
When I was a high school senior, my AP Lit teacher gave us several book lists at the beginning of the year to help us become more well-read. I set a goal then and there that I was going to read every single work listed on the “100 Most-Often-Recommended” list (list taken from here). I wish that I were creating this post to tell you, “Hey, guess what? I read all 100 works!”
But I’m not.
I’m creating this post because I want to share the wealth…and compare books.
The ones I’ve read in their entirety are in red.
Those which I’ve read excerpts from are in blue.
Which ones have you read? Any that I haven’t, and that I should start right away?
Any that you hated? (Like Heart of Darkness, maybe?)
Let’s talk books.
P.S. Yes, the reason that I’ve read more from the beginning of the list is because I just started to go through and do the thing in order. Shebam.
***Note: list updated with my latest reads January 2019
The 100 Most-Often-Recommended Works
|
||
Novels and Short Stories
|
||
Jane Austen
|
Pride and Prejudice
|
British, 1813
|
James Baldwin
|
Go Tell It on the Mountain
|
American, 1953
|
Saul Bellow
|
Seize the Day
|
American, 1956
|
Charlotte Brontë
|
Jane Eyre
|
British 1847
|
Emily Brontë
|
Wuthering Heights
|
British, 1847
|
Albert Camus
|
The Stranger
|
French, 1942
|
Lewis Carroll
|
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
|
British, 1865
|
Willa Cather
|
My Antonia
|
American, 1918
|
Miguel de Cervantes
|
Don Quixote
|
Spanish, 1605, 1617
|
Kate Chopin
|
The Awakening
|
American, 1899
|
Joseph Conrad
|
Heart of Darkness
|
British, 1902
|
Stephen Crane
|
The Red Badge of Courage
|
American, 1895
|
Daniel Defoe
|
Robinson Crusoe
|
British, 1719
|
Charles Dickens
|
Great Expectations
|
British, 1860-61
|
Feodor Dostoevski
|
Crime and Punishment
|
Russian, 1866
|
George Eliot
|
The Mill on the Floss
|
British, 1860
|
Ralph Ellison
|
Invisible Man
|
American, 1947
|
William Faulkner
|
The Sound and the Fury
|
American, 1929
|
Henry Fielding
|
Tom Jones
|
British, 1749
|
F. Scott Fitzgerald
|
The Great Gatsby
|
American, 1925
|
Gustave Flaubert
|
Madame Bovary
|
French, 1857
|
E.M. Forster
|
A Passage to India
|
British, 1924
|
Gabriel García Márquez
|
One Hundred Years of Solitude
|
Columbian, 1967
|
William Golding
|
Lord of the Flies
|
British, 1954
|
Thomas Hardy
|
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
|
British, 1891
|
Nathaniel Hawthorne
|
The Scarlet Letter
|
American, 1850
|
Ernest Hemingway
|
A Farewell to Arms
|
American, 1929
|
Zora Neale Hurston
|
Their Eyes Were Watching God
|
American, 1937
|
Aldous Huxley
|
Brave New World
|
British, 1932
|
Henry James
|
The Turn of the Screw
|
American, 1898
|
James Joyce
|
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
|
Irish, 1916
|
Franz Kafka
|
The Trial
|
Czechoslovakian, 1925
|
D.H. Lawrence
|
Sons and Lovers
|
British, 1913
|
Sinclair Lewis
|
Babbitt
|
American, 1922
|
Bernard Malamud
|
The Assistant
|
American, 1957
|
Thomas Mann
|
Death in Venice
|
German, 1912
|
Herman Melville
|
Moby-Dick
|
American, 1851
|
Toni Morrison
|
Sula
|
American, 1973
|
Flannery O’Connor
|
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
|
American, 1955
|
Tillie Olsen
|
Tell Me a Riddle
|
