I love to read classic literature, and am intrigued by this list of 101 Great Books Recommended for College Bound Readers – recommended by the College Board. These novels are listed in alphabetical order, by the last name of the author, not by order of preference.
My love affair with classic books.
On June 23, 2015 I reformatted this entire page, and updated a bit. As I was doing so, I kept thinking – “Who *writes* these lists, anyway?”
There are some great books on this page, but others I’ve read and loved were left out. Maybe I should write my own list of 100 great and/or classic books I can recommend. I’ll work on that.
I updated on Sept. 4, 2016 as I’ve read several classics this year, and it is my plan to continue reading the books on this list.
(I’m crossing out the ones I’ve already read, and may someday be lucky enough to read the rest.)
If you have any favorite books that were left off the list, please add them to the comment section at the end of this page.
So far I’ve read 37 out of the 101 books on this list – with 64 more to read.
☆ – I own a copy of the book
☆☆ – I own a copy and am currently reading the book
✓ – Finished
- ✓ Beowulf – by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet
- ✓ Things Fall Apart – by Chinua Achebe
- ✓ A Death in the Family – by James Agee
- ✓ Pride and Prejudice – by Jane Austen
- Go Tell It on the Mountain – by James Baldwin
- ✓ Waiting for Godot – by Samuel Beckett
- The Adventures of Augie March – by Saul Bellow
- ✓ Jane Eyre – by Charlotte Bronte
- ✓ Wuthering Heights – by Emily Brontë
- ✓ The Stranger – by Albert Camus
- Death Comes for the Archbishop – by Willa Cather
- ☆ The Canterbury Tales – by Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Cherry Orchard – by Anton Chekhov
- The Awakening – by Kate Chopin
- Heart of Darkness – by Joseph Conrad
- ☆ The Last of the Mohicans – by James Fenimore Cooper
- ✓ The Red Badge of Courage – by Stephen Crane
- The Inferno – by Dante
- Don Quixote – by Miguel de Cervantes
- ☆ Robinson Crusoe – by Daniel Defoe
- ✓ A Tale of Two Cities – by Charles Dickens
- ☆ Crime and Punishment – by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – by Frederick Douglass
- An American Tragedy – by Theodore Dreiser
- The Three Musketeers – by Alexandre Dumas
- ☆ The Mill on the Floss – by George Eliot
- Invisible Man – by Ralph Ellison
- Selected Essays – by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- As I Lay Dying – by William Faulkner
- ✓ The Sound and the Fury – by William Faulkner – my review
- Tom Jones – by Henry Fielding
- ✓ The Great Gatsby – by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- The Good Soldier – by Ford Madox Ford
- Faust – by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
- ✓ Lord of the Flies – by William Golding
- ☆ Tess of the d’Urbervilles – by Thomas Hardy
- ✓ The Scarlet Letter – by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- ✓ Catch 22 – by Joseph Heller
- ✓ Farewell to Arms – by Ernest Hemingway
- The Iliad – by Homer
- The Odyssey – by Homer
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame – by Victor Hugo
- ✓ Their Eyes Were Watching God – by Zora Neale Hurston
- ☆ Brave New World – by Aldous Huxley
- A Doll’s House – by Henrik Ibsen
- The Portrait of a Lady – by Henry James
- ☆ The Turn of the Screw – by Henry James
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – by James Joyce
- ✓ The Metamorphosis – by Franz Kafka
- The Woman Warrior – by Maxine Hong Kingston
- ✓ To Kill a Mockingbird – by Harper Lee
- ☆ Babbitt – by Sinclair Lewis
- ✓ The Call of the Wild – by Jack London
- The Magic Mountain – by Thomas Mann
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – by Gabriel García Marquez
- Bartleby the Scrivener – by Herman Melville
- ☆ Moby Dick – by Herman Melville
- ✓ The Crucible – by Arthur Miller
- Beloved – by Toni Morrison
- A Good Man is Hard to Find – by Flannery O’Connor
- Long Day’s Journey into Night – by Eugene O’Neill
- ✓ Animal Farm – by George Orwell
- Doctor Zhivago – by Boris Pasternak
- ✓ The Bell Jar – by Sylvia Plath
- ✓ Selected Tales – by Edgar Allan Poe
- Swann’s Way – by Marcel Proust
- The Crying of Lot 49 – by Thomas Pynchon
- All Quiet on the Western Front – by Erich Maria Remarque
- Cyrano de Bergerac – by Edmond Rostand
- Call It Sleep – by Henry Roth
- ✓ The Catcher in the Rye – by J.D. Salinger
- ✓ A Midsummer Night’s Dream – by William Shakespeare
- ✓ Hamlet – by William Shakespeare
- Macbeth – by William Shakespeare
- Romeo and Juliet – by William Shakespeare
- ✓ Pygmalion – by George Bernard Shah
- ☆ Frankenstein – by Mary Shelley
- Ceremony – by Leslie Marmon
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- ✓ Antigone – by Sophocles
- ✓ Oedipus Rex – by Sophocles
- ✓ The Grapes of Wrath – by John Steinbeck
- ☆ Treasure Island – by Robert Louis Stevenson
- ☆ Uncle Tom’s Cabin – by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- ✓ Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
- ☆ Vanity Fair – by William Thackery
- Walden – by Henry David Thoreau
- War and Peace – by Leo Tolstoy
- Fathers and Sons – by Ivan Turgenev
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – by Mark Twain
- ✓ Candide – by Voltaire
- ✓ Slaughterhouse Five – by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- ✓ The Color Purple – by Alice Walker
- Collected Stories – by Eudora Welty
- The House of Mirth – by Edith Wharton
- Leaves of Grass – by Walt Whitman
- ☆ The Picture of Dorian Gray – by Oscar Wilde
- ✓ The Glass Menagerie – by Tennessee Williams
- To the Lighthouse – by Virginia Woolf
- Native Son – by Richard Wright
Still reading . . .
I, too, wonder who makes these lists and whether this is the same list colleges would recommend today. I read about half of these before or in college, since I majored in English. I have to honestly say there are several I would have left off the list. Some impressed me greatly when I first read them, but on second reading I wondered why I had been so impressed. Some I’d like to reread now to see what I missed the first time.