First off, a caveat: these are books and literature that are great purely as story or poetry, not as philosophy or spiritualism. Philosophy and spiritualism is way to big a subject for me to collect a worthy Great Books list (to be worthy it would take years), and if this were included, the whole list would be dominated by philosophy and spiritualism. Suffice it to say, such works as the Tao Te Ching, the Sufi poetry of Rumi, and the various great Buddhist writings, the Enneads of Plotinus, and things like this are great in ways most of us could scarcely even imagine until we started learning from them.
Caveat over...
**David S. Annderson's Great Books List*Stories and Poetry**
*20th Century and 21st thru 2025:
Tolkien
CS Lewis
Asimov
Arthur C. Clarke
Heinlein (especially for his early work and Stranger in a Strange Land, a stunningly ambitious awakening of mind leading to places that were probably beyond Heinlein himself
(and thus probably nowhere in the book- read it to open your mind, not for answers! Heinlein was an experimenter, and this book is his grand experiment!
(Read Rumi, the Bhagavad Gita, the Enneads of Plotinus, and the Tao te Ching (among others) for the answers! (and see the caveat above!))))
Andre Norton
And an honorable mention for the Harry Potter series, for its character writing, philosophy, morality, and emotional writing
*Other 'Western'
The greats of English, American, and Irish lyric poetry from Blake to Yeats
The French Symbolists
*Other
The story of Ruth and Naomi in The Bible (this is possibly the finest intimate character story ever written!)
The Ramayana (and any classic retelling)
The Mahabharata (and any classic retelling, such as the classic Telugu Mahabharata from the classic age (11th-14th Centuries AD)
Shudraka's The Clay Cart
Kalidasa's Recognition of Sakuntala
Kalidasa's The Cloud Messenger
Journey to the West
Romance of the Three Kingdoms (also translated into English as Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel; the Moss Roberts translation that uses this title is really good!)
The greats of Chinese and Japanese lyric poetry, especially Li Po and Tu Fu
Basho's travelogues (such as A Narrow Road to the True North)
The classics of Persian and Arabic lyric poetry
*Classical
Homer (Illiad and Odyssey)
Virgil
Horace
The Orestaia of Aeschylus
Sappho
**Honorable Mentions**
*These are works that I have not read, included in Honorable Mentions based on what I have read OF them; any of these might be worthy of the main list
Jack Kerouac and other beat writers
The Shah Nameh
The great early Tamil and Kannada epics
The Kebra Negast
The classics of Greek lyric poetry other than Sappho
The Epic of Sundiata
The Popol Vuh
The Egyptian Book of the Dead (the Normandi Ellis translation)
**Special Mention**
*And a special mention to the founding work in the epic poetry tradition, that paved the way for Homer, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Shah Nameh, and the earliest great surviving work of narrative literature; so much on this list only exists because of this book
And that is the Epic of Gilgamesh
If we expanded this list to include Shakespeare and Dante, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the Epic of Gilgamesh should be in there too; the story is that great!
There it is! My Great Books list! David S. Annderson's Great Books list!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. A David S. Annderson Great Movies list:
If I made a similar list for movies, these would be definitely added.
Seeing a great movie is a powerful experience. Any of these movies can change your life, if they haven't already defined your life from early childhood (and if you haven't seen them since childhood, they can still possibly change your life!):
Star Wars (the original trilogy)
E.T.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Indiana Jones (Raiders and Last Crusade)
The first three Star Trek movies
The Muppet Movie
The Dark Crystal
Other movies by Jim Henson, plus various episodes of Fraggle Rock
The Secret of NIMH
My own writings comes more from these than the books!
And these movies should be on the list as well:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by Peter Jackson
Groundhog Day
It's A Wonderful Life
The Bear (the one from 1988 with actual bears)
Seven Years in Tibet
The Fifth Element
The final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation
Various episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (the originals from the 60s)
Zoey to the Max (this is a beautiful indie movie; I don't know enough indie movies; I'm sure many others could be on this list)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Princess Mononoke
Metropolis (the 2001 Anime)
Casablanca
The Life of Pi
PK (the Aamir Khan movie)
3 Idiots (the Aamir Khan movie)
Everything Everywhere all at Once
And probably the Barbie movie as well (which I haven't seen- I spend way too much time writing, which is my joy!)
A special place for the man that gave us Avatar and Titanic
And a special shout-out to the great movies from the golden age of Japanese cinema, the age of Kurosawa and Yasujiro Osu, which I have not seen, but which surely deserve a place here! (also shout-out to them because I myself am artistically descended from Kurosawa, for he was a huge influence upon Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the central influences upon my own writing!)
Also a special shout-out too to the Golden Age of Bengali cinema in the same age as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Osu in Japan, a stunning age in the awakening of cinema as an art form!
And finally, these video games, as great examples of the cinematic art, should be on some kind of list:
Skyrim
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy X
The most beloved Legend of Zelda games (Ocarina of Time, Breath of the Wild, etc.)
Among, I'm sure, others as well! These are some of the finest cinematic stories I have ever known!
And these comics:
Calvin and Hobbes
Little Nemo in Slumberland
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Many, many Manga
And a special place for the classic Donald Duck comic books of Carl Barks, The Good Duck Artist, whose comic books are the source of the classic television show Ducktales
P.P.S. Shakespeare is in my Great Books list- the long version. There are a lot of Great Books out there!
P.P.P.S. I would like to pay tribute to the movies that influenced me as a writer. Above all, the works of Steven Spielberg, in his E.T. mode, and George Lucas, especially E.T. And I would also like to pay tribute to the movies which I have not seen, but which belong on the list, and which I am descended from through their influence upon Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. And that is Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey (which I have seen!), and the films of the great Akira Kurosawa. I am the artistic grandfather of these films and the great men who created them. These were the films that influenced the aspects of Spielberg and Lucas's films that most affected and influenced me, and though I have not seen Lawrence of Arabia or any of the films of Akira Kurosawa in full, you could probably watch the films and read my works and find exactly where I am influenced by them through Spielberg and Lucas! (I'm sure that you could do this with 2001: A Space Odyssey as well; but I have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and am influenced by it directly as well!)