To truly advance one’s knowledge and enhance reading comprehension, simply reading for pleasure is not enough. The key to significant self-improvement lies in developing a systematic reading framework. This can be achieved through self-exploration or by seeking expert guidance.
The most efficient way to build this literary framework is by engaging with high-quality secondary sources. These are not highly specialized academic papers but rather accessible, introductory texts like literary histories, collections of author’s reflections, or interviews. These resources provide a crucial overview of literary history, its progression, and its structure, offering a solid foundation for all future reading. For this purpose, works such as Yuan Xingpei’s A History of Chinese Literature and Zheng Kelu’s A History of Foreign Literature are excellent starting points. Western literary histories like John Macy’s The Story of the World’s Literature, John Drinkwater’s The Outline of Literature, and Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon also serve this purpose well.
Once a framework is in place, the next step is to choose the right entry point for reading literary classics. Starting with dense, challenging works from the classical and medieval periods (e.g., Homer’s epics) or complex 20th-century modernist and postmodernist texts can easily lead to frustration and discouragement. A much better approach is to begin with 19th-century European and American realist novels. The works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky are not only foundational but also highly accessible, providing a strong base that makes reading more complex works later on a much more manageable and rewarding experience.
Here are some excellent and approachable works from 19th-century Western realism and other movements:
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Anthony Trollope: The Last Chronicle of Barset
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Stendhal: The Red and the Black
Honoré de Balzac: Père Goriot
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Charles Baudelaire: Paris Spleen
Émile Zola: Nana
Guy de Maupassant: Ball of Fat
Heinrich Heine: Germany: A Winter’s Tale
Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest
Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Stories
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin
Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls
Mikhail Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time
Ivan Turgenev: A Sportsman’s Sketches
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Anton Chekhov: Complete Short Stories
And for those ready to move on, here is a list of significant Western modernist works:
Knut Hamsun: Hunger
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier, Parade’s End
E. M. Forster: Howards End, A Passage to India
James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando
André Gide: The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters
Marcel Proust: Pleasures and Days, Against Sainte-Beuve, In Search of Lost Time
François Mauriac: A Kiss for the Leper, Thérèse Desqueyroux
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus
Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game
Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Castle, The Trial
Hermann Broch: The Sleepwalkers
Joseph Roth: The Radetzky March
Italo Svevo: Zeno’s Conscience
Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet
Ivan Bunin: The Life of Arseniev
Andrei Bely: Petersburg
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tales of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!
John Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory
Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel
Reading just five books from this list will lead to a significant leap in your literary understanding and critical judgment. This is the power of classics. By supplementing your reading with introductory guides like The Story of the World’s Literature or How to Read and Why, your overall literary knowledge will become much richer. You may even find that you can independently construct your own reading system without any further guidance.