I read Anna Karenina this summer and I was not into it. Waaaay too much Levin.... Like, how does a novel named after Anna end with 50 pages of Levin?

Also, tbh, I'm kind of over "great books" lists where everything is written by white men. (Though I do see nods to a few white women -- Austen, Elliot and Woolf -- on OP's supplemental list.)

Anonymous wrote:If I get into a “great books” mode, I usually turn to this list: The St. John’s College seminar reading list.

https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/classes/seminar/annapolis-undergraduate-readings

+1 also, Goethe above Milton on your list

If I get into a “great books” mode, I usually turn to this list: The St. John’s College seminar reading list.

https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/classes/seminar/annapolis-undergraduate-readings

I truly mean the best of the best:

Homer, Iliad and Odyssey
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Dante, Inferno
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Shakespeare (complete works)
Milton, Paradise Lost
Melville, Moby Dick
Tolstoy, War and Peace and Anna Karenina
Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Joyce, Ulysses

Runners up are Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Dickens, Bleak House.

These are the literary works I'd bring with me to a desert island.

Below that you have the greats who are splendid but not quite the best of the best: Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Kafka, Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett, McCarthy etc.