Here. Book list. You’ve seen it. Now me…
…the titles I’ve read are in bold
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
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
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
Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
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 – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
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
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – 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
In the case of Cather, Wharton, Dreiser, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Hemingway, I’ve read plenty of other stuff. I’ve read bits and pieces of Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, and Portrait of an Artist. I keep meaning to get to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Lots of stuff not on the list that should be, chief among them, Gravity’s Rainbow; Portnoy’s Complaint; Goodbye, Columbus; Rabbit, Run; The Moviegoer; Name of the Rose; Foucault’s Pendulum. Countless others, too, that I’m not thinking off just now because of these damnable silk boxers and their glorious fabric tickle.
Is it all right that I reallyreallyreallyreallyreally hated reading Charles Dickens?
I mean, not to piss off any literocrats or something. I just really couldn’t stand reading those depressing english stories- poverty-disease-despair- what fun!
Hatesses them I do…..Hateses……
I hated them when I was first assigned them (Great Expectations, I think it was, in 10th grade?), but then years later in grad school I revisited them and found Dickens to be one of the funniest writers around. Really. Yes, he’s dealing with squalor and he’s being paid by the word. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t fantastic at capturing wild absurdity and releasing it groomed and well-behaved.
Maybe give Dickens another shot, is all I’m saying…
Yep, Great Expectations, summer before 9th grade for me. I would be hard pressed to find a less interesting or more depressing summertime read for a 14 year old.
Perhaps you’re right about Dickens now that I’m older. Maybe I would find the poverty, disease and despair funny. All I can remember was that it was the literary equivalent of eating beets for me. I’ll give it a try one of these days when I need some cheering up. And I’m drunk.
I never got into Dickens either, probably because so many of his characters are caricatures. If someone is not into him, I would highly recommend finding some Benito Galdos, particularly
First, the list is entirely fiction – no science, no mathematics, no history, no philosophy, etc.
Second, a fair number of the titles aren’t books at all – they’re plays (all the Shakespeare, Pygmalion, The Cherry Orchard, inter alia).
Nor does either Bartleby the Scrivener nor Metamorphosis qualify as a book. Each is a novella at most, and both are frequently included in collections of short stories.
Third, the list suffers from political correctness. Come, now – Maxine Hong Kingston? Zora Neale Hurston? Alice Walker? Toni Morrison? Does the College Board actually believe that anybody will be reading anything by those four in a hundred years?
Fourth, there’s just some bad judgment here. Sophocles but not Aeschylus? A Tale of Two Cities rather than Great Expectations or David Copperfield? The Turn of the Screw, which might as well be by Stephen King, except it’s not nearly as interesting as it would be if Stephen King had written it?
Dear former 13 yo boys, what were faves on your summer reading list?
My son was first willing but balked at Moby Dick and Frankenstein; I let him go back to Tolkein. (Partly because he was also dealing with a sudded visual loss, from which he’s had some sig. recovery)
Any personal memories of works drawing you “into the vortex” at that age?
He’s a rising 8th grader (homeschooled but probably headed for private high school in grade nine.)
I had some issues with this list, too. The impression I got after perusing it was that the most mediocre English teachers got together and put together something that would encompass what they thought everyone would have been taught, no matter what, and then threw in a few new titles for variety/political correctness.
No one reads War and Peace. Tolstoy, imho, is at his best in the short story format. How Much Land Does a Man Need? is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read and it hits on all those Tolstoy themes without the excessive word count. Same with Bartleby the Scrivener and Melville.
SarahW,
Depends on his interests, but I was reading Alistair MacClain novels, Guns of Navarone and stuff, they were entertaining.
If he’s a sci-fi fan I recommend one that few have probably heard of, but is one of if not the best sci-fi books I have read-
Piers Anthony
Macroscope
SarahW –
I loved all the S.E. Hinton books around that age—The Outsiders; That Was Then, This Is Now; Tex; Rumblefish…
Still love them in my memory, though I haven’t read them in 25 years…
Um, nice list you got there, but i’m not buying any book rankings that don’t have Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. No sirree.
Dang. I was hoping you had read Eliot and could tell me why they built a mill on a tiny piece of floss. Wouldn’t that interfere with the proper use of the floss?
Various musings on this thread:
First off, I love debating the canon.
Whether it’s a play, a novel or whatever, if it comes between 2 covers, it’s a book.
As a Fmr. 13 y/o easily the best book for someone that age is Catcher in the Rye. It captures rebellion nicely, it changed my mind about what literature could be. My little brother is reading crap this summer b/t 9th and 10th grade, so I empathize
Some say Dickens, having written about social inequality in the 19th C, has served his purpose by now. In fact, I got a degree in lit without having read anything by him! They taught it and I avoided it.
An old prof of mine said that if you were to name W&P, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina or Ulysses as the greatest novel ever, you’d probably never have to argue it. As i’ve only read Ulysses (and yes, it’s the greatest ever), I can’t vouch for the others. The Death of Ivan Ilych gave me a hell of a time, but I’ll still get around to W&P one of these days.
