No two people’s lists are the same, but the Anglo-American greats and the ancient Greeks and Romans are all required reading

Since it is seen as a great accolade for a person to be thought “well read”, I wonder what the minimum requirement might be to be considered thus?

David Handley, Yorkshire

Robert McCrum, author and former literary editor of the Observer

In 1618, two years after Shakespeare’s death, a well-read adult could easily load all the books they had collected on to a decent-sized cart. Not only was there a consensus about what a good library should consist of, it was also quite easy to accumulate the necessary classics in good Renaissance translations.

Four hundred years on, the idea of “well read” is both much harder to define (less of a consensus) and also more difficult to fulfil from the global cornucopia of choice.

One thing is certain: it’s still to do with the unaccountable workings of personal taste. The book list I’d consider essential to any description of well read might not be the next person’s; yet both such lists would be equally valid.

I’d suggest that three kinds of reading define the well-read mind. First, I’d want to include the immortals from the classics of Greece and Rome: Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Virgil, Plutarch, Ovid, Juvenal and Sappho…

Next, from the Anglo-American literary tradition, we can’t forget Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Byron, Austen, Keats, Dickens, Twain, Thoreau, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Spark, Beckett, Woolf… and certainly another score of contemporary greats, including Baldwin, Pinter, Morrison, Miller, Bellow and Naipaul.

Finally, and this is where it gets contentious, there’s great writing in translation, from Proust, Freud, Fanon and Bulgakov to Grass, Márquez, Kundera and Levi.

I’ve only scratched the surface, but these would be indispensable to my definition of well read.

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