Came across this list on Literary Menagerie, which is originally from the College Board. Love the idea & wish I had tried this the summer before starting university. Oh well...
I've read 12 titles and approx. 7 other titles by authors in the list (Shakespeare's works I've counted as 1 title). Most are on my TBR list already. I've never heard of some, which I've highlighted in yellow. Can anyone fill me in on them? Are they worth reading?
The titles I've read are in bold and if I've read a different title (or more) by an author, the author is in bold (but not the title). Clear as mud? :oD Plus, I added a little commentary here & there in ( ).
--, Beowulf (This was on a course reading list, but I dropped it & never read it)
Achebe, Chinua- Things Fall Apart
Agee, James- A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane- Pride and Prejudice (sooooo embarassing...!)
Baldwin, James- Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel- Waiting for Godot (I read Endgame in university--quite unique)
Bellow, Saul- The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte- Jane Eyre (ouch, another one I'm ashamed to say I haven't read)
Bronte, Emily- Wuthering Heights (ditto above...TBR)
Camus, Albert- The Stranger (TBR)
Cather, Willa- Death Comes for the Archbishop (My Antonia- TBR)
Cervantes, Miguel de- Don Quixote (on TBR list)
Chaucer, Geoffrey- The Canterbury Tales (TBR)
Chekhov, Anton- The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov's Selected Stories- TBR)
Chopin, Kate- The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph- Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore- The Last of the Mohicans (TBR)
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 (Scenes From a Clerical Life in university)
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 (in high school)
Flaubert, Gustave- Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox- The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von- Faust
Golding, William- Lord of the Flies (in high school)
Hardy, Thomas- Tess of the d’Urbervilles (TBR)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel- The Scarlet Letter (TBR)
Heller, Joseph- Catch 22 (TBR)
Hemingway, Ernest- A Farewell to Arms (TBR)
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 (on my nightstand, TBR)
Kafka, Franz- The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong- The Woman Warrior (was on a course list but never read it)
Lee, Harper- To Kill a Mockingbird (in high school)
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 (Death of a Salesman in high school)
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 (in high school)
Pasternak, Boris- Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia- The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen- Selected Tales (The Raven is one of my favourite poems)
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 (a classic favourite of mine)
Shakespeare, William- Hamlet (read in high school & university; my favourite tragedy)
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 (university- children's lit)
Voltaire- Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.- Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice- The Color Purple (university- women writers)
Wharton, Edith- The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora- Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt- Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar- The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Importance of Being Earnest)
Williams, Tennessee- The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia- To the Lighthouse (A Room of One's Own)
Wright, Richard- Native Son
There's a lot on this list that I haven't gotten to yet. I want to read Call It Sleep, but the book keeps eluding me. I saw it once, but was short on money.
ReplyDeleteI recommend an American Tragedy. Dreiser's style is so awkward and cumbersome but the power of his storytelling gets him through...I'm reminded of the way the Juggernaut bashes through things re; Dreiser's style.
A recent and happy discovery was Their Eyes were Watching God.
You're off to a good start with your blog. And good for your teacher back when you were 8 years old!