Toni Morrison will be around for a long time. Probably centuries. She’s a major component of black lit, women’s lit and southern lit. I had to read it in 3(!) different classes in college.
“Sophocles but not Aeschylus?” Ah, that’s a judgement call and we can debate it forever, but seeing as how Sophocles invented drama and all that, I’ll stick up for their choice.
Not having read any of the Henry James myself, I’ll only add that sometimes you read something just because everyone says it’s important. Then you can point out how it’s crap when everyone says to read it.
I’m disheartened that there’s no poetry on the list, but whatever.
Bottom line, it’s 101 books. Important stuff will be left out. The list is fine.
just noticed poetry is in a different list. Gotta click the link!
Sarah: Feed him all the Tolkein he wants. That’s the sort of thing I was reading in Jr. High, and I turned into a voracious reader. The eye naturally turns towards the finer things later in life, so don’t worry about cramming James Joyce down his throat, he’ll pick it up later in life on his own. Another good bet is Isaac Asimov. The Foundation Trilogy is can’t-miss stuff.
Jim – I’ll take Tale of Two Cities over Great Expectations or David Copperfield any day of the week. As love stories go, it’s (for me anyway) behind only The Great Gatsby and Lolita, not to mention how entertaining it is just for the French Revolution context.
It’s amusing to see Their Eyes Were Watching God on the list. That was one of the token multicultural books they force fed us in high school. Native Son as well.
I should probably just be glad that only one Thomas Hardy novel made it onto the list. Hardy, to me, is like what I suspect TMan feels for Dickens. Only there’s no funny anywhere to be found in Hardy, just more misery.
bg – You got a lit degree without reading any Dickens, but had to read Toni Morrison 3X?
I despair.
And to your professor’s list of unarguably greatest books Middlemarch, and Les Miserables (the unabridged only, TYVM).
Yep, I read (and should have specified earlier) Beloved in 20th C. Am. Novel, Southern Lit. and Am. Lit 2. I also read Sula in a history class (or half of it since it was irrelevant to the course). All with different professors. Not as much of a waste of time as you’d think, since each prof has a different take on it.
Overlap is sometimes unavoidable (I read Invisible Man, Sound & the Fury, Sun Also Rises [which should replace Farewell to Arms on that list and is my favorite romance] and Gatsby twice, probably others too), but 3 times is impressive, I think.
It was as much my fault as theirs, I took a lot of extra English courses as electives knowing there would be overlap.
Dickens had his own course and they taught him in Hist. of the Novel Pt. 2, and a few others but I only took Hist. of Novel Pt. 1 (it sucked). I took plenty of Brit lit courses, they just didn’t include Dickens in the curriculum.
When I was much younger, and actually read things printed on paper instead of on a screen, I read constantly—paperbacks, magazines, backs of cereal boxes, FDA inserts from discarded medicines….reading in bed, on the couch, on the can, in the shower….
…and our esteemed host has read far, far more of “the canon” than I ever did. But then, I learned early on that “the canon” were books to be avoided.
I think it was Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” that did it for me. My aunt, who loves Steinbeck, once charitably characterized it as “one of his less accessible works.” Once that loathesome piece of sludge had been forced down my throat at school, I determined that I’d rather be torn apart by rabid dogs than pick up anything else written by the man.
And so it goes—there is a huge amount of really great literature that is truly a pleasure to read, but authorities continue to praise other, less enjoyable works so that readers must join them on their exalted plane of literary masochism. By listing “difficult” works, only the purest of heart will perservere and join their exclusive ranks.
Or maybe I was just traumatized…
Here’s the secret: revisit the stuff they assigned you in school that you hated later on in life, when you’re better prepared to appreciate it (and less likely to resist it on its face because it’s been assigned to you by someone you don’t much like who dresses poorly and who styles his hair like he did in 1959).
I picked up Grapes of Wrath at a used book store in OC MD in the summer of 1987 and loved it. In fact, that was the summer that I started reading novels and short stories at a substantial clip because I needed something to do by the pool while I was working on my tan and getting my hair to streak yellow.
WaitWaitWait
Mention Ulysses? Um, I did.
When I write, every chance I get, I include an homage to Joyce.
My favorite was when I paraphrased the end of the 2nd chapter (“the sun flung spangles, dancing coins”) in an article about a senior prom.
SarahW, if you are still reading,
I read a lot of Zane Grey back then. He wrote some fine novels. Heinlein is good too. Just make sure it’s not anything after the 60’s. Also, Stranger in a Strange Land might be a little much for him.
Try stuff like the Rolling Stones, The Door Into Summer or Starbeast. His earlier stuff is very good. Stuff like Friday, Time Enough for Love and 666 The Number of the Beast that came after Stranger has everybody with an IQ of 180 running around nekkid and having sex all the time.
bg,
Unfortunately, your original post was too long for me to wade through. It was also rather difficult to follow and I didn’t catch most of your arcane references and subtle allusions to prior works of literature. Also, I only speak English.
Sorry.
then how’d you get through Ulysses?