah al-Balkhi, strive to attain a high spiritual station, but few succeed, especially when genies and angels intervene, as they do often in this series of linked intrigues and adventures. Mahfouz succeeds splendidly with this fantasy which should appeal to a wide readership—Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib.

Alphabet of Dreams By Susan Fletcher Horn Book (November/December, 2006)

A fourteen-year-old thief, Mitra, and her little brother Babak join the magus Melchior's caravan after Babak starts to prophesy through dreams, prompting Melchior and two other magi to set out for Bethlehem, where a child has been born in a stable. Author Fletcher prevents that monumental occurrence from overbalancing the narrative by keeping the scale human, cleaving solely to Mitra's point of view. Mitra's involvement in the event at Bethlehem turns personal only during Herod's massacre of the innocents, when Babak's dreams and Mitra's own troubled conscience compel her to take action. Written in a natural first-person voice with loving attention to the sounds, smells, and tastes of the Middle East, this well-shaped historical novel brings a new perspective to an ancient story.

Beowulf

Grendel

Beowulf’s Inspiration in Graphic Novel and Retellings Through the monster’s eyes….

Beowulf

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Beowulf initiated a legacy of fantasies like this popular YA series:

The Ranger’s Apprentice Series by John Flanagan

School Library Journal (June 1, 2005)

A strong debut in a new fantasy series. Will hopes to become a knight; instead, he winds up as a Ranger's apprentice, joining the secretive corps that uses stealth, woodcraft, and courage to protect the kingdom. His aptitude and bravery gradually earn the respect of his gruff but good-hearted master. When the kingdom is attacked by evil magic forces, Will helps track down and defeat a couple of particularly nasty beasts. This closing episode sets the stage for a good-versus-evil war that will likely be at the heart of future volumes. In this opener, though, most of the story focuses on the learning process that Will goes through as an apprentice. Descriptions of Ranger craft are fascinating. Exciting confrontations with bullies and wild boars help to establish the boy's emerging character. Side stories involving a rival Battleschool apprentice and the identity of Will's father are woven in smoothly. The author occasionally spells things out more than is needed when actions demonstrate them clearly enough. However, the well-paced plot moves effortlessly toward the climax, letting readers get to know the world and the characters gradually as excitement builds. The public adoration Will gains at the end seems slightly overdone given the established distrust people feel for Rangers, but it's still a pleasing finish and should leave readers eager to share the future adventures of the Ranger's apprentice.-Steven Engelfried, Beaverton City Library, OR Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

B. The Aristocratic Age

"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...."
(Bloom, p. 534)

· Dante

The Divine Comedy: The Inferno

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Publishers Weekly (December 5, 2005)

Some of Picoult's best storytelling distinguishes her twisting, metaphor-rich 13th novel (after Vanishing Acts) about parental vigilance gone haywire, inner demons and the emotional risks of relationships. Comic book artist Daniel Stone is like the character in his graphic novel with the same title as this book-once a violent youth and the only white boy in an Alaskan Inuit village, now a loving, stay-at-home dad in Bethel, Maine-traveling figuratively through Dante's circles of hell to save his 14-year-old teenage daughter, Trixie. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal
Pearl's fiction debut should please fans of well-crafted literary mysteries. The title refers to an actual group of 19th-century Bostonians who gathered to translate Dante's Inferno for an American audience. Among the members of this exclusive "club" were poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poet James Russell Lowell. While poring over the poem, the men find themselves on the trail of a serial killer who tortures his victims in ways that seem to be taken straight out of the pages of Inferno. --Laurel Bliss, Yale Arts Lib.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information.

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales

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Kirkus Review starred (July 1, 2004) The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd

The erudite and entertaining Ackroyd brings 1380s London to life all over again, with many a nod to The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer set his people on the road, but there's no actual pilgrimage in Ackroyd (The Plato Papers, 2000, etc.), whose characters pretty much stay in London. The Canterbury pilgrims do appear again, by name and vocation, though noting the differences between Chaucer's characters and Ackroyd's can be as much fun as crediting the similarities. Once again, they're hardly a fault-free lot, though Ackroyd throws us a curve or two-his Physician is good through and through, his Pardoner hardly so bad a guy, and, unlike Chaucer's saintly Clerk, Ackroyd's is up for skullduggery indeed. What binds the tales together (aside from the much shared humanity in the close confines of a medieval city) is, not surprisingly, politics. Readers of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays will be right at home: the tales here are told over exactly the same time as Henry Bolingbroke returns from France to reclaim the throne and depose (and then worse) Richard II. In fact, much of Ackroyd's drama is generated through the machinations of a radically religious secret pro-Bolingbroke cell led by the truly monstrous William Exmewe (the Friar), whose belief as a so-called "predestined man" is that nothing one does for the good cause can be a sin-and readers will learn soon enough what Exmewe is capable of doing, as will Thomas Gunter (the Physician), Miles Vavasour (the Man of Law), and others. As the political crisis deepens, so does the threat to one of the cloistered nuns, Clarice, who, thought to be mad, emits prophetic utterances that displease the Prioress, stir up the townspeople, and most severely anger the king's protectors. There will be arrests, interrogations, and worse before stability returns.

Thoroughly captivating: the whole medieval panorama re-achieved by a modern, with all the atmosphere of the old.

Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte D'Arthur

"In those old days, one summer noon, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword—and how I row’d across
And took it, and have worn it, like a king"
From La Morte D'Arthur by :
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809–1892 ~