THE BALCKWELL CANON


FICTION

TIER 1: CANONICAL WORKS

The works that tower above all else


  • Ficciones & The Aleph, Jorges Luis Borges
  • Dream of Red Mansions, Cao Xueqin
  • A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
  • Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
  • The Castle, Franz Kafka
  • Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
  • Dune & Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert
  • The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
  • Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann
  • Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  • Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville
  • Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained, John Milton
  • In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
  • I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki
  • War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  • Amrita, Yoshimoto Banana

TIER 2: DEUTEROCANON

One single step below canonical heights


  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
  • Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  • The Aegypt Series, John Crowley
  • The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
  • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick
  • No Longer Human, Dazai Osamu
  • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
  • The Bridge Trilogy, William Gibson
  • Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov
  • Demian, Herman Hesse
  • The Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
  • The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  • God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert
  • The American, Henry James
  • The Trial, Franz Kafka
  • The Master of Go, Kawabata Yasunari
  • The Old Capital, Kawabata Yasunari
  • Short Fiction, HP Lovecraft
  • Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
  • Mardi, Herman Melville
  • The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
  • Spring Snow & Runaway Horses, Mishima Yukio
  • Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov
  • Sanshiro, Natsume Soseki
  • The Gate, Natsume Soseki
  • The Metamorphoses, Ovid (trans. A.D. Melville)
  • Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
  • Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
  • Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
  • From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
  • Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
  • Journey to the West, Wu Chengen
  • Asleep, Banana Yoshimoto
  • The Sins of Abbe Mouret, Emile Zola

TIER 3: APOCRYPHA

A miscellaneous collection of reccomendable works


  • The King of Trees, Ah Cheng
  • If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
  • The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
  • Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
  • The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Cesares
  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  • VALIS, Philip K Dick
  • Baudolino, Umberto Eco
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. Goethe
  • The Princess Casamassima, Henry James
  • The Light That Failed, Rudyard Kipling
  • Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
  • Samson Agonistes, John Milton
  • Laura: A Journey into Crystal, George Sand
  • Richard III, William Shakespeare
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  • Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh, Shi Naian
  • The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki Junichiro
  • Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China, Jules Verne
  • Conquest of Plassans, Emile Zola

NON-FICTION

THE BIG ONES

Ranked by personal influence on my life

  • Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi
  • Tao Te Ching, Laozi
  • Critique of Pure Reason & Practical Reason & Judgment, Immanuel Kant
  • Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
  • Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann
  • The Kingdom of God is Within You, Leo Tolstoy
  • Complete Works, Plato
  • The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick
  • The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer

OTHER CURIOSITIES

  • America, Jean Baudrillard
  • The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library, W.G. Bloch
  • Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson
  • Ash Wednesday Supper, Giordano Bruno
  • Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, Mircea Eliade
  • Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
  • Incompleteness: Proof and Paradox of Godel, Rebecca Goldstein
  • Histories, Herodotus
  • Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard
  • Utopia, Thomas More
  • Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford
  • The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Selected Works, Edward Said
  • The Birth of Modern Belief, Ethan Shagan
  • Zen At War, Brian Daizen Victoria
  • Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace
  • The Art of Memory, Francis A. Yates
  • Essays in Idleness, Yoshida Kenko

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

  • Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford
  • Coleridge: Early Visions & Coleridge: Darker Reflections, Richard Holmes
  • Literaria Biographia, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Sutin
  • Monsier Proust, Celeste Albaret