My Top "Great Reads" In 2011--The ProSe Awards

I spent the weekend going through all of my bookshelves, culling out books for donation to the public library, and doing some major shelf organization/reorganization.  As I lovingly handled and flipped through many of my books I reflected upon just how many good books that I'd been privileged to read during 2011.  I thought it might be fun share a list of my top, or favorite, reads of 2011.  Also, as I do read about as much poetry as prose these days, I thought that I'd issue my ProSe "Great Reads" awards in two categories:  Poetry and Fiction.  So, without any further ado, here are my lists of my top "Great Reads" in Poetry and Fiction for 2011.

 Top-Ten Great Reads in Poetry

1. The Iliad, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1974)
2. The Iliad, Homer, translated by Stephen Mitchell (2011)
3. The Iliad, Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo (1997)
4. The Oresteia, Aeschylus, translated by Ted Hughes (2004)
5. Sophocles' Antigone: A New Translation, translated by Diane J. Rayor (2011)
6. The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully (2011)
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, by Anonymous, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien (1975)
8. War Music, Christopher Logue (2003)
9. All Day Permanent Red, Christopher Logue (2004)
10. Memorial, Alice Oswald (2011)

Top-Ten Great Reads in Fiction

1. Middlemarch, George Eliot (1871)
2. The Crippled God, Steven Erikson (2011)
3. The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien (2007)
4. Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (2010)
5. The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy (1887)
6. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (1977)
7. The Songs of the Kings, Barry Unsworth (2002)
8. The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie (2011)
9. Return of the Crimson Guard, Ian C. Esslemont (2010)
10. The Passage, Justin Cronin (2011)

Well, there they are, my top-ten "Great Reads" in Poetry and Fiction for 2011.  I honestly very much enjoyed reading each and everyone of these books, plays, or poetry collections.  Have a look and I truly hope that you may find something of interest to you in one or both of these two lists.

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My Top-Ten Favorite Authors

Well, I am a little late for "Top-Ten Tuesday," but that's okay!  Like my friend, Lisa, over at Bibliophiliac, I am intrigued with the notion of thinking about and listing my top-ten favorite authors, rather than trying to identify my top-ten favorite books (which seems an incredibly daunting task) .  I like doing this periodically too, as my list of favorite authors (and books) seems rather dynamic and changes over time with all of the reading I do.  So, I may revisit this topic a couple of times each year.  I am hopeful that it will record my maturation as a reader.  Finally, I should point out that "Top Ten Tuesday" is an original feature/weekly meme created by the folks over at The Broke and the Bookish.

So, here is my Top-Ten Favorite Authors list.  I am also endeavoring to include an example, or two, of their works of literature that I particularly admire.  This list is in no particular order, and includes--

1. Homer--  What can I say?  The Iliad and The Odyssey are two of the greatest epic poems known to humanity, and ripping good yarns at that!  I highly recommend the translations by Robert Fagles too.  They are masterfully done, and incredibly lyrical.
2. Aeschylus--  Aeschylus' trilogy of tragedies, The Oresteia, is stunningly powerful.  This is the story of the House of Atreus of Argos, and its journey from a dark and bleak legacy of treachery and vengeance to the establishment of a process for formal determination and atonement of guilt through the use of a trial and jury--the process that we now know as Justice.  Again, I highly recommend reading the Fagles translation.
3. Emily Dickinson--  The 'Belle of Amherst' is, in my humble opinion, perhaps the most important American writer to date.  You simply must read her The Complete Poems.  Her poetry is brilliant, powerful and evocative.
4. John Keats--  Much like Dickinson, Keats is a singular and unique poetic voice; a 'Bright Star' that was dimmed all too soon, with his death at such a young age.  Keats' Complete Poems is a volume that I continually visit.
5. Jane Austen--  Austen's novels are some of the finest fiction in the English language; and her Persuasion and Emma are my two favorites.
6. Charles Dickens--  In my opinion, Dickens may have been the Shakespeare of his day.  His stories are steeped in the human experience and have great meaning even now.  I highly recommend his novels, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.
7. Thomas Hardy--  One of my favorite authors!  Hardy's appraisal and characterization of the pastoral human experience in his fiction and poetry is almost unparalleled in my view.  Whether intentional or not, I find in Hardy's poetry and novels the thread that reaches back to the ancient Greek tragedies that binds the story of Human Life inextricably with Fate and Destiny.  Reading Hardy's Complete Poems, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure was a transformative experience for me--I just look at Life differently now.
8. Leo Tolstoy--  For me, Tolstoy's fiction is the voice of what it means to be Russian (similarly, I think that Anna Akhmatova is the 'poetic voice' of the Russians).  In reading Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the reader cannot help but inexorably become swept up in the passion, pathos, and drama of the heart and soul of the Russian peoples against the backdrop of that great land.  I highly recommend the new translations of these two novels by the husband-wife team of Richard Pevear and Lara Volokhonsky.
9. George Eliot--  In my view, Eliot is the giant of the Victorian pantheon of writers!  Eliot's fiction is some of the most profoundly important literature that I have ever read.  Like Tolstoy and Hugo, Eliot is didactic, but her teaching, moralizing, and philosophizing flows ever so smoothly from the printed page to the reader's consciousness.  It makes sense and just rings True!  While I love all of her books, my two favorites are The Mill on the Floss and the monumental Middlemarch.
10. William Shakespeare--  Again, what can I say?  Harold Bloom seems to see a Canon of Literature that is 'Shakespeare-centric' in that all literature revolves around the works of 'The Bard.'  I don't disagree.  Also, I love his sonnets and narrative poems!

Well, there it is; my list of my 'Top-Ten Favorite Authors.'  I'd love to know what you think too.  Take a minute and tell me about your favorite authors and their great works?  Happy Reading!