(Part 2) Top products from r/AskLiteraryStudies

First off, good on you for taking the initiative.

For introductory books, I'd recommend Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. Now, I haven't read it myself, but it's been mentioned on this sub often enough for me to feel comfortable mentioning it. It might also be a good idea to pick up a miscellaneous collection of poems in order to get an understanding of the variety and depth of the subject matter. A more informal volume might be something edited by Garrison Keiler, like Good Poems. While that specific book is more bent towards Modern American poets, there's still a lot to draw from. A more academic book would be The Norton Anthology of Poetry ot The Norton Introduction to Poetry, which has a lot more to choose from. These two also give you a bit of structure – my copy of the Introduction has clear headings, like "Symbol" or "The Sonnet," with neat little introductory essays and poems chosen to help you understand how these concepts work. That being said, Norton tends to be a little expensive, though if you live in a college town you can probably find a cheaper copy. The benefit of these kinds of collections lies in helping you to find a poet whose style or subject matter you particularly like.

Regarding online sources, there's The Poetry Foundation, which has archives of poems and articles on the poets themselves. Their monthly articles can vary from the interesting to the banal, however, so keep your bullshit detector on. You can probably also find podcasts that deal with the subject. A personal favorite of mine is called "Entitled Opinions," and is run by a professor of Italian Studies over at Stanford by the name of Robert Harrison. Mind you, this particular podcast deals with philosophy and literature as well, so while I'd recommend listening to all their episodes you would have to do a little bit of searching in order to find a particular episode on poetry – though I would reccomend the one on "Dante and Prufrock." I imagine these kind of examinatioms would be useful because they can give you a sense of what poetry 'does' or 'how it means' beyond a surface play with words.

As for the writing of poetry, the first thing I'd recommend is that you read and meditate on a lot of poetry, good and bad, in order to get a sense of how its all done. Learn certain conventions – like, say, that of the sonnet – in order to see how poets follow through with them, or how they play with them. Learn prosody so you can understand how the precise meter, or 'beat,' of each line can affect the reader. I can't really give concrete advice with regards to this, save for a metaphorical "go west, young man!"

1. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry 1 -
   
   This book is heavy, so it doubles as a brick for smashing in the windows of capitalist bourgeois pigs. Reading it is like taking a shot of tabasco sauce and injecting it into your eye with a hypodermic needle.
   
   
2. Surrealist Poetry in English 2 -
   
   I had to buy this one on ebay, but it's a damn fine collection. Makes me want to hand out LSD-laced lollypops to schoolkids, then piss on the grave of H.W. Longfellow.
   
   
3. Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry 3 -
   
   These two have all the good ones of the 20th century, a clean layout, and a fine selection. Good for reading beneath a tree in the autumn, in a graveyard.
   
   
4. Penguin Anthology 4 -
   
   It's edited by Rita Dove, so you know this collection has good taste. The poems are from a wide spread of poetry movements, but personally, I find a lot of the pieces in it to be a little too 'delicate'. But very good for reading naked in bed, while softly stroking the hair of your sleeping lover.
   
   
5. English Romantic Poetry 5 -
   
   Got all the biggies like Byron, Shelly and Keats. I fuckin love Keats. This book is a great introduction to 19th century poetry. This is good for reading on a bus while driving past a field of flowers on a humid summer evening with the windows open, reminiscing about your high school crush.

You seem to have the will and desire, which are more important than an education and natural intelligence. Diligence and discipline are everything in writing, not how 'smart' you are.

There are two roads you must take here, both simultaneously. First, you must become a great reader. Start off by reading authors who are 'accessible,' meaning they do not initially make great demands on their audience. In the west, these are authors like:

1.) Mark Twain (Huckleberry Fin)

2.) George Orwell (Any of his books)

3.) Ernest Hemmingway (Check out his short stories)

4.) Jack London (Call of the Wild)

5.) Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice)

Here are the rules of reading:

1.) Read slowly. Imagine each scene in your head. Evoke your memory to make the text come alive.

2.) Read everything twice.

3.) Have a dictionary on hand and look up EVERY word you don't understand.

