The College Board Book Meme

[omorka]

Bold those you have read, underline those you've started but not finished, and italicize ones you've read PART OF, as in an excerpt or started-but-will-probably-never-finish.


The College Board's List of 101 Greatest Works of Literature

Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (three times)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot (HATED it)
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 (might go back and read the boring tales some day)
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (read Lord Jim, didn't think enough of it to read more Conrad than I had to)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage (love Crane's poetry, not so hot on him as a novelist)
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe (excerpts only)
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (not bad, for Dickens)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment (excerpts only)
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (excerpts only, mostly in narratives about the Civil War)
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 (I kinda like Emerson, and don't like Thoreau, which apparently makes me a bad UU)
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury (Don't know when I'll get back to it)
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones (excerpts in a Norton's Anthology only)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby (couldn't finish, don't plan to try)
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust (I tried, I tried, I'll get back to it someday)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies (9th grade summer reading, and DAMN)
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles (three times, hated it all three times)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter (could've been worse, but like Asimov, Hawthorne's short stories are better than his novels)
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (was reading the Jerk's copy, never got one of my own)
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 (ow ow ow)
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird (Norton excerpts, again)
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild (One chapter excerpted in something)
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 (excerpts in the complete book of her poetry)
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 (can't read Pynchon, couldn't make it through Gravity's Rainbow either)
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front (Read the first three chapters during TAAS testing in 2002 because there was nothing else to read in the room)
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac (bits and pieces from various places)
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (yeah, I know, bad weirdo, but the misogyny was getting to me; I'll finish it someday, I promise)
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet (yup, all of them)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (I read a badly butchered "edited for children " version because the bookstore wouldn't sell me the real one at age 8)
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone, Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath (Norton excerpts, should read the real thing someday)
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 (I've listened to the whole musical; does that count? ;) )
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Harrison Bergeron
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple (Although I do plan to go back and read the whole thing)
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories (read some of the stories, reprinted elsewhere)
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 (excerpts only)