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October 22, 2008

Check It Out: Poe's library

I'm not going to insult your Poe intelligence, or start a mini-war, by suggesting anyone can tell you what the best Poe works are. As a poet, critic and story teller, his creations are sometimes impossible to contrast and compare, anyway.

Instead, I asked Shelley Costa Bloomfield, author of The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, to share what she found to be Edgar's favorite literature.

The list has a lot of variety, I think," she said, "which shows the breadth of his interests and taste."

William Godwin, Caleb Williams
Danield Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
John Pendleton Kennedy, Horse-Shoe Robinson
Jeremiah N. Reynolds, A Brief Account of the Discoveries and Results of the United States' Exploring Expedition
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby
The poetry of Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Posted by Nancy Knight at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Check It Out

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About the bloggers

While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, Nancy Knight grew up reading nearly everything she could get her hands on, including a probably unhealthy amount of R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike, with the obligatory Jane Austen thrown in. She'll still read just about anything you put in front of her, especially the funny or weird. She lives in the city with her books, cat and drum set.

Dave Rosenthal came to The Baltimore Sun as a business reporter in 1987 and now is an assistant managing editor and Sunday editor. He reads a wide range of books (but never as many as he'd like), usually alternating between non-fiction and fiction. Some all-time favorites: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; and anything by Calvin Trillin or John McPhee. He belongs to a book club with a Jewish theme.