Oh, I should've added Ivanhoe now that you mention it, I quite enjoyed that actually, even though it's been so long ago that I must've been rather young at the time. Need to reread it.

And yeah, makes sense, you had a similar situation of having a smaller native language with a fair bit of foreign languages instead. You read Shakespeare in English class, too?

Well, yes, but the main part of my definition was simply the "generally considered" bit.

Heh. Didn't see the pre-edit version of your post.

Ibn Khaldun lived in the... I want to say 14th century in North Africa, and wanted to write a world history. He well may have done, too, but posterity only really cares for the superb introduction to it (muqaddimah is Arabic for "introduction" or "prologue", which has a number of extremely modern-sounding ideas on economics, sociology and their influence on history. He analyses things like power structures, the differences between rural and urban communities, tribal nomadic cultures transitioning into sedentary ones, economic concepts, and so on. I've read even less of him than of the Greek and Latin authors, as I read even slower in (hard) Arabic than in those languages, but I was very impressed by what I did read.

As for the Dutch ones, I imagine you'd be able to read them if you tried, what with Norwegian being closet Dutch. Hooft is a 16th century history and poet, wrote Petrarca-esque sonnets and iirc some history on rhyme that I've never bothered to read. Vondel is a bit later, poet and playwright, and notable for having written a play, Lucifer, which is a likely influence on Milton's Paradise Lost (we have reason to believe Milton knew enough Dutch to read it).

Hehe. I hesitated about putting Borges here or below, too.

Achterberg is a Dutch poet who spent most of his life in psychiatric care after an incident that involved manslaughter at the very least, but he wrote great poems, most of them about religion - not in a doctrinal preachy way, but in a searching, philosophical way.

And Flecker was described by at least one critic as "the greatest premature loss English poetry suffered since Keats", so I'm not alone at least in thinking he kicks ass. Wikipedia informs me a poem of his appears somewhere in Sandman, and there's an Agatha Christie novel ("Postern of Fate" named after a line from one of his poems (his best one, actually, if you ask me).

Hm. I'm not sure whether you should or not... I think you'd like it, but he does have a very particular style. The book I got furthest in was Mason & Dixon, and well... let's just say the combination of surreal elements, 18th century dialects, bizarre sexual descriptions, and extremely convoluted plots is quite a spectable to behold, and totally entertaining. But I can't possibly read more than twenty pages of it at a time, and as his books are all fairly long, and I'm not good at discipline in reading books, well, I don't finish them.




Makes sense. I think I actually may have read a prose summary of the Aeneid, or some such... but not the real thing. I'm sure I'll read them at some point.