An English Major’s Bookshelf Tour

As an English major (with a concentration in writing) and a perpetual member of a great books program, the Torrey Honors College, here are the essential books on my bookshelf. Because I moved around after I graduated, I had to pare down my collection to just two shelves—so it really is only my favorites. Each one of these books changed my life, even if just by one thought. Follow me on Pagebound to see what else is on my bookshelf and some new finds!

Ancient Epics

• Beowulf — trans. Seamus Heaney

• The Metamorphoses of Ovid — trans. Allen Mandelbaum

• The Iliad and The Odyssey — trans. Richard Lattimore

• The Aeneid — Virgil, trans. Robert Fitzgerald

Medieval Times

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — trans. J. R. R. Tolkien

• The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, trans. Neville Coghill

• The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser

Other Poetry

• George Herbert The Complete Poetry — ed. John Drury and Victoria Moul

• John Donne The Complete English Poems — A. J. Smith

• Gerard Manley Hopkins Selected Poetry — ed. Catherine Phillips

• William Wordsworth Selected Poems — ed. Stephen Gill

• Christina Rossetti Selected Poems — ed. Dinah Roe

• Four Quartets — T.S. Eliot

American Literature

• Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson

• The Complete Stories — Flannery O’Connor

• Moby Dick — Herman Melville

• The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton

• The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James

• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Norton Anthology — 1865-1914, 1914-1945- Literature since 1945

British Literature

• Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

• Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

• Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

• Middlemarch — George Eliot

Russian Literature

• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Writing

• A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver

• Dreyer’s English — Benjamin Dreyer

• The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need — Susan Thurman

• Elements of Style — William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White

Favorites from My Childhood

• The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales — ed. Lily Owens

• All Creatures Great and Small — James Herriot

• The Adventures of Robin Hood — Roger Lancelyn Green

• The Moon Spinners — Mary Stewart