Here is a book recommending some of the best books in history. Each book has an introduction; flip through it and see what interests you.

Here is a book that provides a guide on how to read anything well.

Second, you must become an addicted writer. You must write everyday, it doesn't matter about what. The only key thing is that you enjoy it. Once you get into the habit of reading+writing, and you enjoy it, start looking into books that help you improve your writing. There are a lot to choose from; here are two examples:

1.) How to Write a Sentence, by Stanly Fish

2.) Elements of Style, by Shrunk and White

If you continue to read and write everyday, pushing yourself into more difficult books and more elaborate writing, you'll start to develop a taste for good reading/writing yourself, and be able to distinguish it in the world around you. From there, it depends on what your goals are. Good luck.

A few more come to mind, less literature but more about stylistic and analytic skills you'll require in your advanced years in the Humanities.

People say to read a good style guide like Strunk & White, which is just okay. But I'd highly recommend Pinker's A Sense of Style--he also unpacks some of the problems with Strunk & White's core edicts.

Stanley Fish is just a great person to read in general. From his op-ed stuff in the NY Times to his class How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. I'd also highly recommend reading the full introduction of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism or the introduction to Rifkin & Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. When it comes to the lit theory stuff there are some good torrents with a lot of anthologies and canonical texts lumped together as PDFs. I also find a lot of good stuff with my Scribd membership.

I'm far from a medievalist, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt.

One approach you can use is to pick up the Norton Critical edition of Malory's Morte D'Arthur. Norton Criticals are great because they gloss vocab well plus they include relevant essays that can be great for providing some extra perspective on a piece. All in one package, nice and easy. Then again, they're not exactly light reading. For slightly lighter reading, there's always Penguin Classics editions of similar writing (linked is Malory, but there's also a Penguin Classics of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances). Penguin editions will edit the text for readability without sacrificing too much - but you're likely to see modernized spellings (for most people, this is a good thing). On the other hand, Penguin classics won't include criticism inside the book, save for the introduction. A final option is Oxford World Classics, again, of Morte D'arthur. OWC are one of my favorite to teach from but they have an annoying footnoting system that can take a little bit to get used to, at least in my opinion. OWC books are generally edited very well, though, and you'd be getting a good experience of the ur-text of Arthurian legend. But again, likely to be pretty darn heavy.

As for Gawain, I read it in college and then haven't touched it since. Sorry I can't offer any interesting studies on it.

Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is a very accessible introduction to thinking about literature in a way that blends narratology and semiotics. It generally sticks pretty closely to talking about the stories he has in mind, so I wished while reading it that I'd had a copy of Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie on hand, among others.

David Lodge's The Art of Fiction used to be popular as a supplementary textbook in creative writing classes because it just uses nice examples to provide a basic language for talking about literature.

John Sutherland has a number of books intended for a general audience that either introduce basic concepts of literary criticism or that just make careful reading fun, e.g. How Literature Works, A Little History of Literature, and The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction (an omnibus edition of the books he's probably most well known for).

Gaston Bachelard comes to mind as someone who, like Gass, is just a delight to read: The Poetics of Space, Air and Dreams, etc. I'd put some other writers writing about their personal relationships to reading in a similar category: Nicholson Baker, U and I; Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary; and even Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.

You might try

• Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth
  
• Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces
  
• this Carl Jung Reader is pretty good
  
  Technically these deal with mythology, but they're sufficiently enlightening on the meaning of myth symbolic myth content to serve you for literature.
  
  One other thing worth reading: the Bible. Particularly a literary Bible like this or this.
  
  Much of the symbolism in literature hearkens back to religion or mythology (which is just old religion). So it's never a bad idea to study the most read religions in their own right. Snake, Apple, Water, Flood, Rain, Fire, Smoke. These are all fairly omnipresent symbols with a wealth of genesis in books like the Bible.

