The Ultimate List of Autumnal Literature

What Makes Literature Autumnal - and the Classics That Make the Cut

With the advent of the orange season, we talk about autumnal books - those tomes which are best read with a hot cup of tea and a cool breeze, watching leaves drift lazily to the ground, scattered first by the wind and then brushed into happy piles by the watchers.

But what makes literature autumnal? Surely it has to do with more than just the setting we read it in.

A number of themes come to mind. Autumnal literature is about coming-of-age, about growing older, about transformation and decay. Often it is beset by a deep sense of melancholy or nostalgia, wistfulness or loneliness. Autumnal literature is rich and emotive. It demands what is deepest and most difficult in life. In the autumnal piece we are reminded of our impermanence, our mortality, our finality. Even as we are reminded of our youth through themes of scholarship and development, and of the bounty of life by the presence of the harvest, so too are we reminded that things come to an end, that everything has its place and every season its time - here today and gone tomorrow. Autumnal literature is introspective; it seeks out out end in the two meanings of the word - our purpose, and our conclusion. In some senses, autumnal literature is the most human literature of all.

And so, as we open our chapters and dance and cry there, on ancient edifices, and as we return to our roots in the Greek and in the fantastical realms of childhood, as we feel the cooling, the rain and storm of early winter, and as the sun sets on summer and the days become evenings, let us bless this blazing, dying landscape and thank God that a world awaits us, of which there will be no end.

A List of Books for Autumn

Russian Classics

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Memoirs from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Childhood, Boyhood, Youth by Leo Tolstoy

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

• A Nervous Breakdown by Anton Chekhov

Modern British Classics

• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien

• Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

• The Little Minister by J.M. Barrie

• Ulysses by James Joyce

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

• The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

• The Italian by Ann Radcliffe

• Hard Times by Charles Dickens

• Bleak House by Charles Dickens

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

• The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

• Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

• The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

• The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

• Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

• The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

• Villette by Charlotte Bronte

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Don Quixote by Cervantes

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

• Persuasion by Jane Austen

• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

• Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling

• The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

• The Chronicles of Narnia (Series) by C.S. Lewis

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• Dracula by Bram Stoker

• A Study in Scarlett by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• The Complete Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

• The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

• The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

• The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne

• The World of Christopher Robin by A.A. Milne

• Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier

American Literature

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt

• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

• The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Modern European Literature

• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

• The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

• The Plague by Albert Camus

• The Fall by Albert Camus

• The Diary of a Young Girl (Het Achterhuis) by Anne Frank

Modern Canadian Literature

• Anne of Green Gables (Series) by L.M. Montgomery

Classic Plays

• Faust (Parts I & II) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Macbeth by William Shakespeare

• Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Ancient Literature

• Metamorphoses by Ovid

• The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

• Fall of the Roman Republic by Plutarch

• The Histories by Herodotus

Medieval Literature

• Confessions by St. Augustine

• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

• The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Modern Poetry

• The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

• Paradise Lost by John Milton

Ancient Poetry

• The Aeneid by Virgil

• The Iliad by Homer

• The Odyssey by Homer

Non-fiction

• Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard

• The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

• The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

• Mythology by Edith Hamilton

• Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber

• On Stories by C.S. Lewis

• The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson

• Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis