Contemporary | Fiction | Non-Fiction | Classics | Poetry | “Required” | Plays

Here is my list of recommended reading for college preparation, covering roughly what would be covered in the average high school curriculum. I haven’t read all of these: I’m no longer in college prep, for one thing, so I can read what I like.  Knowing that, I also based this list on those I have gotten from my friends who are librarians, and on lists I tracked down online, including American Library Association lists and online High School lists, so that friends who are being homeschooled can be sure they will be able to show they are meeting the same general requirements

I also made an effort to ensure this list is as multi-cultural as I could while still making sure it would meet college education standards. I am deeply unhappy that college education standards, as evidenced by all those online lists, is still that of white men who died over a century ago and fear for the best and brightest minds educated on a standard that does not address the fact that we live in a global culture that does not recognize the primacy of the values of dead, white, European men.

It’s not necessary for someone to read everything on this list: I provided a big selection so a person can pick and choose. I did * those books/authors that appeared on a lot of lists, meaning a reader should read that book or one book by that author. I was asked not to include fantasy on this list because most of my friends read fantasy anyway. I did include the many science fiction titles I found on the required reading lists online (1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale).

Contemporary Teen

I tried to include as few depressing problem novels as I could, but sadly, most of the contemporary teen books on the lists are just that. Sorry.

• Julia Alvarez – Before We Were Free (2002).
• Marion Dane Bauer (Editor) – Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence (1994).
• Edward Bloor – Tangerine (1997).
• Chris Crowe – Mississippi Trial, 1955 (2002).
• Alex Flinn* – Breathing Underwater (2001).
• Donald R. Gallo* (Editor) – On the Fringe (2001).
• Nancy Garden* – Annie on My Mind (1982).
• Brent Hartinger – Geography Club (2003).
• Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston – Farewell to Manzanar (1973).
• Walter Dean Myers* – Fallen Angels (1988).
• Joyce Carol Oates* – Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002).
• Carol Plum-Ucci – What Happened to Lani Garver (2002).
• Marjane Satrapi – Persepolis (2000; Graphic Novel).
• Art Spiegelman* – Maus (1980; Graphic Novel).
• Suzanne Fisher Staples – Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind (1989).
• Cynthia Voigt – A Solitary Blue (1983).

Fiction

• Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – Rashomon and Other Stories (1922).
• Julia Alvarez – In the Time of the Butterflies (1994).
• Margaret Atwood* – The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
• Ray Bradbury* – Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
• Rita Mae Brown – Rubyfruit Jungle (1973).
• Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Orange (1962).
• Sandra Cisneros – The House on Mango Street (1984).
• James Clavell – Shōgun (1975).
• Joseph Conrad* – Heart of Darkness (1899).
• Pat Conroy – The Prince of Tides (1986).
• Anita Diamant* – The Red Tent (1997).
• Charles Dickens* – Oliver Twist (1846), A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky* – Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
• Arthur Conan Doyle* – A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Valley of Fear (1915). You’ll find both in most Sherlock Holmes collections—they’re short novels based on events of the times. You might want to find out the real events he’s writing about.
• Fannie Flagg – Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987).
• William Golding* – Lord of the Flies (1954).
• Philippa Gregory – The Other Boleyn Girl (2001).
• Zora Neale Hurston* – Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
• Aldous Huxley* – Brave New World (1932).
• Masuji Ibuse – Black Rain (1965).
• Maxine Hong Kingston – China Men (1980).
• Harper Lee* – To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
• Bernard Malamud – The Fixer (1966).
• Yann Martel – Life of Pi (2001).
• Frank McCourt* – Angela’s Ashes (1996).
• Yukio Mishima* – The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (1963).
• Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye (1970).
• Tim O’Brien* – The Things They Carried (1990).
• George Orwell* – Animal Farm (1945), 1984 (1949).
• Alan Paton* – Cry, the Beloved Country (1948).
• Ayn Rand – Anthem (1938).
• Erich Maria Remarque* – All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).
• Kenneth Roberts – Rabble in Arms (1933).
• Amy Tan* – The Joy Luck Club (1989).
• Leon Uris – Mila 18 (1961).
• Voltaire – Candide (1759).
• Kurt Vonnegut* – The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
• Alice Walker* – The Color Purple (1982).
• T. H. White – The Once and Future King (1958).
• Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography (1928).
• Jane Yolen – Briar Rose (1992).

Non-Fiction

• James Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
• Maya Angelou* – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
• Edward Ball – Slaves in the Family (1998).
• Dee Brown* – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970).
• Claude Brown* – Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).
• Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968; Essays), Salvador (1983).
• Ralph Ellison* – The Invisible Man (1952).
• Miep Gies & Alison Leslie Gold – Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family (1987).
• William Goldman – Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983).
• Alex Haley* – Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976).
• Carl Jung – Man and His Symbols (1964).
• Sebastian Junger* – The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997).
• Helen Keller – The Story of My Life (1902).
• Eric Lawson – The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2002).
• Nelson Mandela* – The Long Walk to Freedom (1995).
• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto (1848; Philosophy).
• Farley Mowat – Never Cry Wolf (1963).
• Miyamoto Musashi – The Book of Five Rings (1645; Philosophy).
• Mary Pipher – Reviving Ophelia (1994).
• Upton Sinclair* – The Jungle (1906).
• Susan Sontag – On Photography (1977; Essays), In America (1999).
• Henry David Thoreau* – Walden (1854; Philosophy).
• Barbara W. Tuchman – A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century (1978).
• Sun Tzu – The Art of War (~500 BC; Philosophy).
• Alison Weir – The Children of Henry VIII (1996).
• Tom Wolfe – Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), The Right Stuff (1979).
• Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein – All the President’s Men (1974).

