Regarding Kafka: Do yourself a favour and consider it as Black Comedy. There's a large number of short/shortish stories that you can start with. Die Verwandlung/The Metamorphosis is quite well-known and rather short, as is the penal colony thing. If you are in the mood for something longer and want some Paranoia Fuel, try Der Prozess.
The Iliad is pretty fucking badass. This depends very much on translation though. I'm not sure what your primary language is and I'm not one to ask about what the best translations are. Be warned though that it is Greek and old so expect values dissonance in some areas.
Divine Comedy is much the same as the Iliad in that you need a good translation. You also need some groundwork on Spanish history or a copy with annotations. Dante wrote what was basically self insert revenge fanfic so there's a lot that one will miss if they don't know the climate he was living in at least to some extent.
I wouldn't consider the Aeneid a required read to get the Comedy, but it could be a handy thing to read and it's a nice poem anyway. It's translation dependent and the ending is absolute shambles. Then again Virgil died before he finished it and those last bits were very much in the rough.
edited 15th Aug '12 3:17:48 PM by Aondeug
If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan ChahWe have a thread
for this sort of thing.
Wilde! He's one of my favourite authors. His most famous works are The Picture Of Dorian Gray (novel) and The Importance Of Being Earnest (play). Both are excellent and I suggest you start there. The preface in Dorian Gray is a distillation of Wilde's beliefs, so you'll know what to expect from the others. It is also, in my opinion, possessed of a rare crystalline perfection.
Note that Wilde has a compulsive need to be witty, in much the same manner as Lord Byron. This shines through most clearly in Earnest, which isn't so much a play as an opportunity for Wilde to string together as many epigrams as possible. It's still hilarious, but I know Wilde's wit doesn't appeal to everyone. Do you find lines like "If I am occassionally a little overdressed, I make up for it by always being immensely overeducated" amusing? That will probably determine how much you'll like his works.
Of his other plays, I've read Lady Windermere's Fan and Salome (there should be a diacritic here, but I can't type it on my phone). The former is much in the vein of Earnest, though perhaps slightly more serious. Salome is surprisingly serious and dark in contrast to either.
Wilde also wrote some fairytales and poetry. His talent didn't lie in poetry, and it's little known - aside from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", a long poem he wrote about his experience in prison.
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I am interested in looking at Divine comedy, anything by Kafka, Oscar Wilde and the Iliad but I don't have any information on them and I want to know what I am getting into before I read them.
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