101 Books College Bound Seniors Should Read
by Jenners • 03/20/2009 • Classics • 11 Comments
So I found this great list of 101 books all college-bound seniors should read over at The Bookkitten’s wonderful blog. I couldn’t resist seeing what books I had read myself. All of the books I have read are highlighted in green. If I’ve highlighted the author only, that means I haven’t read the work listed here, but another work off the list.
Author, Title
- – Beowulf
- Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
- Agee, James A Death in the Family
- Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
- Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
- Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March (I read Seize the Day)
- Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre (reading now)
- Bronte, Emily Wuthering Heights
- Camus, Albert The Stranger
- Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop (I read My Antonia)
- Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote
- Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
- Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
- Chopin, Kate The Awakening
- Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness
- Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
- Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
- Dante Inferno
- Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
- Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment
- Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy
- Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers
- Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss
- Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo Selected Essays
- Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying
- Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury
- Fielding, Henry Tom Jones
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby
- Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
- Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
- Golding, William Lord of the Flies
- Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d’Urbervilles (I read Jude the Obscure)
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter
- Heller, Joseph Catch 22
- Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms (I read The Sun Also Rises)
- Homer The Iliad
- Homer The Odyssey
- Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
- Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House
- James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady
- James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
- Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis
- Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior
- Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird
- Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt
- London, Jack The Call of the Wild
- Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain
- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener
- Melville, Herman Moby Dick
- Miller, Arthur The Crucible
- Morrison, Toni Beloved
- O’Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find
- O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night
- Orwell, George Animal Farm (I read 1984)
- Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
- Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar (I have read her poems but maybe that doesn’t count)
- Poe, Edgar Allen Selected Tales
- Proust, Marcel Swann’s Way
- Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49
- Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front
- Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
- Roth, Henry Call It Sleep
- Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
- Shakespeare, William Hamlet
- Shakespeare, William Macbeth
- Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
- Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
- Shelley, Mary Frankenstein
- Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sophocles Antigone
- Sophocles Oedipus Rex
- Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
- Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels
- Thackeray, William Vanity Fair
- Thoreau, Henry David Walden
- Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
- Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
- Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Voltaire Candide
- Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five
- Walker, Alice The Color Purple
- Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth
- Welty, Eudora Collected Stories
- Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
- Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse
- Wright, Richard Native Son
Turns out, I read 41 — not even half of the list! Yikes! I think I need to work on this list a bit — will perhaps give me some focus on my “plugging the holes in my reading knowledge” project that I’ve started on. I will confess that most of them were required reading for school and not my own choices to read — excepting The Color Purple, Huckleberry Finn, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Lord of the Flies and Catch 22. I am currently reading Jane Eyre so I am counting it.
And I thought I had read Flannery O’Connor but then I wasn’t sure. What other young Southern woman writer could I be mixing her up with? Any ideas?
How about you? How many have your read?
So college-bound seniors are supposed to knock one of those off every three and a half days during their last year of high school? Won’t they all flunk physics and trig, not having time for homework? And have to give up all sports, clubs, jobs, and dating?
I ran out of fingers and toes, so I can’t give you a count…but about half I think. The problem is, that like many here, I read a lot of those in school, so many years ago. And I am getting to the point that the more I think about a few, I am not sure I read them or only saw the movie.
I am hopeless…do I have to give my college degree back??
Padfoot:
Like CJ, I thought I would list some of my faves in the comments. Hope you find both of our comments helpful.
I would recommend:
Mark Twain — If you already read Huckleberry Finn, then I suggest A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Arthur Miller’s “The Cruicible” — really really good and then you go around calling everyone “Goody.”
Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy — I read this in college for a literature class and really ended up liking it. It is a big one though, if I recall correctly.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath — Just a great book. Check out Of Mice and Men too if you haven’t already.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — Brilliant. Wonderful. Great movie too.
Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 — Genius book. Very very funny but thought-provoking.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — You probably have read this but be sure you don’t miss it if you didn’t read it already.
Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities — Excellent. Must read.
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple — Loved this book and a great movie too.
To Padfoot who asked which books one would recommend from the list.
I loved Jane Eyre. I also love Twain and since Huck Finn is his masterpiece, even with a rather lame ending, I’d recommend it or Puddin’head Wilson as an alternative. I thought Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep was excellent, but I recommended it to my sister who wasn’t thrilled with it. It is the only book he wrote. I was impressed at how well he portrayed the thoughts of a child. To Kill a Mockingbird —again Lee’s only book —shouldn’t be missed.
I would recommend reading anything by Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Wilde, and Richard Wright, whether a particular book is on the list or not.
Among my favorites NOT on the list:
Sophie’s Choice – Styron
Rebecca – du Maurnier
A Room with a View – Forster
Look Homeward Angel – Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe
Another who isn’t there, Jorge Amado, a Brazilian author —I’d go with Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, but Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon, is good, too. Both are funny, sad, exotic and erotic —also somewhat wordy, but delicious, nonetheless. Delicious is a good word to use because both of the heroines are great cooks and might even share a recipe with the reader.
I haven’t read very many of those at all, but I’ve already confessed that I’m not well read. You’ve got a lot of green on your list. I think an interesting list would be what books you think should be read by students. I may have to ponder that.
If I counted right I read 89. Of the remaining 11, either I read something else by that author or I’m totally uninterested.
Some favorites from your haven’t read yet:
Canterbury Tales
Emerson
Woman Warrior
Call of the Wild
Bell Jar
Walden
Leaves of Grass
Welty
Usually, I’ve read like 70 percent of books on lists like these, but on this one, I’m only at like 30-40%. Better get reading.
63 for me.
I’m going to say 43, but there are 3 that I think i read, but I’ve seen the movie so often, I’m not 100% sure. It’s been 50 years since I read some of these. I got one of these lists in high school in the early 60′s —it listed some of the same books, because I remember reading the Three Muskateers and Robinson Crusoe from that list, among others. Of course, i few were assigned in high school or college, but I read a lot on my own. Jane Eyre was one of my mother’s favorites. I went through a Fitzgerald phase. I liked Twain early on, but fell in love with him once i started to read his social commentary. I got a similar list from my local library recently. Trouble is, that I thought most of those books were wonderful when I read them, but now so many sound old fashioned and dull. I remember not liking My Antonia when I was 15, but I think I should try it again. Most of the books I read now are so fast paced, it is sometimes difficult to slow down and savor a classic. Mark Twain described a classic as: “a book which people praise and don’t read.”
I have read 38 of them. These lists are always so random though. I mean, why only one Dickens but two Herman Melvilles?
The funny thing though is that of the ones I have read, I think most of them were in high school as assigned reading. I read more random classics than the “reading list” types these days.
Very nice post!!! I love the list. I’ve only read like 23 of these classics which is completely embarrassing because I am an English major. Grrrr. Good thing this is my year of classics I am going to try to know a bunch of those out. Any good ones from the list you recommend?