From Homer and Proust to "Beloved" and the Bible, "Beowulf on the Beach" is a user-friendly guide through the imposing world of literature.

The Iliad ; The Odyssey / Homer -- The Bible: The Old Testament, The New Testament -- The Aeneid / Virgil -- Metamorphoses / Ovid -- Beowulf / Anonymous -- Inferno ; Paradiso / Dante Alighieri -- The Decameron / Giovanni Boccaccio -- The Canterbury tales / Geoffrey Chaucer -- The Faerie Queene / Edmund Spenser -- Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth / William Shakespeare -- Don Quixote / Miguel de Cervantes -- Paradise lost / John Milton -- The history of Tom Jones, a foundling / Henry Fielding -- Pride and prejudice / Jane Austen -- Faust I & II / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- Eugene Onegin / Alexander Pushkin -- Pere Goriot / Honore de Balzac -- Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte -- Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte -- Moby Dick / Herman Melville -- Bleak house; Great expectations / Charles Dickens -- Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert -- Crime and punishment; The brothers Karamazov / Fyodor Dostoevsky -- War and peace; Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy -- Middlemarch / George Eliot -- The wings of the dove / Henry James -- Remembrance of things past / Marcel Proust -- Ulysses / James Joyce -- The magic mountain / Thomas Mann -- The trial / Franz Kafka -- To the lighthouse / Virginia Woolf -- The sound and the fury / William Faulkner -- Farewell to arms / Ernest Hemingway -- Tropic of Cancer / Henry Miller -- Native son / Richard Wright -- The man without qualities / Robert Musil -- Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov -- Giovanni's room / James Baldwin -- One hundred years of solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Gravity's rainbow / Thomas Pynchon -- Blood meridian / Cormac McCarthy -- Beloved / Toni Morrison -- Tips on reading classics, and good books in general.