There's no point in trying to ignore this because sooner or later someone would email it to me. The rules: highlight (or bold) everything in the list that you have read. This might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever posted. Oh well... might as well quit stalling.
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
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, 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
de 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 von - 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 (I started this one twice but only made it about a quarter of the way through)
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 García - 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 (But I've read 1984. Why couldn't that be on the list?)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (? I've read two or three...)
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 (ummm... I don't think so. I have read Tom Sawyer)
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
UPDATE: My sincerest thanks to everyone who has linked to this. It's been my most popular post so far. And to think, I almost didn't post it! One thing I must clear up: I did not start the list. I found it at Accidental Verbosity. A reader named Paul posted in the comments below that it originally came from College Board.com.
James DiBenedetto - email - url
Lynn,
If it makes you feel any better, I've read less of the books on this list than you have. I came up with 12, and that's being generous (counting things I read in high school English classes, etc)...
22 Apr 04 @ 22:23
Lynn S - email - url
I was counting stuff I read in high school English class too. Throw those out and it cuts the number in half.
23 Apr 04 @ 07:09
Robert the Llama Butcher - email - url
There's nothing wrong with including high school reading lists. It's a great way to get your exposure to certain books that, shall we say, don't really belong in the starting line-up, out of the way!
23 Apr 04 @ 11:39
stephenb - email - url
Frankly, the list seems rather heavy on American Lit to my way of thinking. Do you have any idea who compiled it?
23 Apr 04 @ 12:21
Lynn S - email - url
No idea. It's another one of those things that's making it's way around the blogoshpere and who knows where it originally started.
23 Apr 04 @ 16:01
Don - email - url
Not everything on the list is worth reading. It is a sign of cultivation to have *not* read James Fenimore Cooper. (I was assigned one of his other novels for a class once. It took me a *month* to force my way through the drivel. Mark Twain's essay on "Cooper's Literary Offenses" is worth tracking down.)
24 Apr 04 @ 09:51
John Salmon - email - url
Echoing Don-a fair number of these books are junk (Toni Morrison? What were they smoking?), and the list as someone else said is a little too heavy on Americans.
24 Apr 04 @ 23:29
Mike - email - url
What??!?? You haven't read "Swann's Way"? How droll.
But as most everybody else points out, who made this list, and why do they think they're such a big deal?
As you've read Beowulf (I assume that was one of the English class books), and Antigone, you don't really have to read any of the others.
For everybody else out there: What books would you put on a list, and why? (Which underlies the bigger question, of the millions of books that have been written and printed since 1600 or so, what should a book tell us to make it worth reading?)
And perhaps the emphasis on American lit is because so few of us read any other languages.
26 Apr 04 @ 13:58
Jeannette - email - url
Where did you find this list? my first reaction was to feel a bit embarrassed at how little I've read, but then I realized that's a rather arbitrary list. There's so much not on there that could even replace stuff on there. Kind of fun, at any rate.
28 Apr 04 @ 19:20
Jimmy - email - url
You owe it to yourself to read Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt!
30 Apr 04 @ 22:06
