Books everyone should read

Rowan · Post by **Rowan** » 10 May 2007, 06:20

I am working on a list of books that everyone should read by the time they are in college. I posted this on shelfari too, but no one responded. I have quite a few, but missed quite a few as well. I have everything from 19th C. Russian lit to modern....

knightss · Post by **knightss** » 10 May 2007, 09:56

Post the list here if you can... i'd like to see it.

awelker · Post by **awelker** » 10 May 2007, 10:37

yea that would be cool.

if you go to listsofbests.comyou can make a list and see how much of the list that you have complete. you can even get other lists that were award winners and even movie lists as well as other stuff. its a pretty cool site.

lifelongreader · Post by **lifelongreader** » 10 May 2007, 14:23

I would recommend Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder: an amazing book, a great intro to philosophical thought.

sleepydumpling · Post by **sleepydumpling** » 11 May 2007, 05:21

I'm not so much into "shoulds" but I dig "suggestions".

Would love to see your list Rowan.

Rowan · Post by **Rowan** » 11 May 2007, 22:14

Adams, Richard Watership Down
Aesop Fables
Agee, James A Death in the Family
Anderson, Sherwood Winesburg, Ohio
Anonymous Go Ask Alice
Asimov, Isaac Short Stories
Austen, Jane Emma, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
Balzac, Honore de Pere Goriot
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
Bolt, Robert A Man for All Seasons
Bront?, Charlotte Jane Eyre
Bront?, Emily Wuthering Heights
Brooks, Gwendolyn In the Mecca Riot
Browning, Robert Poems
Buck, Pearl The Good Earth
Butler, Samuel The Way of All Flesh
Camus, Albert The Plague, The Stranger
Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia
Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate The Awakening
Collins, Wilkie The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Shaver, Victory
Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
Dante The Divine Comedy
Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities
Dickinson, Emily Poems
Dinesen, Isak Out of Africa
Dostoevski, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment
Douglas, Frederick The Life of Frederick Douglas
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie
Early, Gerald Tuxedo Junction
Eliot, George Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner
Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral
Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo Essays
Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Intruder in the Dust, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
Forster, E. M. A Passage to India, A Room with a View
Franklin, Benjamin The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Galsworthy, John The Forsyte Saga
Golding, William Lord of the Flies
Goldsmith, Oliver She Stoops to Conquer
Graves, Robert I, Claudius
Greene, Graham The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory
Hamilton, Edith Mythology
Hardy, Thomas Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D?Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter
Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises
Henry, O. Stories
Hersey, John A Single Pebble
Hesse, Hermann Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
Homer The Iliad, The Odyssey
Hughes, Langston Poems, The Big Sea
Hugo, Victor Les Mis?rables
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik A Doll House, An Enemy of the People, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, The Wild Duck
James, Henry The American, Daisy Miller, Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
Kafka, Franz The Castle, The Metamorphosis, The Trial
Keats, John Poems
Kerouac, Jack On the Road
Koestler, Arthur Darkness at Noon
Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee Inherit the Wind
Lewis, Sinclair Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Main Street
Llewellyn, Richard How Green Was My Valley
Machiavelli, Niccolo The Prince
MacLeish, Archibald J.B.
Mann, Thomas Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain
Marlowe, Christopher Dr. Faustus
Maugham, Somerset Of Human Bondage
McCullers, Carson The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Melville, Herman Billy Budd, Moby-Dick, Typee
Miller, Arthur The Crucible, Death of a Salesman
Monsarrat, Nicholas The Cruel Sea
Naylor, Gloria Bailey?s Cafe, The Women of Brewster Place
O?Neill, Eugene The Emperor Jones, Long Day?s Journey Into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra
Orwell, George Animal Farm, 1984
Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
Poe, Edgar Allan Short Stories
Remarque, Erich All Quiet on the Western Front
Rolvaag, O. E. Giants in the Earth
Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye
Sandburg, Carl Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Saroyan, William The Human Comedy
Sayers, Dorothy The Nine Tailors
Shakespeare, William Plays and Sonnets
Shaw, George Bernard Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Saint Joan
Sheridan, Richard B. The School for Scandal
Shute, Nevil On the Beach
Sinclair, Upton The Jungle
Sophocles Antigone, Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom?s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver?s Travels
Thackeray, William M. Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David Walden
Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina, War and Peace
Trollope, Anthony Barchester Towers
Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark Pudd?nhead Wilson
Updike, John Rabbit, Run
Vergil The Aeneid
Voltaire Candide
Walker, Alice The Color Purple, Meridian
Warren, Robert Penn All the King?s Men
Waugh, Evelyn Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust
Wharton, Edith The Age of Innocence
White, T. H. The Once and Future King, The Sword in the Stone
Wilde, Oscar The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wilder, Thornton Our Town
Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire
Wolfe, Thomas Look Homeward, Angel
Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
Wouk, Herman The Caine Mutiny
Wright, Richard Black Boy, Native Sun

there ya go it is such a big list....

