I saw this list of "great books" on Sarah Hempel's blog. You are supposed to highlight the ones you've read. Stars are next to ones I've read in the original language (when it wasn't written in contemporary English). "!" next to works I am currently reading. I like this list. It makes me feel kind of well-read.
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family (I think I may have read this one in high school, but I guess it doesn't count if I don't remember anything about it.)
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 (no, but I've read three of his other books)
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 (I'm convinced that this should never be read in English)
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles (no, but I did write my high school senior paper on The Return of the Native)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms -- I HATE Hemingway. Don't get be started.
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 García - One Hundred Years of Solitude I actually just bought this last week, based on how much I enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera.
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 Allan - 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 The movie version starring good ole Girard (are there any other French actors?) was one of my favorites in high school, but, of course, the book is much better.
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 (Did you hear about the modern version of the myth, where a man falls in love with a supermodel and asks the gods to maker her human? Haha)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (So I haven't learned enough Russian to take a stab at reading entire novels, even short ones.)
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 (hated it)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse (I wonder why this one's on the list and not A Room of One's Own or Mrs. Dalloway.)
Wright, Richard - Native Son
Here's a question - how many of those were originally read as part of a course of study?
Posted by: Peter at May 1, 2004 9:11 PMI'd say about half. There's nothing wrong with that!
Posted by: Amy at May 2, 2004 3:44 PMAnd most of that half is thanks to Penny Rauzi, one of my high school English teachers. Since you had her, too, Peter, I bet you've polished off a good chunk of this list, too.
Posted by: Amy at May 2, 2004 3:52 PMLet's see... Rauzi's class is a bit of a foggy memory, but I do remember reading these books at some point for high school classes:
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter (Little did I know that I would end up frequenting the Taco Bell in Salem!)
Homer - The Odyssey
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
I can't remember all of which were Rauzi and which weren't, but frankly, Rauzi is the only one of my high school english teachers who comes to mind at the moment (unless you count good ol' Craig Butz!)
I can say for sure that we read Woman Warrior in SCAP/AP English. How could I forget the slew of multi-ethnic/cultural awareness titles we were subj...err, I mean, exposed to?
Posted by: Peter at May 2, 2004 6:02 PMDon't bother with "Catcher in the Rye" 60's style existentialist junk!!
Tolstoy's "Cherry Tree (or Orchard)" was pretty good from what I remember. I took a Russian Lit. class in high school and it was about the best Literature class I ever took!
Oh yeah, everyone should read Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and "Martian Chronicles". It is funny how many of the former are almost true in a politically correct world that we live in now. his science fiction is more of a mind thinking type, rather than "Star War-zy" type.
Posted by: Dad at May 2, 2004 9:26 PMI've read Bradbury's "Toynbee Convector" collection of short stories. I think I've also read the Martian Chronicles.
Posted by: Peter at May 3, 2004 9:06 AMI went to public high school :o( So, I didn't learn to read until freshman great Books class at the 'Dale. Most of the books I have read were written before the time of Christ, and many don't appear on the list. Besides, I am an artist; all my books are picture books ;oP
Posted by: Sarah The Cute at May 8, 2004 7:23 PM