A while back while browsing the web I found this list of books. I suppose I went through it then nodding at what I read, and obviously I found it to be a good compilation. I say that because I found it when I was cleaning and organizing my favorites. It was buried with a bunch of other book lists. As I went through it again I was truly ashamed of myself for how few of the books I’ve actually read on here, being in college and all. So, I have made it a goal to read all of the College Bound books. I’ll also say quickly that I am aware that many of these books are on my other reading lists, but there are quite a few that aren’t, but still deserve mentioning here.
The Arrowhead Library System has other book lists and book related links here.
The bold titles are books I have read. The italics are books I own, but have not gotten around to reading yet (which in itself is shameful).
THE LIST:
American Literature:
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Anderson, Sherwood – Winesburg, Ohio
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It On the Mountain
Bellamy, Edward – Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Bellow, Saul – Seize the Day
Bradbury, Ray – Fahrenheit 451
Cather, Willa – My Antonia
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg – The Ox-Bow Incident
Cormier, Robert – The Chocolate War
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dorris, Michael – A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Gaines, Ernest – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Kesey, Ken – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Main Street
London, Jack – Call of the Wild
McCullers, Carson – The Member of the Wedding
Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick
Morrison, Toni – Sula
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
Parks, Gordon – The Learning Tree
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Great Tales and Poems
Potok, Chaim – The Chosen
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Hucklebury Finn
Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
Welty, Eudora – Thirteen Stories
Wolfe, Thomas – Look Homeward, Angel
Wright, Richard – Native Son
World Literature:
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Allende, Isabel – House of the Spirits
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Balzac, Honore de – Pere Goriot
Borges, Jorge Luis – Labryinths
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Carroll, Lewis – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cervantes, Miguel de – Don Quixote
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations
Dostoevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Esquivel, Laura – Like Water for Chocolate
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Forster, E.M. – A Passage to India
Fuentes, Carlos – The Death of Artemio Cruz
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gogol, Nikolai – The Overcoat
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Grass, Gunter – The Tin Drum
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hesse, Hermann – Siddhartha
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Trial
Lawrence, D.H. – Sons and Lovers
Mann, Thomas – Death in Venice
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Paton, Alan – Cry, the Beloved Country
Remarque, Erich Maria -All Quiet on the Western Front
Scott, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe
Shelley, Mary W. – Frankenstein
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Swift, Johnsthan – Gulliver’s Travels
Tan, Amy – The Joy Luck Club
Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina
Weisel, Elie – Night
Biography/History:
Angelou, Maya – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Ashe, Arthur and Arnold Rampersad – Days of Grace
Baker, Russell – Growing Up
Berenbaum, Michael – The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Brown, Dee – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Cooke, Alistair – Alistair Cooke’s America
Criddle, Jan D and Teeda Butt Mam – To Destory You Is No Loss: The Odyssesy of a Cambodian Family
Crow Dog, Mary and Richard Erdoes – Lakota Woman
Curie, Eve – Madame Curie
Delany, Sara and A Elizabeth with Amy Hill Hearth – Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years
Epstein, Norrie – Friendly Shakespeare: A Thorougly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard
Frank, Anne – Diary of a Young Girl
Franklin, Benjamin – The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Haley, Alex – Roots
Hersey, John – Hiroshima
Karlsen, Carol – The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
Keller, Helen – The Story of My Life
Kennedy, John F – Profiles in Courage
King, Martin Luther, Jr. – A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Kovic, Ron – Born on the Fourth of July
Machiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince
Malcom X, with Alex Haley – The Autobiography of Malcom X
Marx, Karl – The Communist Manifesto
Mathabane, Mark – Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Back Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
Maybury-Lewis, David – Millenium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World
McPherson, James – Battle Cry of Freedon: The Civil War Era
Mills, Kay – This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer
Plato – The Republic
Rogosin, Donn – Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tocqueville, Alexis de – Democracy in America
Tuchman, Barbara – A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
Williams, Juan – Eye on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-65
Yolen, Jane – Favorite Folktales From Around the World
Science:
Attenborough, David – The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth
Bronowski, Jacob – The Ascent of Man
Carson, Rachel – Silent Spring
Darwin, Charles – The Origin of Species
Hawking, Stephen – A Breif History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Leopold, Aldo – A Sand County Alamanac: And Sketches Here and There
Social Science:
Campbell, Joseph – The Power of Myth
Hamilton, Edith – Mythology
Kotlowitz, Alex – There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in Urban America
Kozol, Jonathan – Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
Terkel, Studs – Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession
Drama:
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Brecht, Bertolt – Mother Courage and Her Children
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
Marlowe, Christopher – Doctor Faustus
Miller, Arthur – Death of a Salesman
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Sartre, Jean Paul – No Exit
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – Twelfth Night
Shaw, Bernard – Man and Superman
Shaw, Bernard – Saint Joan
Shaw, Bernard – Pygmalion
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest
Wilder, Thornton – Our Town
Williams, Tennnessee – A Streetcar Named Desire
Wilson, August – The Piano Lesson
Poetry:
Angelou, Maya – And Still I Rise
Brooks, Gwendolyn – Selected Poems
Cummings, E.E. – Complete Poems, 1904-1962
Dickinson, Emily – The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson – Read some not all
Donne, John – The Complete Poetry of John Donne
Eliot, T.S. – The Waste Land
Frost, Robert – The Poetry of Robert Frost – Read some not all
Ginsberg, Allen – Howl and Other Poems
Giovanni, Nikki – My House
Hughes, Langston – Selected Poems – Read some not all
Keats, John – Complete Poems
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth – The Poetical Works of Longfellow
Sandburg, Carl – Complete Poems
Thomas, Dylan – Poems of Dylan Thomas
Williams, William Carlos – Selected Poems
Wordsworth, William – Poems
Yeats, William Butler – The Poems
Among Stories 