American, 1956-60
|
George Orwell
|
Animal Farm
|
British, 1945
|
Alan Paton
|
Cry, the Beloved Country
|
South African, 1948
|
Edgar Allan Poe
|
Great Tales and Poems
|
American, 1839-45
|
J.D. Salinger
|
The Catcher in the Rye
|
American, 1951
|
Sir Walter Scott
|
Ivanhoe
|
British, 1820
|
Mary Shelley
|
Frankenstein
|
British, 1818
|
John Steinbeck
|
The Grapes of Wrath
|
American, 1939
|
Jonathan Swift
|
Gulliver’s Travels
|
British, 1726
|
William Makepeace Thackeray
|
Vanity Fair
|
British, 1847-48
|
Leo Tolstoy
|
War and Peace
|
Russian, 1865-69
|
Ivan Turgenev
|
Fathers and Sons
|
Russian, 1862
|
Mark Twain
|
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
|
American, 1886
|
John Updike
|
Rabbit, Run
|
American, 1961
|
Voltaire
|
Candide
|
French, 1759
|
Kurt Vonnegut
|
Slaughterhouse Five
|
American, 1969
|
Alice Walker
|
The Color Purple
|
American, 1982
|
Eudora Welty
|
Thirteen Stories
|
American, 1965
|
Edith Wharton
|
The Age of Innocence
|
American, 1920
|
Virginia Woolf
|
To the Lighthouse
|
British, 1927
|
Richard Wright
|
Native Son
|
American, 1940
|
Drama
|
|
|
Aeschylus
|
Oresteia
|
Greek, 458 BCE
|
Aristophanes
|
Lysistrata
|
Greek, 411, BCE
|
Samuel Beckett
|
Waiting for Godot
|
Irish, 1952
|
Bertolt Brecht
|
Mother Courage and Her Children
|
German, 1941
|
Anton Chekov
|
The Cherry Orchard
|
Russian, 1904
|
Euripides
|
Medea
|
Greek, 431 BCE
|
Johann von Goethe
|
Faust, Part I
|
German, 1808
|
Henrik Ibsen
|
A Doll’s House
|
Norwegian, 1879
|
Christopher Marlowe
|
Doctor Faustus
|
British, 1604
|
Arthur Miller
|
Death of a Salesman
|
American, 1949
|
Molière
|
The Misanthrope
|
French, 1666
|
Eugene O’Neill
|
Desire Under the Elms
|
American, 1924
|
William Shakespeare
|
Hamlet
|
British, 1600
|
George Bernard Shaw
|
Pygmalion
|
British, 1913
|
Sophocles
|
Oedipus Rex
|
Greek, 430 BCE
|
Oscar Wilde
|
The Importance of Being Earnest
|
British, 1895
|
Thornton Wilder
|
Our Town
|
American, 1938
|
Tennessee Williams
|
The Glass Menagerie
|
American, 1945
|
Poetry
|
|
|
Allison, Alexander, Editor
|
Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition)
|
British & American
|
Anonymous
|
Beowulf
|
British, c. 700
|
Anonymous
|
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
|
British, c. 1350-1400
|
Geoffrey Chaucer
|
Canterbury Tales
|
British, 1387-1400
|
Dante
|
Inferno
|
Italian, c. 1320
|
Homer
|
The Odyssey
|
Greek, c. 9th C. BCE
|
John Milton
|
Paradise Lost
|
British, 1667
|
Vergil
|
The Aeneid
|
Italian, c. 18 BCE
|
Walt Whitman
|
Leaves of Grass
|
American, 1855
|
Miscellaneous
|
|
|
Aristotle
|
Poetics
|
Greek, 4th C. BCE
|
Saint Augustine
|
Confessions
|
Italian, 397-401
|
|
Bible (esp. King James Version)
|
|
Charles Darwin
|
Origin of the Species
|
British, 1859
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
“The American Scholar”
|
American, 1837
|
Benjamin Franklin
|
Autobiography
|
American, 1771
|
Sigmund Freud
|
Civilization and Its Discontents
|
German, 1930
|
Edith Hamilton
|
Mythology
|
American, 1940
|
Niccolò Machiavelli
|
The Prince
|
Italian, 1532
|
Karl Marx
|
Communist Manifesto
|
German, 1848
|
Michel de Montaigne
|
Selected Essays
|
French, 1580
|
Plato
|
Republic
|
Greek, c. 370 BCE
|
Henry David Thoreau
|
Walden
|