Canonical and Forgotten

Two books have recently been published with lists of books we all should have read or we all shouldn't have forgotten about. I haven't looked closely at either and both appear to have been rather informally collected—but particularly as we get ready for another list, people may find a perusal of these lists worthwhile.

The first list is Richard Canning's 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read:

Yahweh  Samuel 1 & 2
Tablets  Gilgamesh
Sappho  Poems
Plato  The Symposium
Horace Walpole  Letters
Herman Melville  Moby Dick
Walt Whitman  Leaves of Grass
Arthur Rimbaud  A Season in Hell
Henry James  The Bostonians
A.E. Housman  A Shropshire Lad
Oscar Wilde  De Profundis
Colette  Claudine at School
Thomas Mann  Death in Venice
Ronald Firbank  The Flower Beneath the Foot
Virginia Woolf  Mrs. Dalloway
Marcel Proust  Time Regained
Ivy Compton-Burnett  More Women than Men
Constantine Cavafy  Poems
Djuna Barnes  Nightwood
Vita Sackville-West  Letters to Virginia Woolf
Evelyn Waugh  Brideshead Revisited
Marguerite Yourcenar  Memoirs of Hadrian
Patricia Highsmith  The Price of Salt
G.F. Green  In the Making
Yukio Mishima  Forbidden Colors
Allen Ginsberg  Howl and Other Poems
James Baldwin  Giovanni's Room
Harold Brodkey  First Love and Other Sorrows
Shelagh Delaney  A Taste of Honey
Christopher Isherwood  A Single Man
José Lezama Lima  Paradiso
James Purdy  Eustace Chisholm and the Works
J.R. Ackerley  My Father and Myself
Mañuel Puig  Betrayed by Rita Hayworth
William Burroughs  The Wild Boys
Mary Renault  The Persian Boy
Coleman Dowell  Too Much Flesh and Jabez
Andrew Holleran  Dancer from the Dance
Audre Lorde  The Cancer Journals
Alice Walker  The Color Purple
Edmund White  A Boy's Own Story
Jeanette Winterson  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Hervé Guibert  To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
Rebecca Brown  The Terrible Girls
Tom Spanbauer  The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
John Foster  Take Me to Paris, Johnny
Gore Vidal  Palimpset
Matthew Stadler  Allan Stein
Douglas Wright  Ghost Dance
Susan Smith  Burning Dreams

The second, covering recent gay fiction now out of print, is The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered:

Glenway Wescott  The Apple of the Eye
Roger Peyrefitte  The Exile of Capri
Donald Windham  Two Peple
George Baxt  A Queer Kind of Death
Kyle Onstott & Lance Horner  Child of the Sun
John Donovan  I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip
Daniel Curzon  Something You Do in the Dark
Lynn Hall  Stick and Stones
Richard Hall  Couplings
Charles Nelson  The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up
Paul Rogers  Saul's Book
Agustin Gomez-Arcoz  The Carnivorous Lamb
Robert Ferro  The Blue Star
George Whitmore  Nebraska
Paul Reed  Longing
John Gilgun  Music I Never Dreamed Of
Allen Barnett  The Body and Its Dangers
Neil Bartlett  Ready to Catch him Should He Fall
Patrick Roscoe  Birthmarks
Melvin Dixon  Vanishing Rooms
Michael Grumley  Life Drawing
James McCourt  Time Remaining
Bruce Benderson  User
Mark Merlis  American Studies
Douglas Sandowick  Sacred Lips of the Bronx
J.S. Marcus  The Captain's Fire
Rabih Almaddine  The Perv: Stories