Favorite Books

This is the quintessential desert island question, and I think I have this one down pat.

Poetry (the old stuff)

Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language is my favorite anthology;

As for my very favorites canonical poets and poems I will rush by them as most are not very telling: Chaucer (Pardoner's Tale and Wife of Bath's Tale), Dante (The Comedy), Spenser (Faerie Queen), Donne (Holy Sonnet 10 and 14), Marvell (Coy Mistress, The Garden), Milton (Paradise Lost, Lycidas, and Samson Agonistes), Pope (Rape of the Lock, the end of the Dunciad), Blake (The Mental Traveller, Milton, The Crystal Cabinet), Coleridge (Rime, Khan, Christabel), Shelley (Bloom's selections from Epipsychidion, The Triumph of Life, the end of Adonais), Keats (La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Odes, Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion), Clare (I Am, A Vision), Beddoes (Dream Pedlary), Whitman (Song, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, When Lilacs Last), Melville (Fragments), Dickinson, Tennyson (Ulysses, In Memoriam), Browning (Last Duchess, Childe Roland), Arnold (Dover Beach), Hopkins (Spring and Fall, I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark), Dante Rossetti (Orchard Pit), Swinburne (Anactoria, August, At Month's End), Bronte (Last Lines), Yeats (Adams Curse), Hardy (Darkling Thrush), Frost (Directive, the Wood Pile, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Most of It, For Once Then Something), Stevens (Sunday Morning, Domination of Black, Snow Man, Idea of Order, Poems of Our Climate, Auroras of Autumn, Of Mere Being, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction), Eliot (Preludes, Prufrock and Sweeny Among the Nightingales, but NOT the Wasteland, and probably not anything else), John Wheelwright (Any Friend to Any Friend) and Hart Crane (At Melville 's Tomb, Voyages, Brooklyn Bridge, Voyages, Repose of Rivers, The Broken Tower).

Poetry (contemporary)

Heaney's Beowulf

John Ashbery -- basically all of it, but especially the more recent stuff including Can You Hear Bird, Girls on the Run, and Your Name Here

Paul Muldoon's Madoc: A Mystery

James Merrill's The Book of Ephriam (the first book of the Changing Light at Sandover)

Mark Strand's The Continuous Life and Eating Poetry (from Reasons for Moving)

Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, and Tulsa Kid

James Tate's Selected Poetry, especially List of Famous Hats and Goodtime Jesus

Charles Wright -- all of it.

Criticism and Theory

Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Poetry and Repression, and Ruin the Sacred Truths, Figures of Capable Imagination, The Breaking of the Vessels, Agon, and Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climates.

Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, Solidarity

Freud -- basically all of it but especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism; also the Major Case Studies

Emerson's Major Essays, especially Fate, Self-Reliance, History, The Poet, Experience, The Divinity School Address, Representative Men

Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist and the Decay of Lying; also, of course, The Importance of Being Ernest

Walter Pater -- The Renaissance, Appreciations. Really all of it.

Valery's Dance and the Soul

Zizek's Fragile Absolute, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, Looking Awry: Zizek is good but repetitive, so his first books may be your favorites.

Ashbery's Other Traditions

McKee's Story

Paglia's Sexual Personae

Perry Meisel's The Cowboy and the Dandy

Booth's Precious Nonsense

Christopher Ricks' Reviewery

Novels and Short Stories

Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow

Moby Dick

Cormac McCarthy' Blood Meridian

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca -- NO KIDDING. I LITERALLY could not put this book down. Pulpy and Mesmerizing.

Kafka, especially The Knock at the Manor Gate, The Imperial Message, The Doorkeeper, The Problem of Our Laws, A Parable, and The Cares of a Family Man

Donald Barthelme, especially Snow White, 40 Stories and his non-Fiction

Borges, especially Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote, the Garden of Forking Paths and my all time favorite The Three Versions of Judas

David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, and the Christmas stories (including the newer one about the Dutch Christmas)

Favorite Shakespeare Play

MacBeth (and Hamlet)

Kids Books

Harold and the Purple Crayon