The books I’ve read are bolded. (Where is… oh, never mind! This is just a trippy little meme.) I picked this up from icontemplate. Note: I’m not distinguishing between books I read and remember, and books I know I read and couldn’t tell you a thing about any more (and I have a bad feeling I’ve read some of the titles I didn’t bold–they piled it on at college). However, I have starred books I truly enjoyed.
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
* 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
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
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
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
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
George Bernard Shaw – 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
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 on this day, other years:
- My ALA 2011 Annual Schedule - 2011
- Thinking about Open Source - 2010
- See me in Anaheim at Booth 1888 (and elsewhere!) - 2008
- Hi Ho, Hi Ho, to ALA I Go - 2006
2 Comments
Any idea of the original source of this list? I have many lists of the Great Books at http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html. Though there is a lot of overlap in the lists, there are also many worthwhile books that show up on only one or two lists.
Thanks for the list. Looks like I’ve read more of the classics than I thought. Not that I remember much about many either. I’m sure they rocked my world when I read them
I try to switch up and include an annual re-read of the books that have meant the most to me. Which means I should put down Lolita in Tehran and pick up Invisible Man before the summer disappears. Ellison was an interesting, complex fellow. I also have a list of the Pulitzer winners from the beginning. My plan is to read them in order… (Aside. The preview feature is funky. I couldn’t seem to post after reviewing, no button.)
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classics meme
I don’t normally do these things, but I was currious to see just how many of the “classics” I have read.
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