Reddit reviews The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus

I like to tailor my recommendations to what I know about people, so a request like this leaves me a little at a disadvantage. Basically, I believe that there may be no such thing as a universally applicable book, and to that end, whether or not a book is really a "must-read" for any given person depends on the circumstances of that person's life. So what I'm going to give you instead is this: a list of the ten books that I've read that I think (at the moment) have the best chance of having an impact on any random English-speakers life. Make of it what you will.

Ahem. In no particular order:

1. The Bridge at San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
   
   
2. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
   
   
3. The Spirit Catches You and You Fell Down, by Anne Fadiman
   
   
4. The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius
   
   
5. We With to Inform You that Tomorrow We Well Be Killed With Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch.
   
   
6. The Theban Plays of Sophocles.
   
   
7. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch.
   
   
8. The Book of J, by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg.
   
   
9. Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative, by Herbert Mason.
   
   
10. The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.

For fairy tales, I recommend the following:

• The Victorian Fairy Tales Book
  
• Norton's The Classic Fairy Tales
  
• Norton's The Great Fairy Tale Tradition
  
• The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales
  
• My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
  
• Any and all of Andrew Lang's Colored Fairy Books (the first two focus on collections of well-known tales, but most of them are sort of themed/grouped geographically and have fairy tales from all over the world)
  
• The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald
  
• The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend
  
• I'm a big fan of the various "Annotated" Fairy Tale collections, like the Annotated Brothers Grimm, Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, and Annotated Hans Christen Andersen, though I don't always agree with the editorializing. It's a whole series, so I'm only going to link to a couple.
  
• On that note, look for book collections put together and/or edited by Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes. They're the two most prominent fairy tale scholars at the moment and basically have an unofficial duopoly on the fairy tale academic criticism market.
  
• Also, a special shout-out to P.J. Lynch's illustrated version of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and really all of the fairy tales books that Lynch illustrates. They're beautiful.
  
  
  For mythology and classical studies, there are a couple that are basically required reading for any Mythology or Classics class. Since several people have already recommended anthologies of Greek myths, I'm going to err more on the "Classics" side of the conversation:
  
  
• Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
  
• The Odyssey, Homer (I recommend the Fagles translation due to its prominence in academia and its status as one of the best translations of the work)
  
• The Illiad, Homer (again, Fagles translation)
  
• The Aeneid, Virgil (again, Fagles has a translation that's very good). My bias as a Latin student, however, leads me to also recommend Pharr, which has no real use to you if you don't know Latin but it's the most popular all-time textbook version of the Aeneid)
  
• Metamorpheses, Ovid
  
• You also probably want to look at some Greek plays like the Sophoclean Tragedies/Three Thebian Plays

If you like Fagles (and I do), he also translated Aeschylus' The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides) as well as Sophocles' The Three Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone). I haven't actually read either of these, although his translation of Aeschylus is on my bookshelf, and I can't speak to their popularity but I'd imagine they're somewhat similar to his translations of epic poetry. I don't think he translated Euripides though. Hope this helps!