Classics I Liked

• Jane Austen* – Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815).
• Giovanni Boccaccio – The Decameron (1351).
• Geoffrey Chaucer* – The Canterbury Tales (1475). Spot what Chaucer stole from Boccaccio! Find the dirty stories! Find out what life was like during Boccaccio’s plague and Chaucer’s pilgrimages.
• Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote (1605).
• Sheridan Le Fanu – Carmilla (1872).
• Sir Thomas Malory – Le Morte d’Arthur (1485).
• Mary Shelley* – Frankenstein (1818).
• Bram Stoker* – Dracula (1897).

Poetry

Most you’ll just find under “Collected Poems of…” books.

• Maya Angelou*
• W. H. Auden
• Sandra Cisneros*
• Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy (1321).
• Emily Dickinson
• Allen Ginsberg – “Howl” (1955).
• Karen Hesse – Witness (2001).
• John Milton – Paradise Lost (1667).
• Pablo Neruda*
• Sylvia Plath*
• Sappho
• Anne Sexton
• Wallace Stevens
• Dylan Thomas*
• Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass (1855).
• Phillis Wheatley
• Oscar Wilde – “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898).

“Required” Reading

There are some writers people say you have to read to be educated in our society. A lot of them write plays. I hate these writers. I would be letting you down if I did not mention them, but if you hate them, I don’t want you blaming me. I also do not want you to blame me if people say you’re ignorant. So here they are.

• Albert Camus* – The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947).
• Robert Cormier – The Chocolate War* (1974), I Am the Cheese (1977), Tenderness (1998).
• Theodore Dreiser – An American Tragedy (1925).
• George Eliot* – Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1872).
• William Faulkner* – The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932).
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby* (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934).
• Gustave Flaubert* – Madame Bovary (1856).
• Thomas Hardy* – Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895).
• Nathaniel Hawthorne* – The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
• Ernest Hemingway* – The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
• Henry James* – The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902).
• James Joyce – Dubliners (1914; Short Stories), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* (1916), Ulysses (1922).
• Carson McCullers* – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951; Short Stories).
• Herman Melville* – Moby-Dick (1851), Billy Budd (1924).
• Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead (1943).
• J. D. Salinger* – The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).
• John Steinbeck* – Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947).
• Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
• Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* (1884). His only book I don’t like.
• Edith Wharton* – Ethan Frome (1911), The Age of Innocence (1920).

Plays

• Maxwell Anderson – Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Anne of the Thousand Days (1948).
• Edward Albee – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* (1962).
• Jean Anouilh – Becket (1959).
• Aristophanes* – Lysistrata (411 BC), The Frogs (405 BC).
• Samuel Beckett* – Waiting for Godot (1953).
• Anton Chekhov* – Uncle Vanya (1898), The Cherry Orchard (1904).
• Caryl Churchill – Cloud 9 (1979).
• T. S. Eliot* – Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
• Euripides – The Trojan Women (415 BC), Iphigenia at Aulis (405 BC).
• Lorraine Hansberry* – A Raisin in the Sun (1959).
• Lillian Hellman – The “Julia” section of Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), which was adapted into the 1977 film Julia.
• Beth Henley – Crimes of the Heart (1979).
• Christopher Marlowe* – Dr. Faustus (1592).
• Arthur Miller* – Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1950).
• Molière – The School for Wives (1662), Tartuffe (1669), The Imaginary Invalid (1673).
• Marsha Norman – ‘night, Mother (1983).
• Eugene O’Neill* – Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956).
• John Osborne – Look Back in Anger (1956).
• Harold Pinter* – The Birthday Party (1957).
• Edmond Rostand – Cyrano de Bergerac* (1898).
• Peter Shaffer – Equus* (1973).
• William Shakespeare* – Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry V (1600), Twelfth Night (1602), Hamlet (1603), Othello (1604), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605), King Lear (1606), Macbeth (1611), Richard III (1633). There are versions with portions or retellings of some of these on film, including Japanese retellings of King Lear and Macbeth, and a WWII as-done-in-Shakespeare’s-time Henry V, as well as pieces with background research of a Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III with Al Pacino.
• Ntozake Shange – for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975).
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan – The School for Scandal (1777).
• George Bernard Shaw* – Saint Joan (1920), Pygmalion (1941).
• Sophocles – The Three Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone (~440-400 BC).
• Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).
• Wendy Wasserstein – The Heidi Chronicles (1988).
• Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
• Thornton Wilder* – Our Town (1938).
• Tennessee Williams* – The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
• August Wilson – Fences (1983).
• Lanford Wilson – The Hot l Baltimore (1973).