The Reading Room

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12:19 AM

Q: Are there any "good" (general objective and authoritative) lists of Western literature canon?

People often use terms "classical literature"/"Western canon", but I struggle to find any "good" list of classical Western literature. (the ones mentioned in Wikipedia are either highly subjective or focused on one certain epoch/country/etc.) To make this question not opinion-based, lets define "...

8 hours later…

Gareth Rees

8:29 AM

@bobble I think it's fine — my view is that the nature of the question determines if it is on-topic, not the nature of the work. A question about the rhetorical effect of choice of words in a title is a literary question.

13 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

9:01 PM

A: 3-vote close - how's it going?

I'd like to post an answer from the viewpoint of a relative outsider. (For context, I'm on-and-off active in ELU's review queues, with 3 Steward badges here, but I have less than 5k rep and less than 100 posts, almost all answers. On other sites I have two moderator diamonds and 335k network repu...

^ I remember discussing this general issue with people here

Tsundoku

9:13 PM

@Randal'Thor For some people, it's post-it notes all the way down.

2 hours later…

bobble

10:51 PM

> Things escalate. No, I do not remember how or why they escalate. Sorry.

Bookworm

11:09 PM

Q: Everyone keeps diaries due to regular, town-wide amnesia

I would have read this in the late 2010s, though I'm not sure how old it was at that point. It was picked up from a local library in the Western United States. I am 50% sure there was at least one sequel. It's also likely that either it or its sequel had a glowing tree on the cover. Both titles w...