I’m not exactly “college bound,” having received a B.A. and a J.D. Still, I haven’t read very many of these books recommended by the College Board for college bound high-schoolers. I do, however, want to read most of these. Thanks to Rose City Reader for starting this meme. The books I’ve read are in red; blue indicates that I’ve read an excerpt or partially finished the whole book.
Beowulf
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
A Death in the Family, by James Agee
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Inferno, by Dante
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Selected Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
The Iliad, by Homer
The Odyssey, by Homer
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor
Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Selected Tales, by Edgar Allen Poe
Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand
Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Antigone, by Sophocles
Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
Vanity Fair, by William Thackeray
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Candide, by Voltaire
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
Collected Stories, by Eudora Welty
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
Native Son, by Richard Wright
Total Read = 31
How many have you read?
Check out my other list posts:
BBC 100
Entertainment Weekly’s New Classics
Related posts:
{ 14 comments }
I’ve read 41, mostly for school. Did you read most of your 31 for school? We have a lot of overlap, but it’s interesting to see the differences.
Ugh. I’ve only read 20. Pretty much ones that you have read to and yes most of them were for school.
The Lord of the Flies is incredible. Lots of thematic heft there. It shaped a much of my thought on what good speculative fiction should be.
I’m just dropping by to let you know that I’ve given you an award! http://athomewithbooks.blogspot.com/2009/03/awards-roundup.html
It appears I’ve read about 41, and dabbled in a few more. Great list of books!
I read about 40 of them. I was actually going to post this on my website next week as yet another “to read” list. It’s a great list. But I really can’t imagine reading them all before college!
33. They have a similar list I ran into a while ago on facebook (something about the BBC thinks the average person has read less than five of the books on the list). A lot of the books were classics. This list is a good place to find books I’d like to read in the future–I was an English major, ten years removed, and love to keep reading.
Lily – Many were for school, but I’ve picked up a surprising number on my own (Slaughterhouse Five, Beowulf, Jane Eyre, etc.)
Debbie – Luckily, we have time to get to the books on this list later.
Loren – I’ve been meaning to read Lord of the Flies for some time now. I’ve bumped it up on my list because of your recommendation.
Alyce – Thank you so much for the award! I’m honored.
Suey – You’re a classics reading machine. I am motivated to read more of these in the coming years.
Rebecca – I’m sure you’ll get through even more on the list after you complete your HTR&W challenge.
Jeana – I think I’ve posted the BBC list too. Here’s the link. I’ve thankfully read more than five. :)
When I was in high school, I was given a few similar lists. I was especially appreciative of the annotated lists when I was about to take the praxis and anything could show up on the literature test. (I couldn’t believe how much those annotated lists helped!)
About 36. Some of these books might be too difficult for college-bound students. Inferno for high school students is quite ambitious. I certainly didn’t read it until college. I couldn’t stand Faulkner but will read him again. LOL
Thanks for the mention! I can’t take credit for “starting” this though — the College Board did. It’s just one of many “Must Read” lists I keep track of on my blog.
By the way, I have never commented about your blog name, which I love. I have always wanted to be a “blue stocking” myself — ever since my jr. high days devouring historical romances. :) Now, like you, I am a JD who wishes she could spend all her time reading books instead of billing hours.
I just added a link to your list on my College Board post. Please let me know if you update your progress report.
what would you say are your top 10?
i have to read 8 of them this year for school but they can be my choice. i am in high school, and i tend to get bored of books quickly.
Jena – I agree about the usefulness of annotated lists. Maybe I’ll do that to this one sometime.
Matthew – I tried to read Inferno in high school and didn’t get far, but I read the whole Divine Comedy several times in college. I really enjoy it.
Rose City Reader – Another J.D.! There seem to be a lot of lawyer book-bloggers. I love your name too. I lived in Portland for all of elementary school and would love to live there again someday.
Kelly – It’s hard to pick my top 10, but if you get bored easily, I would suggest starting with Pride & Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, or Animal Farm. Good luck!
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