Reading List

Here are some of the books I would consider typical reading for any English major that I'm attempting to work my way through. Some I've already read, but I feel like I need to read them again because I mostly hated them at the time since they weren't Tamora Pierce books. I'm loosely basing this list off a list from The New York Times available through this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/072098best-novels-list.html.

And also on this list from Modern Library:

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

And aha! On the list my 12th grade English teacher gave us called, "Life Reading List." Thank you Katie for being a better pack rat than me and making me a copy of this list :)

I'd seriously welcome any other suggestions! Also, if you feel any of these books don't belong on this list, I'd welcome that feedback as well, especially if it came with your reasoning :)

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. 1984 by George Orwell
6. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (re-read)
7. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (re-read)
8. A Clockwork Orange  by Anthony Burgess
9. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
10. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
11. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
13. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (re-read)
14. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
15. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
16. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
17. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
18. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
19. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
20. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
21. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
22. Ulysses by James Joyce
23. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
24. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
25. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
28. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (DYING to read this!)
29. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
30. The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
31. The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien
32. The Return of the King  by J. R. R. Tolkien
33. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
34. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zorah Neal Hurston
35. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
36. The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
37. Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen
38. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
39. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
40. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
41. Madame Bovary  by Gustave Flaubert
42. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  by Tennessee Williams
43. The Trial  by Franz Kafka
44. Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I by Marcel Proust
45. Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II by Marcel Proust
46. Remembrance of Things Past: Volume III by Marcel Proust
47. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
48. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
49. Aeneid by Virgil
50. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
51. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
52. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
53. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
54. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
55. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
56. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
57. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
58. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
59. Watership Down by Richard Adams
60. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
61. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
62. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
63. White Fang by Jack London
64. The Plague by Albert Camus
65. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
66. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
67. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
68. The Once and Future King by T. H. White
69. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
70. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
71. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
72. Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
73. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
74. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee
75. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
76. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
77. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
78. The Hound of Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
79. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
80. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
81. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
82. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
83. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
84. The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
85. Native Son by Richard Wright
86. Dracula by Bram Stoker
87. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
88. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 
89. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
90. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
91. Middlemarch by George Eliot
92. The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
93. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
94. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
95. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
96. Dune by Frank Herbert
97. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
98. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
99. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
100. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
101. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer 
102. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
103. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking 
104. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
105. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
106. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
107. Atonement by Ian McEwan
108. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
109. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
110. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran
111. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
112. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
113. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
114. The Graduate by Mike Nichols
115. Howl by William Carlos Williams
116. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
117. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
118. A Room with a View by E. M. Forester
119. The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
120. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

121. Night by Ellie Wiesel
122. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (re-read)

Expect more to come! Excited and a little nervous to actually make a dent in this!



2 comments:

  1. Hi! I know I'm stalking you because I just saw you on Kate's blog... But I love this list! Mostly because it contains "Colors of the Mountain" which is my favorite book OF ALL TIME. I highly recommend Margaret Atwoods' "Penelopiad" and Antoine de Saint Exupery's "Wind, Sand, and Stars." Both AMAZING.
    Also, the fact that you mentioned Tamora Pierce makes me love you. I maybe was obsessed with her.... Can we be friends please?
    xx Carolyn (as in, Kate's little sister)

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    Replies
    1. Hi Carolyn! I love that you're stalking me via your sister haha! Kate was totally the one to recommend "Colors of the Mountain" so I put it on my list... I've never actually heard of it though... And Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote "A Little Prince," right? Because I'm in love with that book and will totally take you up on your recommendations!!!

      And there was no "maybe" about my obsession lol. I was so in love with the Tamora Pierce books growing up!!! I'm still upset about things that happened in them even though it's years later!!! Any fan of her books is certainly a friend of mine :)

      Plus you appear to have good genes based on how awesome your family is so I think the chances that you're awesome are pretty much 100% :)

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