#I need to add tiny beautiful things. pipeline and Medea to my plays list lol

[brechtian]

Hi I really like your blog and your writing. I havent really read anything substantial outside of stuff for school and literature kind of intimidates me but I want to get into Classics and plays and the stuff you talk about here.

Do you have any recommendations for starting places build some literary brain muscle?

Hello! First of all: THANK YOU! What an honor not only to have someone admire my taste, but to inspire the desire for self-growth and engagement with literature! And yes, I absolutely do have some recommendations :)

Plays: So I actually have an entire page on my blog dedicated to play recommendations! I need to update it and add a few things, but the top section is a list of all my favorite plays with summaries provided by moi. Best place to start is to just read those summaries and see what sparks your interest!

Literature: I’m going to keep this to my favorite fiction and poetry since that seems like what you’re after, but I’m also happy to give nonfiction and essay recs in the future if you’d like.

Books (in no particular order)

Jane Austen - Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion

Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse

Toni Morrison - Beloved, Recitatif (short story)

Monique Truong - Book of Salt

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)

James Baldwin - Giovanni’s Room

Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed (my favorite book of all time), The Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea books

Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis, A Report to an Academy (short stories)

Poetry:

Emily Dickinson. If you want specific poem recs that’s an entire post on its own

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Sue Huntington (composed of letters and poems so I put it here)

Audre Lorde. Everything but some favorites include The Workers Rose On May Day, Equinox, The Day They Eulogized Mahalia, Prologue, Change of Season, New Year’s Day, One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle, Suspension, The Bees, and Memorial IV

Byron - Prometheus, Darkness, When We Two Parted

Claude McKay - Harlem Shadows (book)

Laura Gilpin - The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (book)

Mary Oliver - Devotions (book, selection)

John Keats - When I Have Fears, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience (book), London

#anon #asks #literature #poetry #recs #I need to add tiny beautiful things. pipeline and Medea to my plays list lol #also like #I am not much farther ahead than you I only started regularly reading serious literature like 3 years ago #I have a lotttt left to go I’m working on building my own literary foundation