How many months do you have? I took it a few years back and read as much as I could for six months solid. I didn't have a job for most of those months, so I got a LOT of reading done. I didn't do poorly, and from what I've heard I even did well for a first timer, but my score didn't blow anybody away. That said, tips:

• Get that stupid awful Kaplan practice book. It's the thinnest one on the shelf, and that's not a good thing. Basically the entire book just says "we can't help you study for this, you just have to read everything you can." However, it does have some great tips about how to read and has some practice exams that are actually really helpful.
  
• Norton Anthologies are your best friends. Read as much of as many of them as you can. Start with the general English Literature, then America, and then whatever your weaknesses are.
  
• Make flash cards. For instance, you will be given a passage from a poem written in the early 1600s and, unless that's your bag, you'll say "well fuck, is that John Donne or Ben Jonson? What the fuck are the differences between these guys anyway?" Flash cards with any kind of identifying traits, biographical notes, big poems/titles, and anything else you think might even remotely have a chance of showing up will really really help in the end. And for that matter:
  
• Google. A bunch of people have taken this test and subsequently pulled their hair out, and then written about what they could have done differently. They have a lot of great tips about what to focus on and what you can let slide a little more.
  
• The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory
  
• Don't get specific. The people writing and grading the test know that they're asking an impossible task. They know how broad the field is, and how limited the time was we had to study it. They'll generally stick to big names and big works, but there will be a few more obscure things to throw you off. Don't get bogged down in those! It's not worth getting high marks with a rifle when you could be blasting away with a shotgun. For example: picking up the Norton Anthology of African American Literature was really helpful to me, but reading all of One Hundred Years of Solitude was not. I spent a lot of time on that one work when I could have been reading the Nortons and making flashcards of a whole bunch of other things.
  
• By the same token, don't worry too much about anything modern. Again, they know how broad the field is, and they know that the only things they can trust everyone was required to read are the older, bigger works. And by bigger I mean more famous, not longer. The Fairie Queene doesn't take up too much space. They'll probably ask about a few contemporary poets (maybe Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison) just for laffs, but there honestly shouldn't be too much of that.
  
• Get a handle on the major movements. Know what magical realism is. Know what mystery plays are. Know the differences between the different kinds of sonnets. Know how to identify more obscure forms of poetry.
  
• Cliff Notes. Hate to say it, but they help. Pick up a copy of the real deal at a library, read enough to get a handle on the style, finish up with the Cliff Notes to get the plot.
  
• Don't drink coffee on the morning of. It's a three hour test and if you leave the room you forfeit your score. You'll regret the coffee no matter what you do.

I agree. Thankfully, there are plenty of fun ways to learn grammar now. I especially like using the poetry activities in Teaching Grammar Through Writing and the website NoRedInk.

You're absolutely right about theory anthologies lacking writing by creative writers after Woolf. If this is something the OP is interested in, I'd suggest Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. It's from 2003 (and, as the title suggests, focused on the 20th century), so it lacks very contemporary poetics, but it's a great resource nonetheless.

We've actually been discussing this in class last week. I've been pondering on this, because I remember being suggested to be mindful of learning styles when it comes to language learning. My professor suggested reading [this book] (https://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/0060933844).

She said that reading was a human invention, as opposed to, say, sound. For instances, babies do not need to learn how to hear sound, but humans have to learn how to read a certain language/character system (I'm not quite sure if I'm using the terms correctly).

Hopefully, this can be edifying. I hope to be able to read this, since I haven't yet!

The tough thing about translated work is that the same poem can vary widely depending on the translator so you need to make sure you find a good one. I recently been working through The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry and it's one of the most well curated consistent anthologies I've come across and a good way to get your feet wet.

although i haven't used it personally, something like this might be helpful

Nominally, the full KJV contains the Apocrypha too. It was one of the first bibles edited to also include a set of apocryphal writings. However, no surprises here, there is a lot more 'apocrypha' than that included in the KJV (and often, it is categorized under a different title). I recommend, for its breadth rather than its depth, http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-Bible-Willis-Barnstone/dp/0060815981 to those interested.

There is this quite unknown online store, they have it:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074KQHDVN/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

If you do not want to have a mobi-version you can try e.g. kobo.com for an epub-version. At least for Germany they offer the title too.