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April 21, 2004
What Great Books have you read?
I got this from Misty.
The highlighted books are the ones I have read. Looking at the list, I think my education was pretty comprehensive.
I read most of these books in elementary and high school. I read a few in college, and fewer still since. These days I like to read science fiction and fantasy.
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
Brontė, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontė, 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
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 This is one of the best books ever.
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 Garcķa - 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 I have a first edition of this one.
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales Actually, I have read all of Poe.
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 I have read all of Twain
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
Posted by Beth at April 21, 2004 7:17 AM
Comments
You haven't read "Beowulf"? Then what's the point of the remainder of the List? Even reading Chaucer cannot obvert that gaping lacunae. (Now where's my latest issue of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle?)
Cheers
JMH
Posted by: J.M. Heinrichs at April 21, 2004 11:28 AM
I'm embarrassed to admit I haven't read many of what are considered classics. I read tons though because I don't like TV much. I have 4 books from the library on my dresser now - Lescroart mysteries. I've read some of Chomsky's screeds just to see what the heck was up. Homer. I bought "Bush at War" and Frum's Bush book. I read fiction, mostly mysteries. I do enjoy period fiction, 19th century England. *cowers*
Posted by: Calliope at April 21, 2004 1:23 PM
Toni Morrison? Great Books? Like HELL.
I'm almost surprised by how many of these I can say "no, not that one by that author" to.
Posted by: Sigivald at April 21, 2004 4:05 PM
I have to agree with you on Toni Morrison - I think she is just politically correct. I graduated from college way before she wrote a book.
Also, there are a lot of books not mentioned that I have read by some of those authors - Anna Karenina, for example, or 1984 or any number of great books.
I love fantasy and, like Calliope, good mysteries. I hate romance novels - or at least the few I have glanced at. Books about spies are also favorites of mine.
Posted by: Beth Donovan at April 21, 2004 4:36 PM
Yeah, I'm not telling. I was a horrible student.
I do think Rand should be on the list. Not that her philosophy should be worshipped or anything, but the Fountainhead would make excellent senior reading.
Posted by: Key at April 21, 2004 6:33 PM
Pride and Prejudice -- IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Posted by: the irish lass at April 21, 2004 8:39 PM
I have read many (though not enough) of the classics, but strangely when I think of books that affected me in a profound manner, I think of "No Language but a Cry" by Richard D'Ambrosio.
I recall reading this for a 6th grade book report (to this day, however, I have no idea why I chose it), and I recall being so moved, so disgusted and so inspired by the story. I have since read it many, many times over, and it still brings me to tears.
Posted by: Nee at April 22, 2004 7:47 AM