THE BALCKWELL CANON
FICTION
TIER 1: PROPER MASTERWORKS
Works of significant interest executed in a masterful fashion
- The King of Trees, Ah Cheng
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- Ficciones & The Aleph, Jorges Luis Borges
- Dream of Red Mansions, Cao Xueqin
- Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
- The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick
- A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Dune & Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert
- Demian, Herman Hesse
- The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- The Castle, Franz Kafka
- Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
- Short Fiction, HP Lovecraft
- The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
- Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann
- Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
- Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
- Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained, John Milton
- The Gate, Natsume Soseki
- The Metamorphoses, Ovid (trans. A.D. Melville)
- In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
- War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
TIER 2: PERSONAL ECCENTRICITIES
Works of great personal significance; not necessarily masterworks but still worth reading
- If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
- The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Cesares
- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
- The Aegypt Series, John Crowley
- No Longer Human, Dazai Osamu
- VALIS, Philip K Dick
- The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
- Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Baudolino, Umberto Eco
- A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
- The Bridge Trilogy, William Gibson
- Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov
- God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert
- The Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
- The Princess Casamassima, Henry James
- The American, Henry James
- The Master of Go, Kawabata Yasunari
- The Old Capital, Kawabata Yasunari
- Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
- Mardi, Herman Melville
- Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville
- Samson Agonistes, John Milton
- Spring Snow & Runaway Horses, Mishima Yukio
- Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki
- And Then, Natsume Soseki
- Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe
- Laura: A Journey into Crystal, George Sand
- Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh, Shi Naian
- The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
- Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
- The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki Junichiro
- Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
- From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
- Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China, Jules Verne
- The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
- The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
- Journey to the West, Wu Chengen
- Amrita, Banana Yoshimoto
- Asleep, Banana Yoshimoto
- Conquest of Plassans, Emile Zola
- The Sins of Abbe Mouret, Emile Zola
TIER 3: HISTORICAL CURIOSITIES
Works of primarily historical interest, but still enjoyable to read
- The Oresteia, Aeschylus
- The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
- The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. Goethe
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong
- Kim, Rudyard Kipling
- Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
NON-FICTION
THE BIG ONES
Ranked by personal influence on my life
- Tao Te Ching, Laozi
- Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi
- 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
- Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, Katsuki Sekida
- The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
- The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer (was of much greater significance when I was younger)
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
- 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 Alberet