Giant College Prep Recommended Reading List to End All Lists

Earlier this year, one of my students asked me what they should be reading to prepare for college.  I was telling my kids that one of my high school teachers (Hi, Miss Goldsworthy!) had given me a list of classic literature mixed with modern classics that were designed to make you think and ask the right kinds of questions about who we are and what we can do better.

My kids were amused that I had carried my book list back and forth to college, graduate school, law school and 3 apartment and house moves, before it got destroyed when our garage flooded when I pipe burst a few years ago.  I had been making my way through the entire list of books, a lot of which were ones I read again in college lit classes -- so I was really, really grateful to have read a number of them before I went to college.

A couple of the students in that class asked me if I could remember a list of several of those books and share them.  So I spent some time writing down the ones that I remembered, and then did a little google magic to find some additional lists for some more modern classics that are being recommended today.

Below find my current proposed list, although I'm open to argument on why something else ought to be included or why you think a particular book has no business being on a classics reading list at all, thank you very much.  In other words, this list is a work in progress -- I'm contemplating whether I need revisions before sharing it with my kids next year, and I'd love some opinions from the readers in my audience.

So, what glorious book that you treasure did I inadvertently forget?  What must be there to help shape young minds and make them ask the difficult or important questions?  What do you think I should add or subtract from the list?  Do tell.

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Classic Books to Read Before College

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Animal Farm by George Orwell
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
6. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
7. The Giver by Lois Lowry
8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
9. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
10. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger

11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
14. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
15. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
16. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
17. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
18. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
19. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
20. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
21. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
22. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
23. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
24. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
25. The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway
26. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
27. The Odyssey by Homer
28. The Stranger by Albert Camus
29. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
30. Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
31. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
32. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
33. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
34. Our Town by Thornton Wilder
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
36. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
37. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
38. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
39. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
40. Candide by Voltaire
41. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
42. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
43. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Houseini
44. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
45. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
46. The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
48. Emma by Jane Austen
49. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
50. Divergent by Veronica Roth
51. Beloved by Toni Morrison
52. Atonement by Ian McEwan
53. The Iliad by Homer
54. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
55. The Republic by Plato
56. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
57. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
58. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
59. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
60. Beowulf
61. The Tell-Tale Heart & Other Writings by Edgar Allen Poe
62. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
63. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
64. Middlemarch by George Eliot
65. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
66. The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
67. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
68. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
69. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
70. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
71. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
72. The Pearl by John Steinbeck
73. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
74. Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
75. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
76. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
77. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
78. Silas Marner by George Eliot
79. A Death in the Family by James Agee
80. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
81. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
82. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
82. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
83. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov
84. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
85. Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper
86. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
87. The Inferno by Dante
88. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
89. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
90. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
91. Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky
92. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
93. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
94. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
95. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
96. Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
97. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
 98. Faust by Goethe
99. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
100. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
101. Beloved by Toni Morrison
102. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
103. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
104. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
105. Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
106. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
107. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
108. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
109. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
110. Antigone by Sophocles
111. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
112. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
113. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
114. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
115. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
116. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
117. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
118. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
119. Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
120. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
121. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
122. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
123. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
124. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
125. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
126. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
127. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
128. A Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemingway
129. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
130. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
131. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
132. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
133. Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
134. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
135. Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
136. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
137. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
138. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
139. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
140. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
141. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
142. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
143. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
144. Native Son by Richard Wright
145. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
146. Metamorphoses by Ovid
147. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
148. Dune by Frank Herbert
149. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
150. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
151. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
152. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
153. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
154. House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
155. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
156. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
157. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
158. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
159. The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
160. And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
161. Complete Poems by Carl Sandburg
162. Complete Poems by John Keats
163. Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
164. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
165. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
166. Complete Poems by e.e. cummings
167. Fences by August Wilson
168. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
169. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
170. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
171. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
172. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
173. My Antonia by Willa Cather
174. Mythology by Edith Hamilton
175. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
176. Night by Elie Wiesel
177. Othello by William Shakespeare
178. Poems by William Wordsworth
179. Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
180. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
181. Roots by Alex Haley
182. Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
183. Selected Poems by Langston Hughes
184. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
185. Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
186. Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
187. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
188. Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
189. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
190. Get a Financial Life by Beth Kobliner
191. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
192. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
193. Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson
194. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
195. Elements of Style by Strunk and White
196. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
197. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
198. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
199. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
200. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
201. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
202. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
203. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
204. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
205. The Poems of William Butler Yeats
206. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
207. The Poems of Robert Frost
208. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
209. Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
210. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
211. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
212. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
213. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
 214. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
215. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
216. Dracula by Bram Stoker
217. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
218. The Kite Runner by Khalid Housseini
219. Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
220. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
221. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
222. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
223. Maus by Art Spiegelman
224. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
225. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
226. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
227. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
228. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
229. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
230. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
231. John Adams by David McCullough
232. 1776 by David McCullough

Some of the lists I used to compile this one:

-- Harvard University Recommended Reading List
-- College Board Suggested Reading List
-- GoodReads Suggested Reading List

I also used one from Oxford University, but I've lost the link that I used.  If anyone knows of other good lists, please share in the comments.

Am hoping to work my way through several of these over the next few months, and even re-read a few that I haven't read in years.  You know...quarantine, you gotta do something.  Why not make it worth my while and read something awesome?