101 Great Books for College-Bound Readers

The College Board, also known as the company to proctors the dreaded SAT examination, provides a list of 101 Great Books that college-bound readers should read. I’m already in college, and I haven’t even tackled half of these. My dream would be to read them before I graduate, but it’s more realistic for me to set a goal of reading them all sometime in my lifetime.  I’ve crossed off the ones I’ve read as well as written out to the side when I read these books.

Progress: 38/101

1. The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) — read in college
3. All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
4. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
5. Animal Farm (George Orwell) — read in high school
6. Antigone (Sophocles) — read in high school
7. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
8. The Awakening (Kate Chopin) — read in high school
9. Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)
10. Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)
11. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
12. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
13. Beowulf — read in middle school; abridged version
14. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
15. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
16. Call it Sleep (Henry Roth)
17. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) — read in high school
18. Candide (Voltaire)
19. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) — read in college
20. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
21. Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)
22. The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov)
23. Collected Stories (Eudora Welty)
24. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
25. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
26. The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
27. The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
28. Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand)
29. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
30. A Death in the Family (James Agee)
31. Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
32. A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen)
33. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
34. A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
35. Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
36. Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
37. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) — read in high school
38. The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
40. A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O’Connor)
41. The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
42. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) [Part 1 | Part 2] — read in college
43. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — read in high school; read in college
44. Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
45. “Hamlet” (William Shakespeare) — read in high school
46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) — read in high school
47. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
48. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)
49. The Iliad (Homer) — read in high school
50. Inferno (Dante)
51. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) — read in high school
52. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) — read in college
53. The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper) — read in adulthood
54. Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
55. Long Day’s Journey into Night (Eugene O’Neill)
56. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) — read in high school
57. Macbeth (William Shakespeare) — read in high school
58. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) — read in high school
59. The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
60. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
61. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (William Shakespeare) — read in middle school
62. The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot)
63. Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
64. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass)
65. Native Son (Richard Wright)
66. The Odyssey (Homer) — read in high school; read in college
67. “Oedipus Rex” (Sophocles) — read in high school
68. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) — read in college
69. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
70. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) — read in high school
71. The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
72. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
73. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) — read in middle school
74. Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)
75. The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane) — read post-college
76. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
77. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare) — read in high school
78. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) — read in high school
79. Selected Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson) — read in college [Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four]
80. Selected Tales (Edgar Allen Poe) — read in college [Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four]
81. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut) — read in high school
82. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
83. The Stranger (Albert Camus)
84. Swann’s Way (Marcel Proust)
85. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) — read in college [Part One | Part Two]
86. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) — read in high school
87. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
88. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
89. The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
90. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) — read in high school
91. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) — read in college
92. Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)
93. Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
94. The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)
95. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) — read post-college
96. Vanity Fair (William Thackeray)
97. Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
98. Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
99. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
100. The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston) — read in college
101. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) — read in high school