I saw this at Debbie's World the other day and decided to copy her idea. I thought about using the Guardian list before, but 1,000 books seemed a little extensive (and unfair to anyone who reads this in a feed), so we're going with the College Board's 101 Books College Bound Students Should Read. (I remember the nightmares about this list as graduation approached senior year--I was under the impression that everyone else I went to university with would have read the entire list. After a few English classes on campus, I felt better. I go to a "highly selective" school--but I've not met anyone yet who's run the list.)The books I've read are highlighted red. If I just highlight the author, that means I've read something else by them, just not the book listed (That counts for something, right?):
| 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 |
| Bronte, Charlotte | Jane Eyre |
| Bronte, Emily | Wuthering Heights |
| Camus, Albert | The Stranger |
| Cather, Willa | Death Comes for the Archbishop |
| 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 |
| 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 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 |
So that makes 25, plus 5 authors I've read, but not the specific works listed. I wish it was a little higher, since I graduate college next year, but I'm actually satisfied with 25%. The Three Musketeers and Things Fall Apart are two of my most recent reads, within the last few months, and Beowulf is actually in my pile of books to read. I really enjoy classic lit when I have the time to sit down and savor it. What on the list have I really been missing out on? How many have you read?
If you do a post on this, let me know and I'll add your link here!
Check out Kitten's list, she puts me to shame with 44!
Correction: I originally had 26, but realized in looking over the list that I had Catch 22, which I have not read, confused with Fahrenheit 451, which I have. That lowers my total from 26 to 25.
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