knightss · Post by **knightss** » 11 May 2007, 23:17

i must say that is a great list but i don't know anybody in HS who would read all of that. You have some hefty books there "Dostoevski, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov"

i don't think the HS me would want you as a teacher lol. (i didn't enjoy reading much when i was younger)

Anna · Post by **Anna** » 11 May 2007, 23:18

Wow, that's a lot of reading for teens to be doing.
________
MAGNERIDE

sleepydumpling · Post by **sleepydumpling** » 12 May 2007, 07:04

I figure if you can get most teens to read ONE book, that's a damn good start!

Dori · Post by **Dori** » 12 May 2007, 19:00

sleepydumpling wrote:I figure if you can get most teens to read ONE book, that's a damn good start!

Well, with sites like Spark Notes and such, teens need not to read anything. All they have to do is print off a few summaries and voila! A 75 on the test!

I despise this approach as much as the next reader, but I don't see the situation changing.

Anyways, I have read 6 (in the process of Don Quixote nad only half of Machiavelli's The Prince, so this is an estimated amount

) from the list. I own around 5 more that are also mentioned, but I have not gotten to them yet. But I still have 2.5 years left of highschool.

I best get started

Linda · Post by **Linda** » 12 May 2007, 21:18

yea not many kids in my english classes have ever actually read the books they were assigned, i always did except in like 2nd grade. haha i was a tricky little kid, in school when we had to read like during class time i'd pretend to read, but i was really good at it. I studied other kids reading and saw that their eyes would scan aross each line so i copied them just moving my eyes and everyone thought i could read and i really had no idea how, eventually i was found out lol i did the same thing for telling time...im not so sure how i pulled it off. i was really independent, i still am, so i guess people just figured i could do things on my own...because i told them i could.

but now i actually read all the books they assign, its easier and i think people will regret using sparknotes to get by later in life.

and yes that looks like a good list, i like it for its ambition

knightss · Post by **knightss** » 12 May 2007, 23:21

i've read 20 but many of them are on my plan to read list.

sleepydumpling · Post by **sleepydumpling** » 13 May 2007, 01:49

I really have a problem with "shoulds" when it comes to books/movies/art/television shows... anything that is subjective to taste. For example, I've read a lot of those books listed. And more than half of them were honestly, a waste of my time. There are other books that were worth my time much, much more than a lot of the so called "classics". However, some of them on the list were absolute gems that have really changed my life or my way of thinking, and I am glad I read them.

I don't feel anyone "should" read any particular book. I do feel however, people should read, it doesn't matter what. I do think people should TRY to read a lot of variety in books, and yet if they don't like it, then don't read the whole book. Stick to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50. Maybe you'll come back to a book later in life and it will connect with you then, and that's cool. But I really feel that a lot of us waste our time on books we "should" read simply because others seem to think those books are worth more than something else we might enjoy more.

Read what you want people! Read anything! Choose your own reading list. Make a list up of "Books I Read and Loved to Bits and You Might Like Them Too, But it's OK if you Don't"

Just READ! (But I'm preaching to the converted here, aren't I?)

DeletedUser · Post by **DeletedUser** » 14 May 2007, 22:27

Wow! Kath, I wish I had a teacher like you when I was in school. Here! Here!

lifelongreader · Post by **lifelongreader** » 15 May 2007, 08:07

^^ Well said Kath,

that's pretty much what I do with my blog, I try to let people know of books I enjoyed, and as I have strong opinions about certain "classics" I actively recommend kids to stay away from them eg Dickens.

It is probably a personal thing for me, but I think it is the kiss of death to a teen reader if you force them to read Dickens. I have parents who force their kids to read him and other "great classics" and the kids hate them, hence they "hate" reading and this annoys the hell out of me.

Get them to read good literature, and let them discover the classics later in life for themselves, if they want. We should not feel obliged, or oblige others, to have read the Works of Shakespeare by the age of 16!

" "Classic." A book which people praise and don't read."
Mark Twain